75 Snatches Will Make You Randy

Workout date: 9/13/16

With summer coming to a close and fall on the horizon, the days have begun to grow shorter.  And what does that mean for Tuesday nights?  (Ok, technically the following is true for all nights, not just Tuesday night, but its relevance is most important for the second workday of the week.)  It means that guys who want to work out at 7:30pm will do so by the light of the moon!  (And the numerous lights within the gym that keep it illuminated.)  Dudes After Dark is a moniker that actually makes sense again.  Don't believe me?  Check out this past Tuesday's class where Coach Rachel instructed eight guys.  No sun, no females.  I'm not sure why that is true, but it is.

Did I say there were eight dudes in class?  My bad.  There was actually a ninth and his name was Randy.  There are a lot of WODs that we do at the gym named after girls, but this was one of the rare workouts named after a guy.  It's officially a hero WOD, but unlike most other hero WODs, it is very short in duration.  It falls somewhere in between Grace (30 clean and jerks at 135/95) and Isabel (30 snatches at 135/95) in terms of duration.  In fact, Randy is just a lighter version of Isabel (she's gonna be pissed when she reads that) with a lot more reps.  Randy is 75 power snatches at 75/55.

Randy shows up in the programming about twice a year, so having been at the gym for nearly 3.5 years, you would think I would have done this workout at some point.  However, prior to Tuesday, I had not.  It wasn't like I was avoiding Randy.  This seemed like a workout I might do well at.  It was slightly longer than a true sprint, which is my preferred length for a Crossfit workout.  It was also about cycling a barbell that was on the lighter side, another element of Crossfit where I tend to excel. My performance in this workout would really come down to breathing and mental toughness.  Could I keep my breaks to a minimum and could I hold on to the barbell for a few more reps after getting to the point where my body wanted me to drop the barbell?

Coach Rachel had the eight of us split up into four pairs so that we could do the workout Fight Gone Bad style: one partner would work while the other partner counted for him.  The four pairs were: Nick and Ryan A, Chris D and Neil, Phani and Ravi, and me and Ranjith.  This was my first time working with Ranjith and even though we didn't chat a lot during this WOD, I think our pairing worked out well.  Rachel broke down the power snatch for us before giving us guidance on what weight we should use for the workout.  I didn't see any reason to use less than 75 pounds as the amount of weight on the barbell wasn't going to be the biggest difficulty for me during this workout.

Ranjith and I decided that I would go first and Rachel got the first group started.  I began with 10 snatches before dropping the barbell.  I could have done more, but I felt like 10 reps was a good spot to take a break.  There was little advantage to doing some ridiculously large set at the beginning and then fizzling out the remainder of the way.  While those first 10 didn't feel very arduous, I quickly realized how much they took out of me on my next set.  I only made it through 7 reps before needing another break.  Uh oh.  I was definitely concerned that this was already falling apart and I was only about a quarter of the way through Randy.  Time to find some mental toughness.

I suppose if I was truly mentally tough, I would have willed myself into doing sets of 10 again, but the best I could do was piece together sets of 7 reps one after another.  At some point, I tried to take a very short break and get back into the snatches, resulting in a set of 4.  I think I snuck in a set of 8 along the way.  And I distinctly remember dropping the barbell after one set and have it bounce away from me, causing me to have to chase it and bring it back from over by the kilo plates.  That is always aggravating to deal with.  As I closed in on 70 reps, I saw that Nick and Neil were still working, so even though I was taking a lot of breaks during this sprint, I wasn't too far behind them.  Nick would finish at 7:02 and Neil would finish at 7:20.  I was wrapping up my final set at the same time Neil was, but I couldn't catch him.  Final time: 7:22.

As I caught my breath, heat 2 got ready to go.  I was interested to see how Chris would do during this workout, since he clearly has the conditioning to get through this type of workout without as many breaks as I needed.  Cycling a barbell might not be his forte, but this weight was light enough that I expected him to crush this.  I would look over and see how he was doing whenever Ranjith was taking a break.  Ranjith was using an empty 15 pound barbell because he is still very new to the gym and it would be a lot to ask him to use more weight than that as a beginner attempting a workout with this much volume.  Could he use more weight?  Definitely.  His initial sets were in the 10-15 rep range.  Rachel had him working from the hang rather than the floor, so he was able to move quicker through the reps.  I was explaining to Ranjith that you couldn't drop the empty barbell, but I think he thought that meant from overhead.  When he was done with a set, he'd bring the barbell back to his knees and then drop it.  (Glad Aimee wasn't there to see this!)  After nearing 50 reps, he did a very large set that got him to 70 reps.  I tried to encourage him to pick the barbell up immediately and get the last 5 reps, but we had another miscommunication.  Ranjith started walking around and then began smiling at me.  He thought he only had to do 70 reps, not 75.  It wasn't until Rachel came over to ask if he was done (and my reply that he was not) that he realized he had a little more work to do.  He picked up the barbell and finished off his last 5 reps, completing Randy in less than 5 minutes.

After congratulating Ranjith, I started to watch Chris again.  He was the only person in the second group going RX which explained why he was the only one still working.  He was nearing the end, but he was tackling the reps the way I tried to in the middle of the workout: taking short breaks, doing small sets.  Neil was counting for him and was encouraging him to find one more burst to get to 75 reps.  Chris was tired, but he did hold on until rep #75 was done.  His final time was 6:42.  I would guess that if I had done this earlier in the year, I might have been able to complete Randy in a time close to what Chris had done.  But I certainly wasn't upset about being within shouting distance of Chris, Nick, and Neil on this night.  It was another improvement on how I had done a week earlier.

The end of class was set aside so that we could practice ring muscle-ups, bar muscle-ups, handstand walks, speaking fluent Mandarin, proper hair maintenance, and any other areas where I have zero aptitude.  Of those options, I supposed that I was closest to getting a bar muscle-up, so I went over and did a few swings where my belly hit the bar before being repelled with great force.  Even though I feel like I've made no progress on this front, Rachel seems to think I'm very close to getting my first bar muscle-up.  She wanted me to practice with a band, which I've always found harder.  When using a band for pull-ups, you aren't kipping.  Instead you're doing a strict pull-up with the assistance of the band, meaning you're going straight up and down.  For the bar muscle-up with a band, you are kipping, meaning you're swinging your body into the band, then away from it in an attempt to generate momentum that will get you up and over the bar.  The problem for me is that it seems like my momentum is being dulled by the band when I do this.  It's entirely possible that the band is getting lost in the folds of my squishy anterior rather than slingshotting me with the force I need.  Even as I flailed away with my banded attempts, Rachel remained convinced that I was close to a bar muscle-up.  Since I doubt she'd have me waste my time with this if she didn't really believe I was close, I am going to trust her instincts and keep practicing with the band.  Maybe I'll accidentally unlock the mystery of the bar muscle-up with its assistance.

Wednesday preview: Coach Rachel take two as she fills in for Jenna at the 7:30.  It's a chipper that brings up the age-old Shakespearean question: to scale or not to scale.