While handicapping has always been my first love, I spent a good portion of my 20's playing tournament poker online with moderate success. Not only did I enjoy playing the smaller tournaments that I could afford, I was consumed with the coverage of the major tournaments that I didn't have the bankroll for, specifically the month-long World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. I would stay up and follow the updates online even though I knew I could simply wait a month or two and watch it all play out on ESPN. And even though I knew what would happen when that TV coverage eventually aired, I would devotedly watch every episode each week when it premiered.
I don't remember which year I was watching, but there was one episode that included a poignant interview with Doyle Brunson right after he had been knocked out of the Main Event, the tournament that every poker player hopes to win one day. Doyle has won it twice already and is considered one of the all-time greats. Even though he's done what most poker players only dream about, Doyle looked gutted upon his elimination. He slowly collected his things before shuffling away from the table to the area nearby where they were going to conduct the interview. The viewer doesn't hear the question that was asked, but you can infer that it is one of those ultra-dopey "how are you feeling right now" questions that athletes are always asked after they've lost a championship. (How do you think they feel???) Doyle managed to keep his composure and gave what I considered to be a pretty eloquent answer:
"The day you bust out from the Main Event is the worst day of the year"
I always liked that line, even though at the time I couldn't fully appreciate how Doyle and all of the other eliminated players felt when they no longer had a seat at the table. In January 2014, I finally experienced it. As a handicapper, the National Handicapping Championship (NHC) is our Main Event. And when I was eliminated from my first NHC, there was a certain emptiness that I felt. Like I had reached the end of my journey and walked away with nothing. I could go through the whole process of trying to qualify for the NHC again over the next 12 months, but in that moment when you realize that your dream will be delayed for at least another year, nothing seems less appealing than going back to the grind. I would experience that same disappointment again in both 2015 and 2016. And my reaction to all three eliminations was similar: I needed time to regroup before I started on the journey again. I needed a break before I could put my best foot forward.
I'm not sure if the King and Queen of Prussia competition became my Crossfit version of the NHC this year, but my performance there was almost as disheartening as falling short the last 3 Januaries. It was a dumb idea to come in just two days later to take on a brutal workout like Fight Gone Bad, but maybe I needed one more punch to the gut to drive home what I suspect I already knew: I needed a break from Crossfit. Would I return from that break and perform better than ever? Of course. I mean, it worked for Batman in The Dark Knight Rises. Why wouldn't it work for me?
(Note: Lest you think it is presumptuous of me to compare myself to Batman, I shall give you a second example: bears. Bears will hibernate for months and then return to their routine, even better at bear stuff than they were before. Or so I've been told.)
I hibernated for 5 weeks before finally returning to the gym on Monday. I spent the last two weeks of my sabbatical in Vietnam celebrating my 10 year anniversary with Jenn. It was a long trip over and a long trip back, but it was amazing getting to see a beautiful country that I never imagined I would ever visit. Crazy how things work out in life. It took a little over 30 hours from the time we left our villa in Hoi An before we walked in the door of our villa in Wayne, PA on Sunday afternoon. I managed to stay awake for a few hours before crashing at around 7pm. I slept for about 10.5 hours and woke up at 5:30. There was only one class at KOP on Monday, a special friends and family WOD at 10am. I didn't feel terribly jet-lagged so I made the decision to sign up for class. Now all I needed to do was kill 4.5 hours.
While Jenn slept, I went downstairs and took care of some things (paying bills, etc.) that I had neglected while we were away. Then I went and weighed myself. While we were in Vietnam, I decided to use the scale in our villa one morning. It showed your weight in kilos rather than pounds, but I had plenty of practice with that conversion from the gym. I stood on it, patiently waited for a number to appear, and then had to pick my jaw off the floor when the result flashed. 99 kilos (about 218 pounds). I knew I needed to lose weight but I didn't think I had gotten that big. That was nearly 4 red plates!
