Hey Jealousy

Workout date: 3/11/16

Despite resting for most of last week, it still turned out to be one of the worst all-around weeks in recent memory.  I'm never a happy camper when I'm sick or injured.  After 5 nights of very little sleep due to a tender mid-section (both the front and back of me), I finally gave in and saw my doctor.  Part of the reason I hate going to the doctor is that I always get the same response back when I see the doctor.  When I lived in the city, my doctor would look at me like I was wasting her time as she informed me that she "didn't see anything wrong with me".  When I moved to the suburbs, my first doctor would always order up a batch of tests to figure out was wrong.

Me: Doc, I'm pretty sure I sprained my ankle.  
Doctor: I'm gonna need you to give a urine sample just to be sure.

After tiring of that, I decided to ask a nurse at the Paoli Hospital if she could recommend a primary care doctor.  She gave me the name of one at the hospital and I began to see him.  The few times I've visited have all gone the same way.  He enters the room with his Macbook in hand.  He asks what's wrong and I give him my symptoms.  He types them into his Macbook.  I'm assuming the program he is using is the doctor's equivalent of the Magic 8-ball, but he could be searching WebMD for all I know.  And then I get an unhelpful answer.  On this visit, I explained that because my mid-section was tender and because I roll around when I sleep, I kept waking myself up and I was exhausted.  After questions about the location and severity of the pain as well as how it was affecting me in general, the good doctor declared "it could be anything", before prescribing me some Vicodin (don't knock it till you've tried it) and sending me downstairs for blood work and a urine sample.  The next day I called to see what the extraction of all of my bodily fluids had determined, only to hear that "all the tests came back normal".  Splendid.  Thus ends the long rambling explanation of why I hate going to the doctor.

That was the story of my health last week.  Having a tougher go of it was my dog.  Indy will be 14 in May and she's reached the point in her life where she has good days and bad days.  She had more bad days than good last week, which was tough on her caretaker.  Jenn was on the other side of the world for the last week and a half, so Indy was my main companion during that time.  It was heartbreaking seeing her cough throughout the day.  There were a couple of days where she refused to eat.  I'm sure if I brought her to my doctor, he'd say everything was normal, but clearly her advanced age is affecting her.

There were other things that piled on to this bad week, but what made things harder for me was not having a release.  The gym has become the place that I go to in order to release the stresses in my life, only I couldn't do it last week because I was trying to "be good" so that I would feel better.  I knew that I'd be going on Friday no matter what because the gym would be doing Open workout 16.3.  And I knew there was a strong chance that I'd be doing the workout in its scaled form.  The 3rd week was the point last year where Dave Castro started bringing out the advanced movements like ring muscle-ups.  The next week had handstand push-ups.  Since the Open's primary purpose was now weeding out who should go to Regionals, there was virtually no chance those movements were going away (unless handstand push-ups were being replaced by handstand walks).  If anything, chances were good that more advanced movements would be added this year.  I hoped that pistols would be one of those advanced movements, as it is one of the rare things that I excel at in the gym.  But if that happened, I might actually enjoy participating in the Open.  Instead, I much prefer to cheerlead as my results leave a lot to be desired.

On Thursday night, Castro announced 16.3 from Italy.  Still wondering where all of that money in Open fees goes?  At least if you went through this last year, you're not surprised by anything HQ does.  (Note: One of the most amusing things for me to read this week was all of the comments on games.crossfit.com where people who were just doing the Open for the first time this year expressed outrage about the scoring and the programming.  Surprise!  You're a year late to the party!)  Castro went through one round of the workout before needing an oxygen tank to recover.  Once he had regained the ability to speak, he outlined the workout in words.

Open Workout 16.3
7 minute AMRAP
10 power snatches (75/55)
3 bar muscle-ups

Hey, there's a new advanced movement!  I thought that we might be done with gymnastic movements on the bar, but the only possible one remaining reared its ugly head in 16.3.  I did not have bar muscle-ups, but I've been practicing trying to get one in conjunction with my chest-to-bar pull-up practice.  I had been told that if you can get your hips to the bar, you should easily be able to get a bar muscle-up.  I had gotten the bottom of my rib cage to the bar several times, which meant I should be close to getting one.  I added "getting 1 bar muscle-up" to my top 10 goals for 2016, although I put it at #10 because it seemed the most unlikely of the 10 goals that I had come up with.

I watched the Open announcement, then I watched Sarah W and Steph M do the workout at our gym. Then I went home and watched the video giving tips for getting your first bar muscle-up.  Watched it a few times actually.  Even went on YouTube and watched various other videos that would help me scratch goal #10 off my list.  I had taken mental note of all the things I would need to do to be successful in 16.3.  And naturally, I went to the gym on Friday and failed miserably.

If the week leading up to Friday was tough, Friday night was the shitty icing on the stale cake.  Probably because I not only felt like crap for failing, but because I felt even worse about how jealous I was of all the people who got their first bar muscle-up.  12 people managed to solve the mystery of the bar muscle-up on Friday.  Some of them have practiced a lot and finally broke through.  For others, everything just clicked and they figured it out.  It was great to hear the KOP crowd go nuts time and time again as someone got their first bar muscle-up.  The whiteboard began to fill with names of folks who had taken on one of the tougher movements in Crossfit and conquered it.  It was a night where the gym was filled with lots of smiling faces.

But that made the pill that much tougher to swallow when I didn't come close to getting one.  The time and practice I had put into getting a bar muscle-up had not paid off.  In fact, the theme of time and practice not paying off has become all too common for me recently.  During my 7 minutes of 16.3, I did my 10 snatches in about 30 seconds, then spent six and a half minutes doing the movement about as incorrectly as you could do it.  At the start, I was told that I was too vertical.  By the end, I was told that I was too horizontal.  It is a rare athlete that can fail at both extremes within a 7 minute workout, but I am that athlete.  Apparently the only thing more horizontal than my form during 16.3 is my learning curve.  16.3 also proved more than ever how much I do not belong at Competitors Class.  We have a Facebook IM group for Competitors Class and before 16.3, there were 6 members who had never gotten a bar muscle-up before.  Of those six, 5 got their first bar muscle-ups during 16.3.  In fact, they all got between 3 and 10 reps during this workout.  You know who the sixth person is.

As unpleasant an experience as 16.3 was, at least I can be comforted by the fact that there are only two workouts remaining in the Open.  16.4 will either require scaling or it will be another silly workout like this one where nearly everyone gets the same score (in this case, 10 RX) if they don't have the advanced movement that is truly being tested.  16.5 will be very tough, although the last two years it has been about finishing a painful thruster-heavy workout rather than testing advanced movements.  My goal of finishing in the top 35 in the gym has pretty much gone out the window, but if I luck out and one of these two final workouts is something I can actually do, then I might be able to make a run at it.

Monday preview: After taking the weekend off to try to get back to 100%, the Monday WOD features lots and lots of double unders, air squats, and push presses.  Plus, I'll be starting a new front squat program.