When you reach the point in a workout where you have to cry uncle, it's usually a sign that you are in dire need of a day off. As I sat at home on Tuesday night, taking Wednesday off from the gym was definitely under consideration. I was even thinking about taking a rest day from double under practice. Might as well give my shoulders/traps 100% rest if I wasn't making the trip over to KOP. Instead of making the decision Tuesday night, I opted to do two things before I gave in to the idea of a mid-week rest day:
- Get a good night's rest
- Take an epsom salt bath in the morning
The good night's rest was essential. Jenn had floated the idea that maybe I was sore on Tuesday because I was experiencing jet lag from the Vegas trip. It made sense. I had slept very little during that trip. And the trip ended on Sunday, so experiencing problems on Tuesday fit in with my typical "48 hours before I suffer the consequences of my choices" timeline. The epsom salt bath was an attempt on my part to eliminate the soreness I was still dealing with. My mobility was still pretty inhibited and I wasn't going to feel comfortable doing a workout with a limited range of motion. In fact, I could think of many workouts that I probably wouldn't even attempt if my range of motion didn't improve.
I got a good night's rest. I took the epsom salt bath. And my decision was made: I was heading to the gym Wednesday night. While I'm sure my body greatly appreciated the amount of sleep I got on Tuesday night, the bath was really what turned things around for me. I had been focused on how sore my shoulders/traps were, but that wasn't the real issue. When I got out of the bath, I was still sore. The issue was that my upper back region was as tight as can be when I got into the bath. By the time I exited, it felt considerably looser. I could reach above my head. Arm circles weren't a problem. I had my range of motion back. That gave me the confidence that I could handle double under practice as well as what was in store for KOP's athletes on Wednesday night.
Wednesday's WOD:
3 min AMRAP at five stations (take 2 min rest between stations)
- Prowler push (140/90)
- Wall ascents (8'/6')
- Dumbbell thrusters (55/35)
- Burpees
- Air Squats
Prior to going to the gym, I got some double under practice in. My old rope has been in pretty bad shape, so I ordered a new one. After adjusting the length of the new rope, I tried it out at the gym, only to have the adjustable screw come flying off. Couldn't find that thing no matter how hard I looked. So until the replacement screws I ordered from Amazon came in, I was stuck with my old rope. I stood in my driveway and began a set of double unders. I had a decent set going, managing 23 reps in a row before I felt all of the tension in the rope give out on rep #24. The right handle felt like it slipped out of my hand when the set ended, but when I went to pick the rope up from the ground, I noticed the handle was gone. WTF? I turned around and looked behind me trying to find the handle. I found it in the grass next to my side door. The handle hadn't come off of the rope, rather the rope had broken in the middle of the set. The handle was still attached to the segment of the rope that had snapped off. The old rope had met its demise.
The silver lining was that I could just take the adjustable screws off of the old rope and put them on the new rope. (I suppose I could have done that anyway, but anyone who has seen the sneakers I wear knows that I make use of personal items until they are completely out of commission.) Once the organ transfer had been made, I went back outside with my new rope. My first two attempts didn't go so well. The third time went much better. I tried to remain calm as I approached 50 consecutive reps. Keep breathing, try not to take huge jumps, don't change your rhythm at all. After hitting 60 reps, my PR of 68 in a row was in sight. When the 69th double under passed below my feet, I started to become giddy. Almost to 75! Keep it together!!! 70...71...72...73...damn! I fell two reps short of my revised goal of 75 in a row. The last 10-15 reps were not pretty, but I had reached the point where hitting my goal took priority of keeping my form. Getting 75 in a row would have to wait for another day.
I went to the 6:30 class rather than the 7:30 because Cline had told me the night before that he was hitting up the earlier class. I also wouldn't be ditching Coach Jenna since she teaches both of those classes. There were 10 of us in class (5 girls, 5 boys), which turned out to be perfect for this workout. We could work in pairs as we rotated from station to station. Each pair could consist of one male and one female, something that would be very beneficial at the wall ascent (only one person can climb a given wall at a time and there is only one 6' wall and one 8' wall). It also helped with the prowler push as one prowler could always have the men's weight on it and one could always have the ladies' weight on it. Unofficially, the pairs were chosen Sadie Hawkins style, with the women choosing their male companions. Alona wanted to race through burpees again, so she chose me as her partner.