My body in the form of Olympic lifting plates
Being that heavy is not doing me any favors, so I've resolved to get my weight down to 86 kilos (a smidge below 190 pounds) by January 23rd, the Monday before the next NHC. That gives me 20 weeks to get slimmer. I originally was going to aim for year-end, but Thanksgiving is almost a guaranteed 5 pound weight gain for me, so I decided to allow myself three extra weeks. And the best part is that the scale at home was not nearly as mean to me. My weight on Monday morning: 213.2 pounds. I'm not sure why the discrepancy was so much, but it may have had to do with the fact that I was starving on Monday morning. After Jenn woke up, I talked her into grabbing breakfast with me. I needed something in my system before taking on Trevor. (Spoiler alert: This may have been a very poor decision on my part.)
What is Trevor? Oh that's only the absurd Hero WOD that was programmed for the friends and family class. Simple in design, brutal in execution. Here's what it looked like:
"Trevor"
Teams of 4 (2 athletes working at a time)
300 pull-ups
400 push-ups
500 sit-ups
600 air squats
Equally divided, that meant 75 pull-ups (yikes), 100 push-ups, 125 sit-ups, and 150 air squats for every teammate. That seemed totally reasonable for my first day back!
It was really good seeing a bunch of the faces that I hadn't seen in over a month when I showed up to the gym. There was a very large crowd on hand and we all squeezed in to take part in the warmup being led by Coach Giulz. We went through air squats. We went through push-ups. We went through sit-ups. We didn't really practice pull-ups due to the amount of people in attendance, but Giulz had Michal show us the different variations we could use. From there, it was just a matter of assembling a team of 4. Or in the case of Cline, Ben, and myself, a team of 3.
Having a team of three was going to be difficult. The rep scheme didn't matter, as we would just do 75% of the listed totals for a team of 4. The problem with using a team of three was that you got less rest. Two athletes could work at a time and that meant we each would be working 2 out of every 3 shifts. With a team of 4, we all would have been working 2 out of every 4 shifts. That wasn't the biggest issue though. The real issue was that one member of this team of three had not done a WOD in 5 weeks. It would become apparent very quickly.
With a bazillion people hovering over by the pull-up rig, we made the executive decision to start with push-ups instead. Ben was worried about his push-ups going away on him, but he would end up faring much better than one of his teammates. Ben suggested that we go one at a time rather than two at a time during the push-ups so that we didn't get worn out. His idea made sense (100 push-ups is no picnic), so we went one after another on the first movement, with Cline leading us off, Ben going second, and yours truly as the anchor (in more ways than one). We decided to do 5 reps at a time and that worked well for 7 rounds. However, during the next 2 rounds, I broke my 5 up into a set of 3 and a set of 2. Ben suggested that we switch to 3 reps at a time rather than 5, something I wholeheartedly embraced. Still it wasn't long before that became too fatiguing for me. In an attempt to not slow us down, I transitioned to doing push-ups from my knees.
You would think that I could handle 3 push-ups from my knees without much issue, but my arms had already gone into a state of shock. Cline was still doing 5 legit push-ups per round, Ben was alternating between doing 3 reps and 5 reps, while I was the weak link, working way too hard to do three scaled push-ups. It felt like forever before we reached 300 reps, but we eventually got there. I was hurting, but 125 sit-ups sounded infinitely better than doing even 1 more push-up.
Cline and I began the sit-ups as soon as Ben completed push-up #300. We had agreed to do sets of 20 before switching out. I didn't move quite as fast as Cline, so once he was done, Ben started working on his sit-ups. Then when I reached 20, Cline would go again and so the merry-go-round would move. As Ben and I worked on our fourth set, we did a check on how many reps we had done. Cline said he had completed 100 reps, which seemed off because he should have only done 4 sets, not 5. Turns out he had only done 4 sets, but he picked up early on that it made more sense to do sets of 25 reps (since we were each doing 125 in total) rather than sets of 20 reps. For round 5, we stuck with our rep scheme, Cline finishing his 125, while Ben and I hit 100. With 50 left to go, Cline did 20 more, leaving 15 each for Ben and myself.
