Beast Or Bitch

Workout date: 4/4/15

I'm starting to think Saturday is my least favorite day of the week.  When that alarm goes off at 6:15 and it's still dark outside?  Ugh.  So, so bad.  And somehow I have no way of getting out of these classes unless I am in a different zip code.  (Spoiler: that will be the case next week!)  But if I try to use the fact that I'm exhausted or not feeling great when I wake up, I get a barrage of threatening texts on my phone.  I gotta fix that somehow.

Anyway, I did my usual routine of slowly getting up, walking to the bathroom, and standing in the shower for an unknown, but very long, amount of time.  For me, 7am is when I end up leaving the house, not when I get to the gym.  It doesn't matter all that much though, because even arriving at 7:15, class hasn't started.  And most of the time I'm not even the last to arrive.  Today's class would consist of Aimee, Giulz, Marisa, Keith, Rachel, and Michal.  The warm-up was 3 rounds of 5 toes-to-bar followed by 10 wall balls.  Simple enough.  I even did the toes-to-bar without hand protection.  Not great, but I got through it.  After that, it was time for snatch practice.  We were all kind of milling around doing our own thing, but eventually Aimee put 15 minutes on the clock to let us know how much time we had before the main event.  I went light for my snatches, but I was very focused on my pulls and also hanging out in the bottom of my squat.  Those are the elements that I tend to forget when I snatch, and if I want to snatch heavy, I will need to improve on those aspects.  I worked up from 75 to 125 before the clock hit 15 minutes.

The real workout was the WOD that had been posted for all classes on Saturday and it looked pretty horrendous.  It was essentially 3 WODs in 1.  Here it is:

Start workout:
3 rounds:
12 Thrusters (135/95)
6 Ring Muscle-Ups

After 15:00
3 rounds:
12 Burpee Box Jumps (24"/20")
6 Squat Cleans (205/145)

After 30:00
3 rounds:
12 Overhead Squats (155/105)
6 Bar Muscle-Ups

So there was 45 minutes of work in store for me.  This was becoming a theme during these Saturday workouts, although in the past, the 45 minute workouts had been partner workouts.  This would be 45 minutes on my own.  Some parts of this were easy to figure out.  I have no variety of muscle-up, so both the ring muscle-ups and the bar muscle-ups would be jumping muscle-ups.  I would use a 17" box for the bar muscle-ups.  The rest was a little trickier.  I had an idea of what weights I would like to use, but since this was a 45 minute behemoth, it probably made sense to fight my urges to attempt everything RX and scale back a bit.  I'd start off with 135 for the thrusters, then only go to 165 for the squat cleans, then try 155 for the overheads.  Figuring in shoe changes was also tricky.  The idea was that each section should be completed in 10-12 minutes.  With 3 minutes of rest, I could go lifting shoes in section 1, regular shoes in section 2, then lifting shoes for section 3.  As long as I had that much rest...

We got started with the first section and I realized quickly that 135 pounds was a bad choice for the thrusters.  36 heavy thrusters and 18 jumping muscle ups didn't seem like it would take 12 minutes.  And that was true.  It actually took 13 minutes and 26 seconds.  During my first round, I tried to put together some bigger sets of thrusters, but 3 was the big set.  Then some sets of 2.  And I was sweating like crazy.  I knew then and there that round 2 and 3 would involve "fast" singles when it came to the thrusters.  As for the jumping muscle ups, they weren't pretty, but I did them in round 1.  In round 2, I got a couple, but the others were merely attempts.  Round 3 was completely attempts as I was too tired to even come close to doing a real jumping muscle-up.