The silver lining was that I could just take the adjustable screws off of the old rope and put them on the new rope. (I suppose I could have done that anyway, but anyone who has seen the sneakers I wear knows that I make use of personal items until they are completely out of commission.) Once the organ transfer had been made, I went back outside with my new rope. My first two attempts didn't go so well. The third time went much better. I tried to remain calm as I approached 50 consecutive reps. Keep breathing, try not to take huge jumps, don't change your rhythm at all. After hitting 60 reps, my PR of 68 in a row was in sight. When the 69th double under passed below my feet, I started to become giddy. Almost to 75! Keep it together!!! 70...71...72...73...damn! I fell two reps short of my revised goal of 75 in a row. The last 10-15 reps were not pretty, but I had reached the point where hitting my goal took priority of keeping my form. Getting 75 in a row would have to wait for another day.
I went to the 6:30 class rather than the 7:30 because Cline had told me the night before that he was hitting up the earlier class. I also wouldn't be ditching Coach Jenna since she teaches both of those classes. There were 10 of us in class (5 girls, 5 boys), which turned out to be perfect for this workout. We could work in pairs as we rotated from station to station. Each pair could consist of one male and one female, something that would be very beneficial at the wall ascent (only one person can climb a given wall at a time and there is only one 6' wall and one 8' wall). It also helped with the prowler push as one prowler could always have the men's weight on it and one could always have the ladies' weight on it. Unofficially, the pairs were chosen Sadie Hawkins style, with the women choosing their male companions. Alona wanted to race through burpees again, so she chose me as her partner.
I got to make the rest of the decisions associated with this workout. The prowler push wasn't going to be much of a problem with 140 pounds on it, so I went RX there. The wall ascents aren't programmed very often during the year, so I wasn't passing up an attempt to take on the 8' wall while channeling my inner American Gladiator/Ninja Warrior. The toughest decision of the night was figuring out what weight I should choose for my dumbbells. I had done dumbbell thrusters in a WOD two weeks earlier and I used 40 pound DBs there. They were difficult, but I managed to get through sets of 9 reps with them. I guessed that I might be able to do some sets of 5 reps with the RX weight of 55 pounds, and with a 3 minute time frame, I thought I would have some time to recover between sets and still post a decent score. Jenna asked us to choose a weight that was 10 pounds less than what we'd use for the workout as our warmup weight. Since Matt B and I are knuckleheads, we grabbed the 45 pound DBs. To be fair to Matt and myself, we did a lot of warmup with those DBs. We began to suspect that Jenna was trying to break us. If that was the plan, it worked. It became obvious that we were not going to be able to use 55 pounds in the workout. We toyed with the idea of dropping all the way down to 40 pounds before settling on the 45 pound DBs we brought out for the warmup.
Chris D was not part of the 7:30 fun, but I did chat with him after he finished taking the 6:30 class. The one bit of advice that he gave me: start with the burpees. That was one of the two stations I was considering starting at (along with the wall ascents) because it seemed like you'd be in trouble if you weren't fresh when you got there. (Spoiler: you will see how true that is when I cover how I did on the wall ascents!) I passed this advice on to my partner and she was more than happy to start at the burpees. We let Jenna know we had dibs on that station and let the other four groups figure out where they wanted to start.
Jenna got the clock started and the burpee race between me and Alona began. I knew there was no chance I was going to keep up with her, but I did surprise myself, especially towards the late stages of this 3 minute block. It didn't take long for me to fall behind and I definitely slowed after about a minute, but I did my best not to take any breaks. I also kept the crawling to a minimum. When three minutes had elapsed, Alona had completed 45 burpees, while I hung in there with a total of 41.
