2015 Recap

Yes, this post took about a week for me to put together.  I knew I wanted to write a year-end recap, but I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to say in it.  Did I simply want to list out my times and scores from the beginning of the year and compare them to where they are at the end of the year?  Did I want to delve into how my perspective of Crossfit has changed over the course of the year?  Did I want to make this a farewell post, as my original intention for this blog was only to cover a year's worth of workouts?  In the end, I knew I would need to touch on all of these things, but I would need to keep things as brief as possible so everyone didn't fall asleep halfway through reading this.  As you know, brevity is not my strong suit, but I will try to keep things to a light ramble as I try to recap my journey over the past year.

The Speech That Never Had To Be Given

I had one major goal for the year: to make it on to the gym white board.  There are 36 categories on the white board.  Surely I could find one category on there where I could crack the top 3 in the gym.  After all, everyone has their strengths and weaknesses.  Wasn't it possible that one of my strengths would cosmically align with a major weakness of most of the other male athletes in the gym?

In a word: no.  I didn't come close.  I really believed that Nancy would be the workout which resulted in the name Dave gracing the white board, but my inability to put together decent 400 meter runs in the later rounds left me a solid 90 seconds off of the white board.  The 500 meter row was a possibility, but just as I began creeping closer to the third place spot on the board, we had Advent Challenge #2 and everyone in the gym went after the top 3 spots.  All the old times came down and three faster times went up.  Earlier in the year, I was really excited to PR my overhead squat by 40 pounds.  That had to put me in the range of the white board for the overhead squat, right?  Sorry, even another 40 pound PR wasn't going to get me on the white board there.  I no longer have the speed to crack the running events nor the hops to challenge on the max height box jump.  There were simply too many jocks for this nerd to overcome.

My goals for 2016 will be much simpler:

• Strengthen my hamstrings: This is the weakest part of my legs and it has hindered me from making larger gains in some areas (Olympic lifts), while causing me to completely plateau in other areas (hello deadlift!).  I was able to improve both my pull-ups and my double unders when I devoted my time and focus to those movements.  Hopefully some 2016 focus on my hammies will lead to some bigger lifts in the new year.
• Grip strength: I can't really say there is a weakest part to my upper body.  It is all weak at the moment.  But if I am to get better at gymnastic movements like pull-ups and toes-to-bar, I need to drastically improve my grip strength.
• Learn to butterfly: While we're on the topic of pull-ups, I think I need to take a crack at learning butterfly pull-ups.  Not only do I struggle with grip strength, I struggle with the push away piece at the top of a kipping pull-up.  Butterfly pull-ups are more advanced, but they eliminate that push away aspect when doing pull-ups.  A couple of people at the gym have told me they struggled with kipping pull-ups but found success with butterfly pull-ups.  Seems worth a shot.
• 10 benchmark goals (ascending in order of expected difficulty):
• Grace - 2:59
• Deadlift - 400 lbs
• Handstand Push-Ups - 1 strict with 1 abmat
• Nancy - 14:59
• Clean and Jerk - 245 lbs
• Annie - 9:59
• Handstand Push-Ups - 5 consecutive kipping
• Front Squat - 300 lbs
• Double Unders - 100 consecutive
• Bar Muscle-Up - 1

To All The Girls I'd Never Done Before

That's a pretty fantastic video, am I right?  Seems like a Saturday Night Live skit in the making.  Unfortunately I couldn't find any SNL parodies of that video.  (Note: Johnny Carson did do a parody of this and his Willie Nelson impression was excellent.)

If I'm going to list out my highlights for the year, I have to start with those workouts that I had never done RX before.  As always, ladies first:

• Annie
• Cindy
• Fran
• Helen
• Isabel
• Jackie

And then the animals (wait, what?):

• Badger
• Wolverine

And then there was that one really wild night:

• Filthy Fifty

And last, but not least, the first workout I ever did at KOP:

• Baseline

Besides getting through these workouts RX for the first time, there were many other highlights for me in 2015.  Among them:

• Best workout of the year: Kelly (December 8th)
• A PR of 6 minutes and 29 seconds.  The combination of improved box jump technique (rebounding throughout), improved wall ball technique (controlled breathing and better arm position), and the most mental strength I've ever managed in a workout.
• Stringing 10 toes-to-bar, winning the ice cream bet with Jill C (January 15th)
• Finishing Kalsu with 95 pounds, one of the two workouts that I had previously started but never finished (June 2nd)
• 225 lb overhead squat (June 26th)
• 49 consecutive double unders (June 30th)
• 330 lb back squat (October 1st)
• 225 lb clean and jerk (October 6th)
• Advent Challenge #15: 50 consecutive wall balls (December 15th)
• Advent Challenge #18: most pistols in one minute (37) among the guys at the gym (December 18th)

That's Just The Way It Is.  Some Things Will Never Change.