Instead of 3-5 minutes of rest and time to change my shoes, I had 94 seconds.  Also, my shirt was completely saturated already.  Not good.  I put 30 more pounds on my bar (that was depressing!) and then attempted to change shoes as quickly as possible.  When the countdown for the start of the second section hit one, I still didn't have my right sneaker on.  About 15 seconds later, I trudged over to my box to begin the second section, sapped of energy, not eager to do burpees at all.  I worked through the burpee box jumps, hoping that the squat cleans would not be too unpleasant.  My single thrusters were all squat cleans that I strained to get above my head.  These cleans would be heavier, but there were half as many to do.

It turns out that 165 was a very good choice for the squat cleans.  Can I squat clean more than that?  Sure.  But 165 was probably that perfect weight to be both challenging yet doable given how tired I was.  In my first round, I started with a couple slow reps, but then I did 2 sets of 2 fast squat cleans, meaning that I went right back to the bar after dropping the first rep.  There wasn't much change in my burpee box jump speed, but I was catching up to Rachel and Michal on the squat cleans.  For round 2, I did 3 sets of 2.  And in round 3, I did a set of 3, then a set of 2, and then the final rep.  I finished in 12:58 (including the 15 seconds at the beginning where I was putting on my right sneaker), 3 seconds behind Michal, 3 seconds ahead of Rachel.  At least I would have 2 minutes to rest before the final section.

Given my limited rest period yet again, I kept my regular sneakers on.  And I decided to drop from 155 to 135 for the overheads.  Not my greatest decision as I should have went lower than that.  I was even more tired than I realized.  I knew better than to try and attempt to snatch the barbell.  I was definitely not going to try and squat snatch it and get an easy overhead rep.  That would have ended very poorly!  Instead, I cleaned the bar to my shoulders, took a slightly wider grip, then did a bad jerk where I basically threw my head back and semi-bench pressed the bar over my head.  Desperate times...

Despite my love of overheads, I could only manage 3-5 reps each time I picked up the bar.  Sometimes the weight got to be too much.  Sometimes I was dead tired.  But it was a lot of work to get through 12 reps.  The jumping bar muscle-ups sounded awful in my head, even though they are one of the rare movements in the gym that I find to be fun.  I tried to do a few in a row, but it was slow going.  Still, I was at the point in the workout where I had to find a way to finish.  I got back to the bar for round 2 and managed 5 reps on my first set.  There we go.  After some rest to get my breath back, I knocked out...three reps.  Not what I was hoping for.  Getting the last 4 strung together was not going to be an easy task.  I finally got the bar back up, did rep 1, rep 2, and barely got rep 3 before dropping.  Dammit.  Now I needed to clean and jerk this just for one last rep.  I managed to finish that off and headed back over for more jumping bar muscle-ups.

I don't remember exactly how I did the second round of 6 jumping bar muscle-ups, but I did manage to string some together.  After the last one, I got back over to my barbell with the finish line now in sight.  With my renewed enthusiasm and some adrenaline pumping, I was ready to do a big set.  So I picked up the bar and got...3 reps.  And then I gasped for air.  There wasn't much more to do, but my body was desperately pleading that I stop.  It was at this point that Marisa (who of course was finished by now) yelled over to me to pick up the bar again.  As I tried to convince myself to do just that, she said "do you want to be a beast or a bitch?"  With my hands on the bar, I turned to Marisa and smiled.

Ya see, no one has ever confused me for a beast.  And my bitch cred is through the roof.  So there was only one answer to her question.  But it was the last piece of motivation I needed to get through the workout.  When I got the bar over my head again, I managed to get through 5 more reps.  Another rest and then one last set of 4 reps left me with only 6 jumping bar muscle-ups to go.  The timer was closing in on 15 minutes, so I tried to hurry to get through the 6 reps, not letting go of the bar for the final round.  I didn't quite make it, but I wasn't too upset with my final round time of 15:24.

A little while after the workout was done, we got together for a photo.  I swear I am not lying when I say that I could not have moved from the spot I was sitting if I tried.  I was completely tapped out.  But I'm glad I finished the whole thing.

With Easter Sunday closing the gym, tomorrow will be a rest day before I get back to it on Monday.