Dudes After Dark

Workout date: 2/9/16

Does this blog post feel like it is teeming with testosterone?  (Or at least alliteration?)  That's because this is a Tuesday night recap of the 7:30 class.  And that can mean only one thing: Dudes After Dark.

<sultry female voice> Dudes After Dark!

Have you attended a Tuesday class at KOP recently and wondered where all the gentlemen were at? (Probably not, but just run with it.)  Well I have a secret to share with you.  The men don't come out and play until the sun goes away.

<sultry female voice> Dudes After Dark!

Coach Rachel's 7:30 class on Tuesdays is all about fun with the fellas.  It is not a coincidence that Cline's dip is vertical.

<sultry female voice> Dudes After Dark!

Ummm...is this a phone sex ad?

<sultry female voice> Dudes After Dark!

That doesn't answer my question...

<sultry female voice> Call now!

Yup, that's what I thought.

Okay, maybe I let my imagination run wild once we had slapped a name on the Tuesday 7:30 class, but for some reason, that class is almost always 100% guys.  And it was no different this Tuesday as Cline, Chris, Matt E, and myself made up this week's all-male review.  The WOD would be one of this month's benchmark workouts, an unpleasant experience named Jackie.

"Jackie"
1,000 meter row
50 thrusters (45)
30 pull-ups

I did this workout RX for the first time at the end of October.  There was a soft 10 minute time cap on  the workout and I stupidly assumed that I would finish under that threshold.  11 minutes and 41 seconds later, I laid on the floor and shook my head in disbelief at how dumb I was.  The row wasn't terrible, but the thrusters were not as easy as I would have guessed.  And pull-ups will always be my nemesis.  Tired pull-ups are just that much worse.

It's been a while since a plan has really blown up in my face, so perhaps I was due for a colossal strategic failure during a workout.  Going into this one, my plan was to do the row at a fast, but not overly taxing pace (4:00 or under).  Then I would pace myself through the 50 thrusters, never putting the bar down (dream on).  At the end, I would try to keep doing sets of 2-3 reps rather than giving up and immediately doing fast singles.  When I had done this last time, I did the row at a good pace before needing 3 sets to do the thrusters (25-10-15, I believe).  The pull-ups killed me though as I resorted to what we'll call "slow singles" after some early success at the pull-ups.

As Rachel led us through the warm-up, this plan still seemed sane.  We ended up doing 8 thrusters with the 45 pound barbell in quick succession and it felt like nothing.  I've been learning that if you stay calm during the workout, you end up doing much better.  Except that's only partially true, a lesson I learned the hard way Tuesday night.  If you are working on a skill movement and you remain calm, you will do much better.  But if you have a light barbell and you're just moseying on through thrusters, you're unnecessarily wasting time and energy.  Trust me.

The four gentlemen of the evening were ready to go once I was able to get my grips on and we set off on our 1,000 meter row.  There was no mystery as to who would get off the rower first.  I'm not sure if Matt or Chris picked up the pace when Rachel yelled out "who's going to catch Cline?", but I already knew that was a futile effort.  He jumped off of his rower when I had about 80-90 meters to go.  I think my 1,000 meter split was somewhere in the neighborhood of 3:44, but I couldn't remember it exactly after the workout was over.  I was the second one to my barbell, but Chris and Matt were right behind me.

I distinctly remembered the thrusters being terrible the last time we did this because I underestimated the effect that the row has on your legs.  So I knew this time around that my legs weren't going to feel great as I began my thrusters.  But know what makes your legs feel worse?  Doing very slow thrusters!  As I finished my first 10 thrusters, I realized that there was no way I was going to make it through all 50 reps without breaking.  In fact, I wasn't going to make it to 25 like last time.  So after 18 reps, I put the barbell down to catch my breath and shake out my legs.  After a break, I did 12 more because 30 seemed like a convenient number to stop at.  While trying to figure out how I had botched this so badly, a thought popped into my head.  Maybe it would be better to break up the last 20 into two very fast sets of 10.  Couldn't be any worse than what I had done to this point.

For my next set, I rifled through the reps like I was doing air squats.  Did this cause me to lose my breath quickly?  Sure did.  But I had completed the 10 reps by the time my body requested mercy.  As I took my final break, Chris headed off to his pull-up bar.  I grabbed my barbell and started cranking through my final 10 reps as fast as I could.  If I was going to do 4 sets, I should have done 12-13 reps like this in each of those sets.  So dumb.  I finished my 50 thrusters right after Cline did and the two of us moved over to the rig.  The clock was on its way to hitting 8 minutes.

Finishing in 10 minutes was a longshot at this point, but I was hoping to get done by 10:30.  I faced away from the clock as I did my pull-ups two at a time.  Aimee had impressed upon me in a workout at the end of last year that I needed to get used to doing sets of two when I get tired on the pull-up bar instead of settling for fast singles.  I did a pretty solid job of doing that at the end of Jackie.  I did 3 sets of two before needing a break.  Then two sets of two reps and a break.  I followed that pattern three times in a row, bringing me up to 18 reps.  I was exhausted and didn't want to jump back up to that high bar.  But I felt it was important to keep moving, even if I couldn't manage a set of two, so I resorted to my friends, the fast singles, and got three more reps.  At 21, I felt I could get sets of two again, so I did two more sets, getting me to 25.  From there, I went back into that "just keep moving" mindset, finishing the workout with 5 fast singles.  I turned around to look at the clock.  Final time: 10:55.

Despite a 46 second PR, I was disappointed in this workout.  The thruster plan was completely dumb and I won't repeat that mistake when we do this again in May.  But the more disappointing part was probably how long it took me to do the pull-ups.  I did eleven sets of 2 this time around and it still took me over 3 minutes to finish 30 pull-ups.  Translation: my breaks were longer than they seemed.  Definitely need to work on that.

There was time left in class once we were done, so Rachel offered to help us with any skill work we wanted to practice.  I wanted to try handstand push-ups again and Rachel had some very good tips for me.  My abmat was too close to the wall.  My hands were pointing in the wrong direction.  I wasn't kicking hard enough in my kip.  And I needed to push my head through while kipping, like I was doing a push press.  Only 4 major things wrong with how I was doing them.  No wonder I haven't been even close to getting one!  The worst part about not getting handstand push-ups is that if you do half a push-up, you come crashing back down on your head.  After a while, I began feeling like a pogo stick.  Once I started feeling a little woozy, I decided to call it a night.

Wednesday preview: Overhead squats and box jumps?  Sounds like a great WOD for me.  Or maybe not.  Another kinda disappointing result makes me wonder whether the Open has already begun.