Good Friday (No Seriously, It Was)

Workout date: 4/3/15

There is nothing like a trip to Vegas to mess with your ability to remember what day it is.  Getting home past midnight on a Sunday night from such a trip does not help any.  And having a random holiday at the end of the week really screws things up.  I didn't even realize I would have Friday off until Tuesday afternoon.  But I was certainly not going to complain about a long weekend.  Plus this gave me the opportunity to hit the gym at a better time for once.

I had contacted Aimee about coming into the gym either before or after the dirty 9:30 so I could try Grace.  I had missed it on Monday and the last time I officially did it was November 13, 2013.  I managed to complete Grace in 5:38, although it felt like forever to complete.  That was a big improvement on my "original" Grace attempt.  (For those unfamiliar with Grace, it is 30 clean and jerks, meaning bringing the barbell from the ground to overhead, using 135 pounds.)  For my "original" Grace attempt, we were doing Heavy Grace.  The idea was that we should use a weight heavier than 135 pounds.  I tried my best by using 145 pounds, but it took me 14:08 to complete.  That was June 18, 2013.

Since then, either I haven't been around when Grace has been scheduled, or like on Monday, I was doing something else at the gym.  Friday was finally an opportunity to see how much progress I had made on Grace.  Now I had sort of done Grace on February 24th, when we did a clean and jerk ladder and I managed 30 reps at 135 pounds over the course of 5 minutes.  But honestly, I did not have a solid idea of whether that meant I could do it in 4:30, or 4:00.  Maybe it would be closer to 3:00.  I just knew the real time should be under 5 minutes.

Rachel had got bored of beating me and had turned her sights on to the gym leaderboard.  She did Grace on Monday and fell 5 seconds short.  So she wanted to take on Grace again.  Aimee let me know that we could come after the 9:30 class and that she would cook up some extra goodies for us to do while we were there (yikes!).  When I got there, Aimee and Rachel were there, as well as Keith and a visiting Jen S., who was my fundamentals coach when I joined KOP.  We started out with the airdyne/medball clean warmup we did before the end of the Nutritional Challenge workout.  Then it was time for Grace!

We went in two heats: one ladies heat, one heat for the gentlemen.  And since Keith is much, much stronger than me, I knew I would be working alone for a significant portion of heat #2.  I acted as Rachel's counter for heat #1.  I really wanted her and Aimee to face each other while doing this, because I thought it would be a very close matchup.  Plus they are both competitive as hell.  (Jen recently injured her toe, or else she would be right in the mix as well.)  The time to beat to get on the board was 2:48.  The girls got going and Aimee took the early lead.  But Rachel is pretty steady.  I only paid attention to Aimee's reps until she dropped the bar and then I was focused solely on Rachel's reps.  Rachel held on to the bar through 12 reps before finally dropping.  Then she began going through sets of 2.  After 2 sets of 2, she had 16 reps complete as the clock hit 1 minute.

Rachel kept the sets of 2 going until she got through 24 reps.  Then it was on to fast singles.  But the clock was becoming a concern.  I forget exactly what rep she was on when the clock got to 2 minutes, but she still had some work to do.  When it got to 2 minutes and 20 seconds, I was worried she might fall short again.  However, she could sense the finish line and knocked out rep #30 at 2:35, giving her the top spot on the leaderboard.  Aimee was not far behind her, finishing up in 2:59.

Time for heat #2.  I was definitely nervous, but sitting around hoping the nervousness would go away was pointless.  We got the 3, 2, 1 countdown and started.  I wanted to hold on to the bar as long as possible so that I didn't give myself an excuse to take rest.  I got through 8 reps before dropping the bar.  Then I did 3 more.  Then it was time for sets of 2.  And somehow Keith was already done.  Awesome.  I must be going slower than I had imagined.  After two sets of 2, I was halfway done and wanted to look at the clock, but told myself not to.  I got one last set of 2 in, but my jerks were becoming dicey, so it was time for fast singles for the last 13.  Knowing that Rachel had made it 7 reps further before going to singles, I was very worried about my time.  Grace is one of those workouts where it feels like it is taking you forever even though you are sprinting.  I could have been at 2 minutes when I started the singles.  I could have been over three minutes.  I honestly had no idea.

I tried to move as quickly as possible.  Jen and Rachel would not let me walk away from the bar between reps.  Jen was even giving me the "3 seconds to get your hands back on the bar" complete with a 3 second countdown.  For the most part, I obeyed.  This was one of the rare workouts where I wasn't feeling winded as much as I was feeling weak.  I could grab the bar and clean it, but my jerks were definitely taking a lot of effort.  I got to 25 and tried my best to get through the last 5 quickly.  Soon I was at 28.  I grabbed the bar for #29, completed the rep, dropped the bar, took a second to regroup, grabbed the bar, and did rep #30.

While I had certainly received lots of encouragement, there wasn't a lot excitement that I could sense as I was finishing, making me believe that my time sucked.  And since Keith had finished what seemed like an hour ago, I was expecting to turn to the clock and read something along the lines of 4:59.  So it was a strangely euphoric feeling that came over me when I looked up and saw 3:28 staring back at me.  To make things even better, the girls told me that Keith had used 95 pounds for his workout, so I didn't feel completely stupid about how badly he had beaten me.

I have to be honest: the Open was kind of deflating.  I got the shit kicked out of me week in and week out.  I didn't improve very much in the overall standings from last year.  And in the workout I was supposed to be good at (15.5), I completely fell apart.  Not a lot of silver linings in there.  But dropping my Grace time down to 3:28?  That was something I could build some good vibes off of.

Even better was the small cash-out we did after Grace.  Why was the cash-out so good?  Because it included pistols!  (If Dave Castro had any balls, he would have put those in an Open workout.  Just sayin...)  The cash-out was 2 rounds of 24 pistols and 12 burpees.  Keith blitzed through this pretty easily, but I did manage to get done before Aimee on this one, and after getting whooped throughout the Open, I am enjoying any sort of imaginary victory that comes my way.

After the workout, the Noon express class came in and those of us who had done Grace hung around to indulge in some Lynne as well.  Lynne is 5 rounds of max reps body-weight bench press and pull-ups.  I worked out with Chris A. for the first time and was more than happy to use 135 for the bench press instead of my actual body-weight.  Chris was very impressive with his consistency and his ability to do strict pull-ups.  I tried my best to imitate him, but this was definitely going to be a workout that I struggled with.  As Chris knocked out between 7-10 strict pull-ups per round, 2-3 was my max.  My bench press reps went 15-13-10-9-8, while my pull-ups went 3-2-3-3-2.  I did do them strict, although my kipping numbers would not have been much better.

Tomorrow is Competitors Class yet again, and since that starts in about 5.5 hours, I should get some sleep!