Going For The Juggler

Workout date: 4/6/16

The Wednesday routine has become similar to what my Saturday routine used to be.  I get up earlier than my body would like, stand in the shower trying to wake up, then head over to the gym late for the class I signed up for.  This week I was later than I had been on my initial trip to early morning Open Strength, arriving close to 6:45.  It didn't matter though.  The scheduling of the 6:00am WOD makes it tricky to do strength work until that class is finished.  The Wednesday WOD involved using the pull-up rig, so I couldn't grab a rack to do front squats until the class was over.  I could have slept for 15 more minutes!  Rookie mistake on my part.

With the 6:00am class done, I set up my rack and got ready to do my 6x5 front squat set with 215 pounds.  We're getting close to the most serious part of the program as Jim C has told me previously that the toughest days are the 6x6 and 5x5 sessions.  6x6 will be next week and 5x5 the week after that.  6x5 day would be my last test to see how well I could handle this much volume.  It would also be my last chance to work on my technique before running through that gauntlet.  I am happy to report that it all went well.  215 pounds doesn't feel light, but I have reached the point where I feel comfortable front squatting that weight.  And since I felt comfortable with it, I decided to really test my speed during these sets.  For each of the 6 sets, I would do two very quick reps, then pause for a second to get a quick breath.  I'd do the same thing before reps four and five.  But there was no stopping and resting.  Coach Clay was watching and commented that I had really good speed during my sets.  Awesome!  Exactly what I was going for.  And even though I had incorporated speed into the sets, I wasn't sacrificing form as I stayed in my heels during the lifts.

Since I didn't start lifting until 7am and because I took appropriate rest between sets, I decided not to do anything else during Open Strength.  After all, I knew I'd be getting more work done later that evening when I did the WOD.  What I was not expecting was to see Clay again.  Clay was substituting for Jenna at the 7:30 class and he'd be coaching three actuaries (me, Luis, and Mike R) and Nicole.  The large percentage of actuaries in class would actually be helpful in having the WOD run smoothly due to the strange rule associated with it.  I give you "The Juggler":

"The Juggler"
75 overhead squats (115/75)
50 pass throughs (push-up on paralettes, pass feet through to the front of your body, dip on paralettes, pass feet back through behind your body)
25 knees-to-elbows
Rule: You must not complete the entirety of one exercise without completing a portion of the other two exercises.

Usually counting reps in WODs is fairly easy because you're simply counting until you finish the first part of the workout, then you begin counting for the second part, and so on.  With this WOD, you needed to keep track of where you were for three different movements.  That meant everyone was grabbing a white board and writing down reps as we went along.  I joked with Luis and Mike about having the actuaries keep track of everything in their heads, but they weren't on board.  Based on the way I was going to do this workout, I felt like I could do this workout without a white board, but I grabbed one anyway just to be safe.

It has been a while since I completely botched the planning of a workout, so maybe I was due with this one.  Here was my thought process before the workout began.  I suck at pass throughs and have done a workout where I got so exhausted that I could barely do one at a time.  So I needed to kill those off while I was fresh.  Knees-to-elbows was another movement that tended to be harder than it looked and could go away quickly, so that was priority number two.  And I love overhead squats, so I'd save the vast majority of those for the end.  As for scaling, I thought I could handle 115 for the overheads, but with the amount of fatigue I was expecting from the other two movements, I dialed it back to 95 pounds.  I also suspected that as I got tired, my feet would scrape the floor as I brought them backwards at the end of each pass through, so I placed 15 pound plates underneath the paralettes to boost me a couple inches higher.

Clay had told us that he wanted to see us string reps together, so my plan was to spend most of the workout doing sets of 5 pass throughs and then 3 knees-to-elbows.  When those were nearly complete, I'd start incorporating the overhead squats so I did not violate the rule associated with the WOD.  I would do a set of 5 pass throughs, a set of 3 knees-to-elbows, another set of 5 pass throughs, and another set of 3 knees-to-elbows before marking my reps on my white board.  The set of 5 pass throughs was more like a series where I went 2-2-1 as I needed to shake out my arms a couple of times mid-set.  I stuck with my pattern of alternating between pass throughs and knees-to-elbows until I reached 35 pass throughs and 21 knees-to-elbows.  Hadn't even looked at my barbell yet.  I planned on breaking up the last 4 knees-to-elbows into two sets of 2 so that I had no singles.  I did 5 more pass throughs (running total: 40) and 2 knees-to-elbows (running total: 23) before finally taking a bite out of the overhead squats.  I began with a set of 10 there, confident that I could chip away at the total of 75 reps in large chunks.

From there, I headed back to the pass throughs and did 4 reps.  I decided to end with 4-3-3 on the pass throughs so that I could get an extra break in for the overhead squats.  Having done some overhead squats, I could now finish off the knees-to-elbows, so I did the last two reps there.  One less thing to keep track of.  I held on for 12 reps of overhead squats before doing 3 more pass throughs.  The next set of overhead squats was 11 reps and then I happily finished off the last 3 pass throughs.  Just 42 overhead squats and I was done with this workout.

This is the point where I should mention that everyone else was done.  Some of them had been done for a while.  Luis finished at around the 15 minute mark.  Nicole was done in just under 19 minutes.  Mike wrapped up his workout at around 22 minutes.  The clock was still ticking for me.  And I was pretty certain that I had 4 sets to go.  I got through 12 reps in my next set, leaving me a nice even 30 reps from the finish line.  From there I could get 3 sets of 10.  But as is usually the case with me, I needed some rest between sets.  Part of it was getting my breathing under control.  Part of it was not realizing how sore my legs were going to be from front squatting in the morning and then doing a ton of overheads later that night.  But one by one, I did the three sets of 10 overhead squats.  Final time: 26:31.

I would have done this workout a lot differently in retrospect.  For starters, the knees-to-elbows were easier than I thought they would be.  It's not like I could have knocked out sets of 10, but sets of five were definitely possible.  And because they weren't as hard as I predicted, I could have thrown in sets of overhead squats earlier on so I wasn't stuck doing a ton of those at the end.  I think I handled the pass throughs the right way, but my mix of overhead squats and knees-to-elbows could have used some tweaking.  That would have trimmed a good bit off of my final time.  That being said, I won't be sad if I never have to do this workout again.

Thursday preview: Endurance is back!  Although it has a decidedly Crossfit-like feel to it.  Special appearances by Coach Aimee, Coach Gordy, and Coach Jill.