At A Certain Point, You Just Stop Karen

Workout date: 4/12/16

Warning: This may be the most boring blog post I have ever written.  Bold statement, I know.  So many contenders for the prize.  Alas, the WOD I am going to write about is basically the Crossfit equivalent of this:

The evil banshee that emits that sound is named Karen and she will be making return appearances in both July and October because she simply won't die.  I mean, because she is one of this year's benchmark workouts.  I may or may not already be coming up with excuses for skipping those days at the gym.

What is Karen?  Karen is simple in design, painful to the body, and torturous to the soul.  It is 150 wall balls for time.  There are no other movements involved.  Just repeatedly throwing a medicine ball at a wall over and over again, even though your body has long since told you that it is not interested in doing this anymore.  It is physically demanding, but at its roots, it is a test of your mental strength.  And once again I was found lacking.

Two bits of good information before I try to recap doing 150 wall balls for time:

1. This was my first time doing Karen, so cross off one more workout I've never done RX from the list.
2. Our warmup involved basketball!  The only time I get to pretend I'm playing basketball in the gym is when we do side shuffles and I start galloping back and forth like a crazed hyena.  This warmup involved a ball and a basket.  (For basketball?  You don't say!)  And there were some pseudo-chest passes involved as well.

There was no Coach Rachel for Dudes After Dark, so Coach Steph stepped in for her.  And boy did Coach Rachel miss out because it was all dudes!  Mike R, Nate, Matt E, Cline, Chris D, and I made up the sextet in Tuesday's 7:30 class.  For the warmup, we lined up into two teams of three facing one another.  Mike, Nate, and Matt were the "other team", while Cline and Chris joined me on the team that matters.  We each had an adversary on the other team who we would be competing against.  Mike and Cline were the 1's, Nate and I were the 2's, Matt and Chris were the 3's.  Steph would call out an exercise for us to do, then at some point yell out a number.  So for round one, she yelled out "2!" and Nate and I ran to the front of the gym where we each had a medicine ball awaiting us.  Once we grabbed the ball, we had to run to our teammates and trade two chest passes with each of them (although this part of the game became more like volleyball after a while, as the teammates began hitting the ball back to the player more than passing it to him).  Once you had completed all of the chest passes, you had to take a shot from behind an abmat and into an upside-down 24" box.  First person to make it scores a point for their team.

Brag time: We each went three times and I scored 3 points for my team.  Cline and Chris also represented, scoring twice for us.  In the end, it was a 7-2 rout for our squad.  Who's got next?

Unfortunately Karen had next.  Steph put us through some warmups before having me demo good wall ball shots and bad wall ball shots.  Her one critique of my "good" wall balls?  That I was shooting it like a basketball.  (Hmmm...I wonder why that was.)  It was a valid criticism though and if I tried to do 150 wall balls that way, I wouldn't be able to use my right arm for the next week.  So I made sure I was doing more of a chest pass to the 10' mark.

The plan was to try and do sets of 30 reps for as long as possible and to adjust as I grew tired.  I had done 50 in a row before and on Sunday I did 25 consecutive wall balls at the beginning of the "25 To Life" WOD.  30 seemed like a number that would be tough but feasible, at least early on.

Boy was I wrong.  We got started and I tried to stay focused on what I was doing.  But soon you hear other people's wall balls dropping and you start thinking "hey, I'm doing well" or "I am doing too many on this initial set".  Whatever the case may be, I dropped the ball after 25 reps as pushing to 30 felt like unnecessary strain in a workout that was more of a grind than anything.  Unfortunately, my resolve turned to mush during the next set.  I was trying not to take a long break, but when I got going again, the reps felt awful.  I decided that it was best to do sets of 10 reps.  This was a terrible idea, but it provided lots of opportunities for breaks along the way.  I did seven sets of 10 to get to 95 reps before making the brave decision to do 11 reps for the next 5 sets, bringing me to a total of 150.  And was I able to do 11 in each set?  Yup.  Should I have been able to do 12-15 per set when I wimped out and decided to do only 10 at a time?  Yup.  I didn't push myself the way I should have on this workout.  As I got to my last few sets, Chris finished his 150 reps.  I couldn't see Cline, but he was cheering me on at the end, so I knew he was done.  I thought Matt was ahead of me, but as I went to pick up my ball for my last set, he grabbed his too.  He had at least one more set to go.  As I kept tossing the ball up to the 10' mark, Matt kept tossing his.  Maybe I was ahead of him?  Nope.  As I caught my 149th rep, Matt threw his ball at the wall one last time and let it drop as he sat down on the floor.  I was one rep and one second behind him.  Final time: 10:41.

None of us were eager to do anything else afterwards, but there was still 20 minutes left in class.  Steph suggested that we do a 10 minute tabata (with 1 minute intervals) where we alternated each minute between two movements that we wanted to work on.  I couldn't think of anything that I wanted to work on.  My shoulders were pretty smoked.  I didn't want to use my legs very much as I had just done 150 squats and I'd be doing my 6x6 front squat workout early the next morning.  As she ran through ideas for us, she mentioned planks.  Planks have never sounded so good to me.  They wouldn't be pleasant, but they'd put more emphasis on my core than anything else and that was the one area of my body that I was willing to work some more.  For my other movement, I decided on the Assault Bike, as I could be fairly lazy on it and the breeze generated from the wheel would cool me down.  (Yes, I totally wimped out on this tabata.)

As we went through these 10 minutes, I felt like I should switch up the plank portion a bit, so during my five rounds, I went high plank, low plank, hand-release push-ups (I did a little bit of work), high plank, and then low plank again.  On the Assault Bike, I pedaled pretty slowly early on, but towards the end of round three, I picked up the pace.  For the last two rounds, I put in considerable effort.  I did 38 calories in total on the bike, along with 13 hand-release push-ups when I wasn't planking.

Wednesday preview: Not sure how good of an idea it is to do 6x6 front squat day less than 12 hours after Karen, but there's only one way to find out!  Plus a WOD containing power snatches, toes-to-bar, running, rest, and a time cap.  Oh yeah, I'm getting myself a time cap.