Pokey Mon

Workout date: 7/13/16

The Wednesday WOD was going to be my last Crossfit workout before the Brawl In The Burbs team event on Saturday.  I had planned on skipping both the WOD and Endurance on Thursday in favor of doing a leisurely 5K through Ardmore.  (Spoiler: That run was anything but leisurely as you will read in the next blog post.)  With that schedule in mind, I felt like the workout on Wednesday was one where I could crank up the intensity and take on the RX requirements assuming they were not way out of my league.  I looked up the WOD on Tuesday night and saw a workout that had the appearance of one that I should be good at.  Appearances can be deceiving.  This would be much worse than I expected.  Here's what was on tap:

40 calories on the assault bike

40 thrusters (115/75)

40 GHD sit-ups

My thoughts on why this would be a good workout for me:

• The assault bike is one of those weird things at the gym that I like more than the average person.  It is painful without a doubt, but it is a movement that you grind through.  I'm not that great at sprint WODs.  I'm not that great at WODs requiring a ton of cardio.  But a WOD where you have to put your head down and push through it?  That's my style.  The bonus today was that the assault bike was at the beginning of the workout, so I didn't have to worry about being exhausted before hopping on to the bike.
• Chris and I had recently done a partner WOD where the heavy thrusters weighed in at 125 pounds.  It was painful, but I could get through them.  Now I was going to be using 10 pounds less.  40 was a lot of reps, but Coach Keithie told us it would be good if we managed 5 reps per set.  Going from 8 reps at 125 to 5 reps at 115?  Seemed reasonable enough to me.
• The GHD sit-ups were the flip side of the assault bike.  I knew I could do big sets of these while fresh, but today I was almost certainly going to be exhausted when I reached this part of the workout.  Could I manage four sets of 10 reps in that state?  I thought I could.

It all seems so easy when your heart isn't beating a million times a minute.  Once the workout begins, your mind instantly realizes the error of it's ways.  115 pounds for the thrusters?  Good call, moron!

There were 15 of us in the 6:30 class and with only 5 assault bikes at our disposal, we needed to form groups of three to do this workout.  Because we would be sharing an assault bike and a GHD, Keithie told us we should try and form groups based on height, that way we wouldn't need to adjust those machines in the middle of the workout.  I partnered up with Cline and Neil.  Keithie also mentioned that if members of a group were using the same thruster weight, they should just share a barbell as it wasn't ideal to have 15 different barbells laying around in the middle of the gym.  Cline made the wise decision to use 95 pounds, while Neil and I went after the RX weight of 115 pounds.  There would be a 4 minute stagger at the start between members of the group, so I suggested that Cline go second, that way if Neil or I struggled during the thrusters, we would have 8 minutes separating us from the person sharing our barbell rather than 4.  I ended up going first, Cline went second, and Neil went third.  You have probably read a bunch of times on this blog how I do not like going first, but I was (stupidly) feeling confident about how I would perform during this WOD.

The only other issue was sharing a GHD.  It seemed clear that we'd be spending most of our time doing thrusters, so initially I wasn't all that concerned about a hang up at the GHD, but I became a little worried at the last minute when I discovered that Cline likes his GHD three notches further out than I like mine.  (Apparently I never realized that Cline has much longer legs than me.  Who knew?)  That was going to be an awkward transition, but I told myself to remember to adjust the GHD for Cline when I got done.

The first wave got underway and I felt comfortable as I pushed along on the assault bike.  I had both my arms and my legs moving at a solid pace.  A glance up at the clock let me know I'd be well under 4 minutes for this first part of the workout, ensuring that I wouldn't be holding up the other members of my group (at least not yet).  I had just passed 30 calories when Keithie walked by my bike.  He encouraged me to push, telling me I was almost done, so I picked up the pace until I reached 40 calories.  I was the first one off the bike.  Having finished 40 calories in less than 3 minutes, I began to daydream about putting up a very strong time for this workout.

Those thoughts came screeching to a halt when I got to my barbell.  The barbell was directly in front of the fan in the back of the gym, which should have been a big benefit to me.  It goes without saying that it was ridiculously hot in the gym because it has been that way almost every day for the last few months.  As I did my first set of 5 thrusters, I realized two things:

1. The assault bike had done more of a number on my legs than I had realized
2. I needed at least three fans to help me deal with the heat

After taking a break, I got into my second set and was able to get 5 more reps.  But I knew then and there that I couldn't manage sets of five reps any longer.  It was sets of three and four (if I was lucky) the rest of the way.  I needed long breaks to catch my breath as I slowly moved through my smaller sets of thrusters.  I also wasted energy chasing my barbell as it had suddenly developed a fan allergy.    It kept bouncing away from the fan each time I dropped it.  I had to drag it back over in front of the fan over and over again.  Keithie saw me do this and didn't understand what I was doing until he looked up and saw where the fan was positioned.

As I reached the mid-twenties in my thruster count, I began to worry about the rest of my group.  My reps were slow, my breaks were long, and there was real reason to believe that Cline was going to catch me on the GHD.  In fact, there was reason to believe that Neil might catch me on the barbell, despite the fact that we had planned things out so that scenario wouldn't come to pass.  Neil came over just after 7 minutes had passed on the clock to check on my progress.  He decided it was best to wait another minute and start on the assault bike at 9 minutes rather than at 8 minutes because I was struggling so much with my thrusters.  That was probably a wise move because I didn't finish my thrusters until about the 11 minute mark.  I'm guessing Neil finished his 40 calories on the assault bike in about 3 minutes, so it would have been close if he had not built in an extra minute of cushion.

I was a sweaty, sweaty mess as I trudged over to the GHD.  I don't recall how I split up the 40 reps there, but I do know that my sets were smaller than I planned them to be.  It's possible I got 10 reps in that first set, but beyond that, all my sets contained single-digit reps.  As I took yet another break, Cline came up to me and asked me to sub out on the GHD.  I crawled off and let him have the GHD.  It was only fair.  I shouldn't have been holding up anyone in my group, but I had misjudged how tough this workout would be.  There was a free GHD up in front of me and I got 3 reps in before Cline told me I could have the original GHD back.  It was still set up for my body rather than his and I imagine he had a hard time completing reps that way.  I got on and pushed through my remaining 8 reps.  Final time: 15:15.

When I got off the GHD, I helped Cline adjust it so that he could get through his reps.  I wasn't happy that I had adversely affected his workout.  There was still a chance that Cline would be blocking Neil because of how slow I had gone.  (That didn't happen, but it could have.)  I was frustrated by how much the heat had kicked my ass again.  It was a problem that didn't seem to have a solution.  And with the Brawl on the horizon, I got the feeling that this workout was simply foreshadowing for how I'd mess up things for my teammates on Saturday.

Thursday preview: A workout that isn't Crossfit.  A workout that doesn't take place inside the confines of KOP.  A workout that begins at 7:30pm.  And somehow the heat is even more debilitating than it has been all-summer long.  Blech.