It was on to the air squats and surprisingly the easiest movement in the workout would be where things fell apart for me. Sure I was tired, but that was not unexpected given that this was a hero WOD. What was unexpected was how nauseous I began to feel. There must have been a delayed effect from the sit-ups as each air squat really generated some unpleasantness from my mid-section. I was regretting having breakfast earlier in a big way. I tried to go through the air squats more methodically (we were doing sets of 15 reps at a time), but after a while, I simply did not want to bend down. Somewhere along the way I needed an extra break as Cline and Ben kept moving through their sets. In the end, I could only complete 8 sets (120 reps). My amazing teammates each took on one of the sets I was supposed to complete so that we reached 450 reps.
All that was left was 75 pull-ups apiece! Wait, what? How in the world was I going to do that? That would be an immense struggle for me if I was fresh. How would I complete 75 pull-ups while trying to hold down my breakfast? My initial thought was "use a band". There was no shame in doing that. I tried to get myself into a band that was hanging on a low bar to get some easy reps done. I did one. Maybe it was scrunching into the band, but I immediately felt like I was going to vomit as soon as I did that rep. I had to stop. My teammates kept going. I felt terrible for them as there was a real chance they were about to be burdened with 37 additional pull-ups each. Ben suggested I go find a spot in front of a fan in order to try and feel better. I tried that out and it made me feel a little better. Then I tried the Charlie Bucket technique of trying to burp my way out of my predicament. (Sorry, TMI!) That helped a little too.
However, nothing helped more than the guilt I felt as I watched Cline and Ben do pull-up after pull-up. It was grossly unfair to make them do 112 pull-ups to finish the workout because I had shown up out of shape. I had no idea how close they were to finishing their 75 reps, but I guessed they weren't too far away, at which point I'd have to give them the bad news that our team was 74 reps short. I couldn't do that to those guys. I had to chip away at that total at least a little bit. I came back to the high bar and did a rep. It felt awful so I paused to kneel for a second. When I rose from my crouch, I got woozy and staggered sideways. That wasn't good. Coach Rachel saw me stagger and checked to make sure I was ok. I lied and told her I was. Leaving the guys with 73 reps was just as bad as leaving them with 74 in my book. I had to finish some more.
Slowly, I began doing sets of two quick singles. It wasn't much, but it helped nibble away at the total. The guys knew I was nowhere close to 75, so they continued on doing sets of 5 as they had been doing since they got to the rig. I made my way up to 20 reps. I thought there was a good chance that they were probably going up to 100 before checking our count again, so I wanted to finish 25. Thinking this could be the final stretch, I did 5 quick singles, ignoring my nausea as best as I could. When I completed that set, I asked the guys how many they had done. Cline had done 95 and Ben had done 90. That meant there were 15 reps left. We would all do 1 more set of five reps. The previous set of 5 gave me some confidence that I could get through this last set. I knocked mine out one by one, as did the two fellas who carried me through this workout. Final time: 44:49.
I can't thank Cline and Ben enough for picking up my slack. I definitely owe them a beer or two. As for me, I felt different after the workout was done. Well, I still felt nauseous for a solid 15-20 minutes afterwards. That part did not change. But I wasn't frustrated at how I had done. I fully expected to struggle in my first workout back after 5 weeks away. I wasn't super sore like I had been after almost every workout I had done this summer. My joints weren't in pain. My hands weren't calloused up like crazy. Aside from some guilt and some poor breakfast planning, I wasn't feeling discouraged about how the WOD went. I did somewhere around 75 push-ups (about half on my knees), 115 sit-ups, 120 air squats, and 30 pull-ups. That kind of volume is meant to leave you in a heap and it had. It was going to take some time to get back up to speed again, so even though I was a horrible teammate, I pretty much met the low expectations I had coming into this workout.
Tuesday preview: Another incredibly tough WOD. Test day with Elizabeth. More low expectations are met.
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