Stranger Danger

Workout date: 6/6/15

Saturday was a very strange morning.  For starters, I woke up early.  As in, I woke up before my alarm went off at 6am.  I laid there intending to get some more sleep, but I was awake.  And for some reason, I wasn't overly tired or cranky despite sleeping less than expected.  I ended up in the shower for a ridiculous amount of time, but I don't think that will ever change.  And when I showed up at the gym, I was in a decent mood.  Very strange.

Attendance at Competitor's Class was sparse, as the only other folks there besides me were Keith, Rachel, and Michal.  The workout was on the lighter side as well.  What was going on?  Perhaps the gambling gods were letting me save my energy to handicap the Belmont Stakes card and root on American Pharoah's Triple Crown attempt later in the afternoon.  We started off with a warmup that looked like so:

2 rounds:
10 push press (barbell only)
20 squats
20 double unders
10 hang power snatch (barbell only)

Simple enough.  The big surprise here though was that I strung all 20 double unders in each set.  Were they done efficiently?  Not even close.  But I got all 20 each time.  I've been struggling with my double unders recently, so it was nice to feel like I hadn't forgotten how to do them.

Next up we had to find a 2RM hang snatch.  Even though snatches are supposed to be easier from the hang, I tend to have a tougher time with this movement when I'm not taking it from the floor ("taking it from the floor" may become my new favorite sorta sounds dirty Crossfit phrase).  I think it has something to do with the fact that I use a lot of momentum whenever I am doing anything in the gym.  When you're in the hang, you don't have any momentum to help you out.  I didn't have a good sense of where I'd end up on this, so I started out fairly light at 95 pounds.  That felt easy, so I went up to 115.  After finding success there, I went to 135, where things definitely started getting tougher.

I did manage to get 135, but only made a 10 pound jump for my next attempt.  And was 145 an adventure!  Up to this point, all of my attempts had been hang power snatches even though I had seen everyone else do some hang squat snatches during their progressions.  I knew I would need to do that soon as well, but in my first rep at 145, the bar pulled me under much more than I pulled myself under the bar.  It was almost like being in a pool and having someone dunk you underwater.  Before I knew it, I was in the bottom of a squat, trying to do an overhead with 145 pounds.  I managed to get it, but I was in full panic mode about how I would get the second rep.  Not wanting to waste my grip, I tried to regroup quickly.  When I attempted the second rep, the same thing happened, only I was aware that it was going to happen this time.  It was still work to stand up the bar, but I managed to rise and complete 145.

I had little faith that 155 could happen, but one rep would have been nice.  I made several attempts, but my form was all off.  I would have to accept that 145 was as high as I was getting in this phase of our class.

The last part of the class was not some 40 minute terror of a WOD (that would be on Sunday).  Instead we were testing out a WOD for an upcoming competiton.  There is a co-ed competition in August that Rachel and Keith are competing in together.  Michal is competing as well with a member of the gym that is hosting the competition.  Their team name is Stranger Danger.  So for this workout, I would be playing the role of Stranger.  Here's the WOD:

3 rounds:
20 toes to bar
20 hang power cleans (135/95)
20 deadlifts (135/95)
20 shoulder to overhead (135/95)

Other important details:

• 10 minute time cap
• Should you complete the workout in less than 10 minutes, you can do bar muscle ups to lower your finish time
• You are not allowed to drop any of the barbells, you must place them on the floor with control before your teammate can grab their barbell
• If you drop a barbell, you and your teammate must do 10 synchronized burpees

Enough details?  I thought so.  When I looked this over, I really believed it was possible that Michal and I could finish under the 10 minute time cap.  There were 2 of us working, so we'd be going faster due to the fact that would get small breaks while the other person was knocking out reps.  Should go fast!

It did go fast...for Rachel and Keith.  They blitzed through this thing in 8:30, leaving more than enough time to get some bar muscle ups in should they so desire (they had no such desires on Saturday morning).  As for Michal and I, we got through round 1 in about 4 minutes, so we knew right off the bat that we weren't meeting the 10 minute time cap.  We did decide to finish no matter what though, and to Michal's credit, she got stronger and stronger each round.  So strong, in fact, that she knocked out about 4 hang power cleans despite the fact that a) we had already completed 20 and b) I was yelling at her to do deadlifts.  I had a few solid sets of hang power cleans and shoulder to overheads to help us finish just under 15 minutes with a time of 14:57.

And that was it for Competitors Class.  Maybe the most laid back version of the year.  I felt like I could handle a 500 rep workout the next morning if need be.

Next blog post: A 500 rep workout.  I do not handle it well.