Badger - January 31st

Brawl In The Burbs - August 15th

Wolverine - October 31st

Day of Infamy - November 16th

People have to wait for me to finish workouts.  Quite a lot.  I did a quick search of Crossfit photos that I had accumulated during the year and it didn't take long to find 4 different examples of this phenomenon.  The quest to get better isn't always pretty.  The "pity circle" may not have been a popular moniker, but look how incredibly bored/sad those support groups look!  The "pity circle" formed many times for me in 2015 as I tried my best to keep my performances respectable.

If I'm willing to list out the highlights of the year, it seems only fair that I mention the low points of the year as well:

• Worst workout of the year: November 16th (see photo above)
• Some unexpected troubles during the toes-to-bar and overhead squat segments of the workout only added on to the misery that was found during my feeble attempts at completing double unders.  Repeated failures just led to more and more anger, pushing me further and further behind the rest of the class.  The overhead walking lunges to finish were no picnic either.  No other workout I did all year elicited as much commentary.
• The 5 week beatdown at the hands of Rachel during this year's Open, with the worst of it coming during my second attempt at 15.2, where I couldn't get a 10th chest-to-bar pull-up, then suffered the indignity of being denied beer at Wegman's (March 9th)
• My performance at The Festivus Games, specifically the first two events where I was slower in Event #1 than I was in my two practice attempts at it, followed by large amounts of crawling during the burpees over the bar portion of Event #2 (April 18th)
• My attempt at Helen in May, as just when I thought I had the hang of pull-ups, I fell apart and ended the workout doing ring rows in extreme frustration (May 18th)
• Launching myself backwards off the high pull-up bar and into the wall in front of everyone at Aimee's Pull-Up Clinic (June 8th)
• Struggling yet again at the annual King and Queen competition, most notably in the second event, a couplet of KB swings and sit-ups where I was time capped with 42 reps still to go (July 18th)
• Having my body fail me during the final workout at Brawl In The Burbs (August 15th)
• Being unable to improve upon my deadlift PR of 385 lbs
• Being unable to do a strict handstand push-up with 1 abmat despite more attempts than I can count

The Heat Of Competition

Even Spaz was able to come through in a competition.  Wasn't even distracted by those Swedish subtitles!  But could I?  Not so much.  You may have noticed that a lot of my worst performances this year took place during competitions.  And that is very disheartening to me.  I used to pride myself on coming through in the clutch.  When I was growing up, my dad taught me how to play games like darts and pool.  When we played against each other, there would be nothing out of the ordinary unless I had the lead late in the game.  Then the chatter would begin.  If I needed to hit a bullseye to close out the game, my dad would be in my ear, telling me how this was the toughest part of the game.  Don't get nervous!  Same deal if I was lining up the 8-ball for a final shot.  At first it was infuriating, because the pressure would get to me and I would always blow the game.  Then I finally won.  

Soon I embraced the trash talk.  I'd start to laugh at all the crazy stuff he'd say to me.  It began to calm me in those tense moments.  After a while, you crave those moments.  You want to be the one who has to take the last shot.  I was in a bowling league in middle school and my team finished the season tied for first place with another team.  In the tiebreaker match, it came down to the last frame and I needed a strike to keep the match going.  Maybe you worry much less as a kid, but I remember having no doubts that I was going to hit that strike.  And I did.  (Note: We still lost when the guy on the other team knocked down enough pins in his final frame.  Bastard!)  In high school, I hit a buzzer-beater to win a basketball game.  In college, I went on a run to close out the final rack en route to winning the team pool tournament.  Is this painting the picture that I am overly competitive?  Guilty as charged.

