Bearing Down

Workout date: 7/20/16

It's been awhile since I've written a blog post.  I wish I had more time to write, but this summer has been incredibly busy for me.  At least towards the beginning of the summer I wasn't traveling.  That changed two weeks ago.  I was in Vegas for the better part of a week for a big handicapping tournament.  After flying home, I didn't have much time before I needed to meet up with some of my KOP friends at Rachel's birthday dinner.  The next day I was headed to Saratoga for another handicapping tournament.  That might sound like a lot of handicapping packed into a short time frame, but the Vegas tournament was actually my first live tournament of the year and I was making up for lost time.  I had to skip the live tournaments I wanted to attend earlier in the year due to weddings or other events that took precedence on my calendar.  Another four days passed before I came home again, a day in advance of another friend's birthday party.  How's my upcoming schedule look?  Later in the week, I have to return to upstate NY for a fantasy football draft.  Then two days later, I'll be off to Vietnam for my 10 year anniversary trip with Jenn, meaning I'll be out of town for almost another two weeks.  It's been a crazy month.

So there's a lot to cover on this blog.  There were a bunch of workouts that I haven't written about yet, but I think I remember the details from them fairly well (we shall see!).  The first of which was a workout that took place on a Wednesday night during the 7:30 class.  It was one that I was excited about because it was one of those rare things that I happen to be good at in the gym.  The WOD was based on the Bear Complex.  The typical Bear Complex requires you to do a power clean, a front squat, a push press, a back squat, and another push press.  Then once you're done with that, repeat that same process six more times before putting the barbell down.  It's a little surprising that I am good at the Bear Complex since it eventually becomes a test of your grip strength, but it also is a test of how well you cycle a barbell and I tend to do that well.

Here's how the Bear Complex was incorporated into the WOD:

5 Bear Complex* (115/75)
500 meter row
4 Bear Complex
400 meter row
3 Bear Complex
300 meter row
2 Bear Complex
200 meter row
1 Bear Complex
100 meter row

*Each Bear Complex in this workout would be 1 round of the typical complex rather than the full 7 round monstrosity.

If you add all that up, that comes to 15 rounds of the Bear Complex (or just over 2 cycles of the typical Bear Complex) and 1,500 meters of rowing.  That didn't sound too awful.  I was fairly certain that I had done the full Bear Complex with 135 pounds on the barbell, so 115 sounded moderate for this workout.  I fully anticipated some extremely fast times on the blog from folks who did the workout earlier in the day.

Except that really wasn't the case.  I thought some of the best times in the gym would be around 9 minutes, but only Keithie had broken 10 minutes with a time of 9:42.  (To be fair, some of the bigger guys in the gym used 135 to do the workout.)  Still, there were many more times in the 11-12 minute range than I expected.  Maybe this was another case of me overestimating how quickly I could do a workout that looked good to me.  I tend to do that a lot with WODs that include rowing as I don't take into account how much the row can take out of you.

There were only 5 of us in Coach Jenna's class, but the gym was full as the Bridgeport Barbell Club was training in anticipation for their meet that was only a few weeks away.  Among those in attendance were Mike Sim. and Pam.  As we were warming up, I got to chat with Mike and he told me to use 135 for the workout.  He had taken class earlier and been urged to do just that.  I was already starting to have thoughts that I was underestimating how tough 115 would be, so I declined the opportunity to try and match the weight Mike used.  Jenna went over the movements in the Bear Complex and highlighted that we could save time if we went from the first push press directly into the back squat without stopping.  With more weight on the barbell, I would probably need to pause after the push press, but since 115 seemed manageable to me, I planned on employing Jenna's advice.

Jenna gave the five of us (myself, Brian, Sue, Chris D, and Nooshi) a few minutes to get ready and as I went to throw on my lifting shoes, I had a conversation with Christine about what my time should be:

Christine: You gonna keep it under 12 minutes, Dave?
Me: I'm hoping to keep it under 10!

That really was my goal despite the times put up earlier in the day.  The way I figured it, 1,500 meters of rowing would take about 6 minutes.  Could I handle the 15 rounds of Bear Complex in 4 minutes? We were about to see...

Typically I'd be aware of how my classmates were doing during the workout and if someone was going faster than me, I'd try to use that as motivation for pushing even harder.  That wasn't gonna work for this WOD.  I needed to go as hard as I could early and just hope to have enough left in the tank to reach the finish line.  Jenna started the clock and I began ripping through the Bear Complexes.  The barbell felt pretty light so I moved through each segment of the complex quickly before tapping the ground and starting the process all over again.  How fast did I go in that first round of 5 complexes?  Pam later told me that I finished the first round in 31 seconds.  I told myself to go as fast as I could and it's hard to imagine I could go any faster than that.  I jumped on my rower and made sure I kept my 500 meter split under two minutes the entire way.  I had finished one-third of the work and the clock hadn't reached 2:30 yet.  10 minutes was definitely in play.

