Fiddy With Cindy

Workout date: 7/6/15

I feel ya, Ron.  It's gotten ridiculously muggy in the gym recently.  The worst part is that you walk through an air-conditioned lobby at our gym before hitting a wall of humidity as you enter the area where you will be working out.  That's not a great situation for most people.  It's Defcon 1 for me.  Not only do I have to worry about dehydration and fatigue, I have to worry about my hands slipping off of equipment as well.  I'd also have to worry about mopping up the area where I worked out if I hadn't been coming to the latest class everyday.  Luckily, those areas dry out on their own by 6am the next morning.

Wednesday was another test day, but it was a workout that I had suspiciously missed back in January and April.  Yes, it has pull-ups in it.  How did you guess?  The workout is named Cindy and it goes a little something like this:

AMRAP in 20 minutes:
5 pull-ups
10 push-ups
15 air squats

Come on, Dave!  That doesn't sound so bad.  Go put your big boy pants on and stop dodging Cindy.  Fine, fine.  For the first time in 2015, I would take on Cindy.

Part of the reason I have never been eager to do this workout is because people put together all sorts of crazy scores like 22 rounds completed.  Athletes move fast and I knew I would not be moving fast on the pull-up bar.  If I used a band, perhaps I'd move a little faster, but at some point I need to acquire the ability to do pull-ups without the band.  I consulted with Dr. Coach Giulz to see how I should approach this workout.  Was it better to be slow and work on pull-ups without the band, or was it better to use the band to keep up a (relatively) fast pace during the full 20 minutes?  Dr. Coach Giulz advised me to go without the band as it would be good practice and it was only 5 reps per round.  Fair enough.

I got to the gym and...oh dear God, it's approximately 137 degrees in here!  Immediately I became concerned about my ability to hang on to the bar.  I looked in my bag and saw that I had wristbands in there, so that gave me some relief.  Still, I had gone flying off the bar not too long ago and I was not looking to do it again.  I would need to remain conscious of drying my hands as much as possible during the workout. 

My goal was to get 10 rounds.  It was ambitious, because that meant doing 50 pull-ups without a band and I had never done that many before.  But 1 round every 2 minutes seemed reasonable, especially since I expected to go very fast on the air squats and somewhat fast on the push-ups.  Just needed to keep it together on the pull-up bar.

The 7:30 class consisted of myself, Cline, and Sue (man, she is in this blog a lot recently).  It was nice having only three people in class as these summer classes can end up being a packed house.  We went through some warm-ups per usual and then got ready to go.  For round one, I started off on the high bar.  I strung 3 pull-ups, then did 2 singles.  That was quick.  Push-ups would be the toughest element of this workout for a lot of people, but not for me.  I did want to conserve my energy though since this was a long workout, so I did 2 sets of 5 reps for each of the first 2 rounds.  The air squats were the part of the workout where you caught your breath, although you also wanted to make sure you moved through them fast and finished up your round.  I completed the first round in about 1:05.  For round 2, I did singles on the high bar for the pull-ups.  Completed round two around 2:30.  I knew my pace was going to slow as the workout progressed, but I began to feel confident that I could complete 10 rounds.

Since I had gotten to the point that I was doing single reps, I decided there was no point in continuing on with the high bar for the pull-ups.  Jumping up there every time was wasting energy.  I grabbed the low bar and started doing singles there.  When I got to the push-ups, I dropped to 4-3-3 for the 10 reps.  Air squats were still not a problem at this point.

I believe it was round 4 when I started struggling with my kip and Keith came over to give me some advice.  The kip itself wasn't bad, but I wasn't opening my hip and shooting my legs down to drive myself up.  It felt goofy to do what he was telling me to do, but it certainly worked.  Every time I shot my legs toward the floor, I pulled and strained my chin up above the bar.  And it pretty much worked for the remainder of the 20 minutes (I had 1 rep where I was tired and came nowhere close to getting my chin over the bar).  The problem with driving my knees up and then driving them down was that this became a bit of an ab workout.  I was feeling it in my core, plus it was causing me to run out of breath quicker.  And did I mention that we were doing this workout in a sauna?  Forget about sweaty hands, now I needed to be able to breathe to get through this.

For the push-up section, I generally did 4-3-3 the rest of the way, although I had a 6-2-2 and a 5-3-2 in there as well.  At the tail end of the workout, I did some 4-2-2-2 rounds, but I never did less than 4 reps to start things off.  And there was something therapeutic about slamming my chest against the floor after finishing off the pull-up rounds.  Michal tells me to keep calm during pull-ups and I did manage to do that for 20 minutes, but I think there was some rage that needed to be let out after each set of 5 that I did.

For the air squats, I had a couple of pauses in later rounds to catch my breath, but I did not want to waste any time getting those done.  I kept a decent pace all of the way through on those.

As I came to the end of round 5, I looked at the clock and saw 9:40.  10 rounds meant keeping the same pace for the final 5 rounds as I had the first 5, which seemed very unlikely.  But as long as my breathing didn't become too big of an obstacle, I was going to push on believing I could finish 10 rounds.  Round 6 was done at 11:55.  Round 7 was done around 14:30.  I was no longer working at a 10 round pace, but I told myself to believe it still could be done.  Round 8 was finished at about 17:15.  With the last round taking about 2:45, I knew I had to move to get the 9th round done.  Each pull-up felt awful, but I got through them.  I tried to take very tiny breaks between sets of push-ups.  And when I got to the air squats, I was doing all 15 without breaking no matter what. 

With round 9 complete, I headed back to the bar seeing I had 25 seconds left.  I wanted to get 3 more pull-ups in.  First one was a success and I put my hands back on the bar to get ready for the second rep.  That one was good and I peeked at the clock again.  15 seconds left.  Could I finish all 5?  There couldn't be any breaks.  I did the third rep.  Then I did the 4th rep.  Keith yelled, "3 seconds left!"  I frantically grabbed the bar, swung, and pulled.  As my chin rose above the bar, Keith yelled "Time!".

I was exhausted.  Cline had made his way out to the curb for some fresh air and I joined him.  He had matched his score of 10+3 from back in April.  Sue had smoked us both with a score of 11+4.  But no one was happier than I was with my score of 9+5.  I had not completed 10 rounds like I had hoped, but for the first time, I managed to do 50 pull-ups in a workout without a band.  It was a victory.  I may not have raised my arms over my head for the rest of the night, but I went to bed that night a happy man.