The reason for the trip down memory lane is to give you some insight as to why I take my Crossfit competition failures so hard.  I'm certainly not going into them thinking that I'm going to win any of them.  But I do expect myself to perform at my best during them.  Instead the opposite has happened.  It is one thing to accept losing a step or two as you get older, but losing the ability to be even remotely clutch has been a much tougher pill to swallow.

So will I do any competitions in 2016?  I'm still figuring that out.  Will I continue to go to Competitors Class?  There's part of me that thinks it's silly for me to be there.  I mean, this is a classic case of...

Spoiler: I'm the hat

Then again, there's part of me that is always driven to improve.  My obsession with trying to RX workouts is based in part because I've always loved challenges.  Competitors Class is a super-sized WOD with some of the best athletes in the gym.  If waking my groggy ass up and working out with them isn't the best challenge available to me, then I'm not sure what is.  So I'll likely be spending more Saturday mornings standing in the shower for 20-30 minutes at 6am.

Who Reads This Stuff Anyways?

As I mentioned in the intro, my original intention was to write this blog for 2015 and that's it.  KOP had put together a benchmarking program for the year and the write-up on this new program included the following instructions: "To take full advantage of the upcoming year, it will be imperative that you log your workouts."  Imperative?  That sounds serious.  How bout I start writing a blog that covers all of my workouts and you can sign me up for that full advantage thingy?

My results from the program can be found by following the link at the end of this paragraph.  In it, you will see a bunch of tabs.  The creatively named tab "All Workouts" includes all of my workouts from this year.  It has the name of the blog post that covered that workout.  The details of the workout are listed next, along with my final time or score.  Workouts done RX are in bold.  The final column has any additional notes that I wanted to include.  Did you know that I started a back squat program on April 6th?  Neither did I!  But I wrote it down.  The second tab, "Gym Benchmark Series", outlines my results from the program that inspired this blog.  The third tab is the aptly named "Other Repeated Workouts" and shows any repeated workouts that weren't in the second tab.  "Improved Benchmarks" shows all of the areas where I made improvements in 2015, while "Unchanged Benchmarks" shows the areas where I stalled out.  Finally, the tab "First Timers" covers the workouts that I completed RX for (you guessed it) the first time in 2015.  Here's the spreadsheet.

So now what?  Well the program may have been my initial inspiration, but it isn't the only reason I wanted to write.  I used to love writing and I rarely get to do it any more.  Plus I discovered along the way that this blog essentially was free public therapy for me.  I mean, I may have uncovered some daddy issues while writing this recap.  It's bizarre where my mind goes.

That hasn't been the only discovery along the way.  I guess this blog has been the closest experience I will ever have to being on a reality show.  (Sorry, the Thanksgiving Amazing Race didn't quite cut it for me.)  I never really thought of it in that context when I started this blog, but that's kinda the way it has played out.  During my first two years of Crossfit, I would get an occasional comment from a coach after a workout or possibly the next day.  Now I have people mention things like "hey, it's been five days since you took a rest day" or "maybe you should have done ring rows instead of banded pull-ups during that workout".  I ignorantly put myself under the microscope for better or worse.  That's not always the easiest thing for someone with low self-esteem to handle.

While I was away last week, I mulled over whether I wanted to keep writing this blog in 2016.  There was one thing that stuck in my brain as I weighed the pros and cons.  Every time I log on to my blog, it shows the number of views the blog has had.  When I started writing this, I figured a few people from the gym might be interested, possibly some friends and family, but this group of a dozen or so potential readers would likely only read it every so often.  It blew me away when all of these folks from the gym told me that they were loyal readers.  It was even more shocking when I found out people who don't do Crossfit were reading it.  (Note: I would like to once again extend my apologies to those of you who stumbled on to my blog in search of Russian porn.  Thank you for visiting anyway!)  When I fell behind with my updates, folks wanted to know when I was going to post again.  This was not what I was expecting at all.  

To date, this blog has gotten approximately 11,000 views.  Maybe in the grand scheme of things, that's not a lot.  But it is a lot to me.  I can't thank all of you enough who have indulged me as I rambled on day after day, being an audience for me as I get to enjoy a hobby of mine.  Perhaps a time will come when my audience will grow tired of hearing about what runs through my mind as I'm doing a set of wall balls or how I've devised the perfect plan to get through a Hero WOD, but I feel like that point hasn't been reached yet.  

So after we ring in 2016, I'm going to keep on writing and hope you keep on reading.  Have a Happy New Year everyone!