A Lesson In Humidity

Workout date: 5/27/15

I was going to start with some positive things in this post, but even that didn't go right today.  Samson had taken video of me doing my 5th rep at 265 on Tuesday and I tried to include it in this post, but I kept receiving a message that it didn't upload correctly.  So you'll have to go along with my critique sans footage of the event:

1. Calling it a "controlled descent" may have been a slight exaggeration.  In the video, I still drop to the bottom awfully fast, a problem that will haunt me when I go to higher weights.  As Giulz would say, FIX IT!
2. With that aside, the video showed little struggle on that last rep.  If it was someone else in that video, I'd turn to them and say "you got that easy, you can do that all day".  For myself, I'll go with "that wasn't so bad".
3. The part of the video you will be most upset about missing is after the lift, where I become super awkward while wandering around, eventually high-fiving Keith and Matt B.
4. According to the chart at the gym, if I can do 5 reps at 265, I should be able to do 1 rep at 305.  Key words: should be able to.

So there's the positive.  The negative?  Pretty much everything I did on Wednesday, although I guess I can think of one exception.  I had mixed feelings about the WOD.  It was called "2 Minutes Max" and went like this: 2 minute AMRAP of muscle-ups, 2 minutes rest, 2 minute AMRAP of snatches (135/95), 2 minutes rest, 2 minute AMRAP of overhead squats (135/95).  Muscle-ups certainly weren't going to happen and with only 2 minutes for the AMRAP, I wasn't sure what scale I could do.  I thought maybe jumping bar muscle-ups with a 13" box, but then I thought they might want us on the rings.  Jumping muscle-ups possibly, but two minutes seemed like a long time for those.  As far as the snatch and overhead squat components were concerned, I thought I could handle 135 for two minutes on each of those, so I planned on going RX.

It's not often that I include a weather report in this blog, but with summer coming in full force, it might become a more common occurrence.  I was sitting in my office, slowly watching time tick by, when I heard loud noises.  It is deathly quiet in my office, so it was a bit startling to hear this noise all of a sudden.  I went out into the hallway until I came across an office with a window and saw that there was a strong thunderstorm.  Guess we'll be warming up on the rowers today.  It had been hot earlier in the day, but didn't seem oppressively hot.  With this storm, I figured things would cool down.  Yay, right?

Wrong.  When I got to the gym, it was immediately clear that the humidity had not dropped after the storm.  Of course, our gym is a sauna most of the time anyway, but it was noticeably worse last night.  Still, I figured I should be able to make it through 6 minutes of work, especially with 4 minutes of rest.  That part would have been true if I planned properly, and not surprisingly, I did not.  Keith explained what the scales for muscle-ups would be and it involved the rings, not the bars.  Specifically, I would be doing jumping muscle-ups.  I was not as concerned about my grip with the rings, so I decided not to wear my hand grips.  This was yet another notch on my belt of poor decision making.

I still had time to fix this mistake after warmups, but I did not.  Even though the workout was only 10 minutes including rest, the warmup was at least 20 minutes long.  It was exhausting (bad sign when the warmup is exhausting!) and I had already produced a puddle of sweat where I would be snatching and doing overheads later.  My hands were moist (Did I use that word because I know so many people who hate it?  You betcha!), but my thought was that I had two minutes between rounds to dry them off, plus I had chalk available.  I won't need those silly hand grips!

We got going on the workout and somehow the muscle-up portion ended up being the bright spot for me.  I needed some adjustment in the middle of the two minutes so that I was jumping far enough forward to simulate the transition in a muscle-up, but I was able to dip out of that transition successfully over and over again.  When the clock hit two minutes, I had done 11 jumping muscle-ups.  My previous high was 7.

Time to knock out the stuff I like!  Especially since I made the decision during warmups to go with 115 instead of 135.  I did some snatches at 95 and they did not feel as light as I would have expected.  And since I have learned not to underestimate any workout with rest built into it, I figured the wise move was to scale down to 115.  My goal for the snatches would be 20 reps and for the overheads I'd be trying for 30 reps.  Those would be tough to get, but I thought I should at least be close to those numbers.

We got going with the snatches and I strung four in a row.  I'm sure my form fell apart as I was going for speed, but I was moving with good speed.  I had 9 done at the one minute mark.  I tried to keep pushing for at least 9 more, but had to drop on one of the lifts (foreshadowing!) and ended up with only 7 in the second minute for a score of 16.  Not terrible, but not great.  At least we were ending with my favorite movement.  I wiped the sweat off of me, chalked up my hands, and waited for the two minute rest period to end.

What followed was a mix of my faulty body, bad weather, and probably a mental breakdown.  All in two minutes!  As the round began, I went to squat snatch the bar to get a quick overhead squat in.  I can pretty much do this in my sleep now with 95 pounds, so 115 shouldn't have been too much of a struggle.  And really it wasn't, except that as I pulled the bar over my head and dropped below it, my grip gave a little bit and the bar started sliding forward out of my hands.  I tried to hold on, thinking that if I could stand it up, I could re-grip and proceed with the overheads.  But the bar had slid too much and I had to drop it.  Not a wonderful start.  Then I power snatched it and did 5 reps, but again, the bar didn't feel right in my hands, so I put it down.  When I went to snatch it again, the bar flew out of my hands and bounced forward.  My hands were covered in white goo (stop it) as the chalk and my sweat had combined to thwart my overhead squatting efforts.  I wiped my hands on my shorts, ran over to the chalk bucket, and got some dry chalk on my hands.  I snatched the bar, did a larger set, and then put it back down.  With less than 30 seconds to go, I tried to snatch it again, but the bar slipped out of my hands yet again.  Having no time to re-chalk, I got the bar over my head via a clean and jerk and got a few more reps in.  When time was called, I had only 16 reps.  Maybe I should have worn those hand grips!  Moron.

As I rolled out after class, I continued to be furious about the workout.  It's bad enough blowing it on something I'm not particularly good at, but that should be balanced out by doing well on things I'm decent at.  Messing up an overhead squat workout was like forgetting it was jeans day at work.  After stewing for a bit, I did 4 sets of 10 swings using the 80 lb KB as I've been wanting to do for a while.  Then I capped the day off with some very poor double under practice.  At that point, it was time to call it a day and hope for better things tomorrow.

Next blog: a workout with 50 chest-to-bar pull-ups?  Maybe I need to hope for better things Friday.