Hitting The Wall (15 Times)

Workout date: 4/22/15

Wall ascents!  The Wednesday workout would be chock full of wall ascents.  After watching season 4 of Game of Thrones, I would once again get the chance to pretend I was a wildling attacking Castle Black.  Of course, the wildlings never had to do heavy KB swings and burpees during their attack.  And I don't recall seeing too many bald wildlings on the show.  But other than that, this would be exactly the same!

The WOD would be a 15 minute AMRAP of 1 wall ascent, 10 KB swings (70/55), another wall ascent, then 10 burpees.  My goal was to finish 6 rounds, although I had some mini-goals thrown in along the way.  There wasn't much I could plan out as far as the wall ascents went, except for "try not to kill your self".  For the KB swings, we were going very heavy, so to knock out all 10 reps at 70 pounds without putting the KB down would be huge, especially later in the workout when I would be tired and sweaty.  As for the burpees, I've gotten into a bad habit of crawling through my burpees as I'm tired.  It's good that I keep moving, but I really wanted to push myself to do actual burpees for as much of this workout as possible.

Before Brian, Linda, and I got started, Keithie went over the wall ascent with us.  I had been over the 8 ft wall several times before, but Brian had not ever been over it.  However, it was clear that would be changing this night when he easily jumped high enough to pull himself over during the warmup progressions.  It was also during these progressions that Keithie tried to fix my stutter-step problem.  Nearly every time I run towards the wall, I end up panicking right before my jump, which leads to me doing approximately 22 stutter-steps before pathetically jumping at the wall and holding on to the top for dear life.  Keithie had me measure it out as if I was doing a long jump, figuring out where I would start if I was going to take 5 real strides before jumping at the wall.  This worked out well, although I correctly predicted that I would be back to the stutter-step technique in later rounds as I tired out.  I ended up doing 4 wall ascents during warmups.

We got started and surprisingly, the first round did not go smoothly.  Oops, bad sign.  Since Linda was using the 6 ft wall, she would be starting the run to her wall underneath the left side of the back of the 8 ft wall.  That meant Brian and I would scale the right side, but have to go one at a time.  Brian let me go first and I got over without a problem, then did my 10 KB swings.  When I came back for the second wall ascent though, one of my hands slipped at the top, causing me to fall back to the floor.  I waved on Brian to go, tried to get my confidence back, and went after he cleared the wall.  At the burpees, I did most if not all of them legitimately and one round was done in a little under two and a half minutes.

From that point forward, I did not have any more slip-ups at the wall until the very end.  The stutter-steps came back eventually and I did have to crawl my way through a considerable amount of burpees, but I held strong on the KB, doing every set unbroken.  Each round was in the 2:30-3:00 range, and as I got through round 5, I realized finishing 6 rounds would not happen.  With 1:15 left, I climbed over the wall, then got my 10 KB swings in.  That left me about 10 seconds, so I ran at the wall with the little energy I had left, grabbed the top for a brief second, and felt my hand slip yet again.  With only a few seconds left, there was no time to get over the wall, so my final score was 5 rounds and 11 reps.

The toughest part about any wall ascent workout is the inevitable bruising.  Because I throw my right arm up on the wall to hoist the rest of my body up, I always end up with a bruised right forearm.  After doing 15 wall ascents (4 practice, 11 in the workout), I was able to not only bruise up my forearm fairly good, but the entire underside of my right arm.  So that will not be pretty for a while.

This was a difficult workout to gauge as a success or a failure.  I wish my conditioning was better than it currently is, but I was happy to get over the wall as many times as I did and I was happy to hold on to the 70 pound KB the whole time, as that has definitely been a struggle for me.  Burpees still need work, but there are tons of workouts that get scheduled with burpees in them, so I doubt I will be lacking practice there.