When I got back to the barbell, I discovered how the row would take its toll on me during this workout.  In other WODs, I've done the row and then felt the impact it had on my legs as I would struggle in other leg-intensive movements.  In this workout, the row impacted my arms more than my legs.  Part of that might have been bad technique on the row.  I might not have used my legs as much as I should have because I was trying to move fast.  But when I got back to the barbell, I noticed that the power clean was much tougher during the second set of complexes.  I thought the squats would become more difficult, but the power cleans were the element of the complex where I began to feel the most pain.  I knew that I wasn't quite as fast during this second round, but I never stopped at any point as I tried to get back to my rower ASAP.  As I finished off the fourth complex, Jenna came over to talk to me.

This was the most controversial part of the WOD (as you'll see later on).  Jenna told me that I needed to make sure that I wasn't doing a thruster at the beginning of each round of the complex.  The front squat and the push press needed to be two distinct movements with a pause in between.  At the time, I was more concerned about staying under 10 minutes, so I just heeded the warning I was given about making sure there was a pause in between those two movements the rest of the way.  In fact, I paused between the first push press and the back squat during the last three rounds because it didn't make sense to me that I could link those two movements.  Why would I be allowed to link the push press and the back squat if I couldn't link the push press and the front squat?  Better to be careful and pause at every point along the way from here on out.

As expected, the 400 meter row was worse than the initial row because I was much more tired and sweaty than I was when I did the initial row.  I could not keep the 500 meter pace under two minutes, so I was losing that 6 minute pace for 1,500 meters already.  I was pretty sure I'd need to make it up later on.

The middle round was definitely the gut check in this workout.  As mentioned, I paused at every point along the way of the complexes, so those were slower.  Each of the power cleans felt like they were done using 155 rather than 115.  I got through the three rounds and returned to the rower, but it was slow going there as well.  Once again, I couldn't keep the 500 meter pace under two minutes.  When I got off the rower, I snuck a peek at the clock and it was beyond 7 minutes.  80 percent of the way done, but my slower pace meant that I might fall short of my goal of staying under 10 minutes.

The next two complexes were probably at about the same speed I used during my previous round, but I was a little bit quicker on the 200 meter row.  I knew that the last complex in the final round would only take 10 seconds or so and the final 100 meters would be a sprint, so I had to keep a semi-decent pace on the 200 meter row.  As I finished that up, I looked at the clock again and saw 9:10.  I needed to move if I was going to stay under 10 minutes.  There couldn't be any delay in starting that final complex and there wasn't.  As soon as I was done with the final push press, I dropped the barbell and got into the rower.  The clock was at 9:30.  I began pulling as hard as I could and immediately reached back in towards the flywheel after every stroke.  I was struggling to breathe, but I told myself that I didn't need to breathe for 100 meters.  I could breathe after that.  One big pull followed another until I hit 100 meters.  Final time: 9:54.

This was one of those workouts where I just collapsed to the side of my rower when it was done.  I was very happy about my time.  I'm guessing that my good mood helped me recover quicker than normal because after about a minute of laying there, I told myself to get up and root on my classmates.  Chris didn't need any encouragement as he was done already.  Wasn't sure whether he beat me, but he was still laying by his rower when I began to walk over to the others.  One by one, Sue, Brian, and Nooshi completed the workout.

Jenna asked us for our scores and that's when my excitement went away a little bit.  She asked for my time.  I gave it to her and she wrote it down.  Then she asked "RX?" and I said yes.  She paused for a few seconds as if she didn't know what to write next to my time.  The same thing had happened not too long ago when Giulz asked about my time for a cash out we had done.  In both cases, I got the impression that the coach didn't think I had done the standards correctly and didn't want to write RX next to my name.  In this instance, I could even point out what the issue was as Jenna had made the comment to me mid-workout about not doing a thruster in the middle of the complex.  So should that have counted?  I don't know.  My preference would be that the coach simply write ROM if they don't think I did the RX standards properly.

A couple extra points about this thruster issue:

1. Chris said Jenna had come up to him about the same issue when he finished his round of 4 Bear Complexes, so he began pausing like I had the rest of the way
2. A few days later, another athlete told me that a different coach had encouraged them to do thrusters during the Bear Complex as a way of moving more efficiently (much the same way we were told to connect the push press and back squat)
3. When we do thrusters in a WOD, they are described as the combination of a front squat and a push press, so I'm not sure why they would not be acceptable in this workout

So why am I going on and on about this minor issue?  Because it was kind of a bummer to reach my goal and then feel like it was tainted afterwards.  I certainly wasn't trying to cheat the system, but if ROM should have been written next to my time instead of RX, then so be it.

Later on that night, Cline posted a comment to our KOP Facebook page noting how well Chris and I had done on this workout (Chris finished in 10:11) and that cheered me up again.  Whether I had met RX standards or not, I crushed this workout and that is something I do not get to say very often.

Thursday preview: The return of the dreaded KB EMOM.  Even the best athletes end up with injuries after this one.  So you know this doesn't go well for a barely mediocre specimen like myself.