Spatial Disorientation

Workout date: 4/5/16

On Tuesday morning I was taking a shower and had Pandora playing from my cell phone.  I had clicked on the Linkin Park station, but was surprised by one of the songs that Pandora had chosen for me based on my interest in that band.  The song?  American Pie by Don McLean.  Not exactly a song that I would associate as being in the same genre as Linkin Park, but apparently Pandora's algorithm for choosing songs knows something that I don't.

After I got out of the shower and got dressed, I started doing some research online.  I have this tendency to watch TV shows or movies and, right in the middle, get the urge to look up more information about someone who appeared on screen.  Or perhaps an event was mentioned and suddenly I want to know more about it.  For example, I'll watch Black Sails and need to know whether a character was real or is fictitious.  And if they were real, I need to know how their real story compares to how they are portrayed in the show.  I know, I have issues.

Hearing American Pie had the same effect.  I knew the premise behind the song, that it was reminiscing about the day that Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper tragically died in a plane crash in the late 50s.  But I couldn't remember the circumstances behind the crash.  (It's been a long time since I watched La Bamba.)  The three pop stars had hired a private plane because the heater in the bus they were touring in kept breaking down and several members of the tour they were on had become sick.  The plane could carry three passengers.  Holly had arranged for the plane, so he got a seat.  The Big Bopper asked Waylon Jennings for his seat due to how sick he was.  Ritchie Valens won a coin toss for the last seat.  The pilot was a 21 year old who was only qualified to fly under visual flight rules, meaning he had to be able to see where he was going.  He wasn't qualified to fly using only instruments as he would need to do on that cloudy winter's evening.

Why am I writing about music history instead of Crossfit?  Patience, I'm almost there.  After an investigation of the tragedy, the cause of the crash was determined to be spatial disorientation.  It is a phenomenon where pilots lose the ability to determine whether they are ascending or descending once they lose visual cues.  (Note: Did reading this story scare the hell out of me?  Yes!  Especially when I later read that many private pilots today are not qualified to fly only using instruments.)  In this case, the pilot took off but quickly lost his bearings.  The plane traveled less than 6 miles before crashing.

On Tuesday evening, I came to the gym for Dudes After Dark.  We were doing the following WOD:

3 rounds:
50 calorie row
15 handstand push-ups
50 double unders

The part of the warmup where we spent the most time was on the handstand push-ups.  We went from  doing a kick up on to the wall to kicking up and coming down on to our heads.  And then we moved on to kicking up, coming down on to our heads, and attempting to kip back up to complete the handstand push-up.  I'm terrible with this movement.  I get upside down, drop my head to the abmat, and then get a series of directions that I mess up.  Let your butt down against the wall.  Bring your knees down towards your chest.  Shoot your legs straight up.  No matter how hard I try, I seem to mess it up.  And then the research I had done earlier in the day on something totally unrelated came rushing back to me.  Maybe this was my version of spatial disorientation.  I get upside down and suddenly I can't get my butt or my legs to go in the proper direction.  It was all making sense now!

(Note: It did make sense to me.  That doesn't mean it's not a terrible analogy, because it could be.  And spatial disorientation is probably not applicable to the fact that I suck at kipping handstand push-ups.  But it genuinely felt like a eureka moment.)

Spatial disorientation or not, I did have one thing going for me: I could do strict handstand push-ups with two abmats, so I didn't need the kip.  Did I have 45 of them?  That was a totally different question.  But I was going to try like hell to get all of them.  The alternative was doing seated push presses, which I kinda hate.  I grabbed 45 pound dumbbells (Matt E had suggested using these a while back) and placed them near the area where I'd be attempting my handstand push-ups.  I really did not want to resort to using those.

The class had five people in it with three dudes (Cline, Chris D, and myself) along with two dudettes (Erika R and Nicole).  Once again, there would be plenty of space at Dudes After Dark, one of the big reasons I love that class so much.  The workout looked like it would take about 20-25 minutes (unless you were a handstand push-up ninja).  My goal was to compress that range a bit and finish somewhere between 22 and 24 minutes.  To do that, I couldn't botch the double unders, something that was not a slam dunk.  Recent workouts with 100 or more double unders had seen me tire out badly and this workout was going to be hard enough without spending an absurd amount of time trying to jump rope.  If I could do sets of 10-15 reps at a time, I'd be pleased.

