Whole Lotta Dubs

Workout date: 9/28/16

Let's make this a short blog post.  I suck at dubs.  The end.

If I left it at that, you'd still know everything you needed to know about my performance during Wednesday's workout.  But I suppose you didn't click on this blog while sitting in a bathroom stall at work with the hope that today's blog would only be one line long.  You need something to pass the time!  Fine, fine...here is a longer recap of what went down at the Wednesday 7:30 class.

Wednesday's WOD:
20 minute AMRAP
100 double unders
100 ft of walking lunges

I'm always trying to squeeze in some extra time to practice my double unders.  How about 20 minutes worth of practice?  Okay, to be fair, this WOD would make you do some lunges as well.  But the lion's share of the workout would be spent twirling the jump rope.  This was a solid test of my form, my engine, my mental toughness, and my ability to withstand pain.  (Spoiler grades for those categories: D, C, C, and B-)

Coach Jenna had 8 people in her late Wednesday class: Matt and Andrew C (I didn't know they were brothers until after this workout), Matt E, Genesis, Julie Foucher, Ranjith, Ravi, and yours truly.  Our warmup started off with a 500 meter row and then transitioned to a jump rope tabata.  We did 20 seconds of single unders, then 10 seconds of air squats.  We did three rounds of that before moving on to two rounds where single unders were replaced with double unders.  And I have to tell you, I was feeling the burn already.  Did it help that we did a tough leg workout the day before?  No.  But I saw a lot of the same names on the whiteboard from the day before which meant they overcame sore legs to do this workout.  I couldn't blame my performance on that.

No, if I was going to blame my performance on anything, it is my inability to get a new set started again once I've completed a big set.  When I walk you through the 20 minutes, you'll see that I had some bigger sets along the way, something that should have resulted in a reasonable score for me on this workout.  And I was better than usual when it came to taking shorter breaks and resisting the urge to rest in a squat.  The problem was my consistency.  I couldn't rattle off consecutive large sets and my large sets weren't all that big to begin with in comparison to my classmates.  All of the feedback that I have gotten recently indicates that my jumping has become more efficient as I do double unders, but my results in WODs like this one where we do a bunch of dubs has gotten worse.  I have to find a way to turn that around.

After having us practice walking lunges (everyone could handle that), Jenna got us started on our 20 minute double under odyssey.  I was closest to the front of the gym with Coyle #1 (Andrew) next to me and Coyle #2 (Matt) alongside of his brother.  They were probably not the best people to stand next to during this workout as they are very good with the jump rope.  I'm not sure how many reps Andrew strung in his first set, but it must have been close to 100 because he started swearing at the end of a very long set.  I was happy with the 23 that I got.  And in the only instance of me putting decent sets back-to-back, I followed that up with 18 more reps.  41 reps in, less than 45 seconds off the clock, not too shabby.

From that point on in round one, I had to claw my way to 100 reps.  I was back to my usual standard of hitting sets in the 8-12 range.  More importantly, I was starting to feel tired, but I wouldn't let myself go into a squat or even take long breaks while I was standing up.  This was a long workout, but I needed to keep moving.  I tried to block out the Coyle brothers next to me as they had already begun lunging back and forth.  I saw Julie and Matt E lunging before me as well, but at that point, I was close to finishing my first 100 reps.  If I stuck with this pace, maybe I could catch back up to them later in the workout.

My approach to the lunges was the same for every round: just keep moving.  It was similar to doing tired burpees.  If you had to pause for a second, that was fine, but there was no reason to come to a prolonged stop.  I might lunge on the way down with my arms by my side and lunge back with my hands on my hips for more stability.  Didn't matter how I did them, I just needed to keep moving along so I could get back to the jump rope.  When I finished my first set of lunges, the clock read 4:05.  I was officially not completing 5 rounds of this workout.  And since I expected my pace to gradually get slower, 4 full rounds was no lock either.

The second round was emblematic of the struggles I have with double unders.  I had a decent first set (like 12-14 reps) and followed that with a bunch of attempts where I hit myself with the rope as I tried to get the set started or managed 1 rep and then failed.  Not only is this a waste of time and energy, it starts to weigh on me mentally.  My initial reaction is to be pissed off, so I have to take a few seconds and tell myself to remain calm.  About 1 minute after this round started, I had 22 reps.  Later, I had a set finish with me getting to 44 reps and a glance at the clock showed two minutes had passed since the start of this round.  I guess I was consistent with my mediocrity.  At that pace, I would have finished 100 double unders in about four and a half minutes, which might have been my actual pace for round 2.  When I finished off my lunges, the clock read 10:00 exactly.  Four rounds wasn't happening without a miracle.

I couldn't even begin round 3 with a decent set like I had done in the first two rounds.  It was a struggle, and after a minute of attempts, I had 10 reps, not 22.  For some reason, I wasn't worried about it taking 10 minutes to get through this round of double unders.  Even though it is rare that I have confidence during a Crossfit workout, I was pretty sure that 10 double unders per minute was not a realistic pace for me.  At some point I was bound to rip through 12 double unders in about 10 seconds.  And eventually I did during that round.  Because I was screwing up a lot, I thought my average was probably going to be 20 double unders per minute, even after that bad first minute.  I think that was about where I finished, estimating that the lunges took close to 90 seconds to complete.  I finished round 3 at close to 16:30.

There wasn't much hope of me completing 100 more double unders in the last three and a half minutes.  I was so angry with how round 3 went that I slammed my rope to the floor after rep #100.  After fighting the urge to rest in a squat during the first 10 minutes of the workout, it was round three when I finally gave in and took a couple of squat breaks to not only catch my breath, but also to cool down emotionally.  Double unders can be so damn frustrating.  One second you have them, the next second you don't.  Or at least that's the case with me.

I needed to average about 30 double unders per minute to finish my 4th round of dubs under the 20 minute time cap and for a brief moment, there was hope.  I did a set of 19 reps to kick off my final round.  A minute later, I was at 20 reps.  I needed a break after the first 19, but all of my momentum vanished during that break.  Several times I failed to get a single rep.  Mixed within those failed attempts was one special set where I got one double under.  Joy!  About two minutes remained and I had 80 reps to go.  That definitely wasn't happening.  I tried my best from there on out to maintain a normal pace, thinking back to Thursday when I tried to rush the end of the workout and prevented myself from getting a better score than I might have had if I stuck with what was working.  When Jenna called time, I had managed to get up to 62 reps.  Final score: 3+62.

Well that sucked.  Not surprisingly, I had one of the lowest scores of the day.  This workout was pure aggravation.  What really bugs me is that my form (in terms of how high I jump and how fast I twirl the rope) has gotten better.  Yet I still mess up getting sets started and I still get tired way quicker than I should.  I'm always told that when people tire out during double unders, it's their shoulders that are fatigued.  I don't think I've ever slowed down on my double unders because of shoulder fatigue.  It's my legs that go.  All those tiny bunny hops wear out my legs long before my shoulders get tired.  I'm not entirely sure how to fix that, but I'll keep working on it in hopes of stumbling across a solution.

Thursday preview: No two-fers this Thursday.  Purely an Endurance day lined up for me.