We got started and to no one's surprise, Cline was the first one done with the row.  Coach Rachel had tried to push the rest of us to try and stay with him on that first row, but I knew that was pointless.  My monitor showed that I was in the mid-thirties on my calories when Cline moved on to the seated push press.  I got off of my rower around the time that Chris did, with Erika and Nicole following soon after.  At the wall, I managed a set of 5 handstand push-ups before needing a break.  That worked for me.  If I could keep knocking out sets of 5 here, I might even be able to go lower than 22 minutes for the workout.  That seemed like a real possibility after I finished the round with two more sets of five reps.  I grabbed my rope and began doing double unders.  I had 4 legit sets (10-15 reps) and a small set (messed up after a couple reps) that got me to 50.  I finished round 1 in just over 6 minutes.

Now I knew that I wouldn't be able to keep up that pace for rounds two and three (especially my rowing pace), but even if I tailed off some, I felt like the 22-24 minute goal was still very feasible.  The second row was much worse than the first and took about a minute longer.  I got to the wall to try for 5 more reps, but had to come down after three.  That's okay, 5 sets of three reps should work.  I did two more sets of three reps before my arms really began to burn.  That wasn't good.  I still had 21 more handstand push-ups in this workout.  I was also starting to have issues planting my left hand as the area next to the wall was becoming soaked with my sweat.  Despite these problems, I got the final two sets of three reps and moved on to the double unders.  As I got there, I saw that Cline had moved on to his third round, Chris and Erika had a decent-sized head start on the jump rope, with only Nicole trailing me, although she was moving through her handstand push-ups faster than I was.  My second round of double unders did not start off as well as the first as I had some choppy sets on the way to 28 reps.  Then I magically remembered how to do double unders.  I strung the last 22 in a row, dropped my rope and headed back to the rower.  I forgot to check the clock, so I have no idea what the time was after round two.  Between 14 and 15 minutes is likely a safe guess.

As I began my final row, I closed my eyes and tried to get into a rhythm.  My arms were not providing me with a lot of power, but I was pulling as hard as I could.  When I finally opened my eyes, I saw a pathetic number on the monitor: 2.  Not sure how many pulls it took to get those 2 calories, but I'd be on the rower forever at this pace.  I got to 10 calories just before a minute.  5 minutes for this row?  That was awful.  The row eventually did improve.  I had 24 calories after two minutes and had 37 or 38 after three minutes.  I finished up my last 50 calories in under 4 minutes, but not by much.

Cline was done with his workout and Erika was finishing up.  Chris went to his wall and strung 15 handstand push-ups.  While that was going on, I managed to push through 4 reps to lead off my final round.  Not too shabby!  Except my arms were really starting to feel shot.  As I went to kick up on to the wall for my next set, I felt very unstable.  I did get three more reps in before coming down.  Nicole was now doing her handstand push-ups right beside me, slowly reeling me in.  I was wobbly again on my next set, with my left hand sliding in the sweat-soaked area next to my abmat.  I did find a way to get three more reps though.  Only 5 more to go.

On my next kick up, my left hand slid even more and I came back down immediately.  Cline, Erika, and Chris were all done at this point, so there was no reason not to move down to a dry area for my last 5 reps.  I set up shop in Erika's lane and kicked up without having my left hand slide.  Unfortunately, my arms were all but done.  I squeaked out two reps and then came down.  I repeated this for my next set, desperately scraping only the very top of the abmat with my dome before pressing out as quickly as I could to finish the rep.  With one rep left to go, I kicked up, but I couldn't support myself and had to come back down.  I was not doing one rep of the seated dumbbell push press.  I took some extra time, shook out my arms, and gave it another try.  This time it was a success.  Just 50 double unders remaining.

Nicole had passed me by now and was well into her double unders.  With my arms feeling weak, I began to worry how long these double unders were going to take me.  Was this going to be the point where I did 3 reps and then hit myself with the rope over and over again?  That seemed the most likely outcome.  But I began twirling the rope and somehow it didn't hit me for a while.  As in I got 27 reps done before it hit me.  Despite being exhausted, I had remembered to remain calm and double under success followed.  I needed a short break, but Cline was pushing me to finish as I didn't have that much left to go.  I tried to go right into the next set, but only got 2.  Another attempt gave me 5 reps.  I stopped for a break and shook out my arms.  I could do this, I simply needed to be calm.  I twirled the rope again and suddenly I was replicating the big set that began this final element of the workout.  After 16 straight reps, I was done.  Nicole had passed me and I missed my goal, but I still felt good about the workout.  Final time: 25:02.

The thing I was most proud of in this workout was getting through all of the handstand push-ups.  A lot of doubt crept into my mind during that third round, but I got through it and didn't have to rely on the seated dumbbell push press.  And obviously the double unders were a pleasant surprise at the end of the workout.

Wednesday preview: More early morning front squatting, along with a workout called "The Juggler" in the evening.  There is nothing that Crossfitters love more than a WOD with complicated counting rules.