Since the breaks were fairly long at 3 minutes apiece, I made the wise decision of having my water bottle near the station I was working at. There was time to grab a drink and recover before heading to your next station, but if you had left your water bottle in your bag and needed to go look for it, you were probably going to be scrambling (rather than recovering) during your rest period.
Alona and I didn't have to move for our second station. The air squats could be done right where we had done the burpees. The second 3 minute segment began and we moved rapidly through the air squats. When we did the first Advent challenge at the gym last December, I did 58 air squats in a minute. I had no intentions of trying to match that pace. Today's pace would be fast but smooth. If I needed to pause for a second, that was okay. If I needed to shake out my legs real quick, that was cool too. What I did not want to do was get to the final minute and have to stop for a long break. I got through 40 reps in minute one. I wasn't hurting at that point, but I suspected I wasn't going to hang on for 80 more reps in the next two minutes. I was somewhere around 75 reps through two minutes and managed to finish up at 105 reps before it was time to rotate.
The prowler push was next and I walked outside long before Alona came out. My prowler was sitting there with 140 pounds on it. What I didn't realize was that the other prowler only had 50 pounds on it. When Alona came out to the barriers where we were starting from, we had less than 30 seconds remaining on our break. She freaked out a bit about the incorrect weight on the prowler, so we scrambled to remove the 25 pound plates and add on the 45 pound plates. Crisis averted. From there, I totally gamed station three. There didn't seem to be much point in doing anything else. Almost everyone had gotten either two full laps or three full laps with the prowler. Partial laps got you nothing, plus you'd have to spend part of your rest period pushing the prowler back to the starting line if you didn't finish a lap. That made things easy for me. There wasn't much of a chance that I was getting 3 laps, so I settled on doing 2. When I got back to the starting line after completing 2 laps, there was less than 20 seconds left, which I used to cheer Alona on as she finished her second lap. Perhaps the extra mini-break I had given myself would help me on the wall ascents.
Or not. I should have realized that the burpees, air squats, and prowler push had probably removed the spring from my legs, but it didn't become apparent until I got to station #4: the wall ascent. The wall ascent is like a shorter, completely vertical version of the Warped Wall seen on American Ninja Warrior. You run at it, try not to get intimidated as you close in on it, try not to stutter step, cave and start stutter stepping like crazy, plant one foot into the wall, grab the top of the wall like your life depends on it, then pull yourself up and over. Piece of cake, right? It is if you can either a) use the speed from your run to propel yourself high up on the wall (meaning you don't have to use arm strength to pull yourself up) or b) have the ability to pull up your body weight without much trouble. The first three stations took away (a) and I've never been able to do (b). So this was not going to go well.
I'm not sure how many times I've fallen off of the wall while trying to scale it, but I know that I've never failed as many times in one workout as I did during the 3 minutes at this station. Things started out alright as I got two wall ascents completed in about 40 seconds. Then came the first rejection. I hit the wall and I got my forearms over the top of the wall, but my hands were slippery with sweat. As I tried to transition into pulling up, my hands slid and my body came off the wall. In many ways, it was like doing a failed box jump. When I don't hit one of those correctly, the box sort of spits me out, hurtling me away from it. The same thing was happening here, only this was a 96 inch box jump.
As is the case with a missed box jump, you need a few seconds to get yourself steady again before you're ready to confront your adversary once more. I took some time before my next run towards the wall. Things went better this time around. From that point forward, I alternated between successful wall ascents and having the wall do its best Dikembe Mutombo impression. I ended up with three rejections and 5 successful climbs during my three minutes at that station. Not a great score for me, but it was all I could muster at that stage of the workout.
One station left and that was the dumbbell thrusters. I wanted to complete at least 20 reps while I was there and I got off to a good start with 7 reps in my first set. Got 6 more in my second set. The biggest difficulty was locking out the reps at the top. I could only manage 4 reps in the next set. That number slipped down to 3 in the fourth set, but at least I had completed 20 reps in total. I knew time was winding down as I did another set of 3, but I was facing away from the clock, so I didn't know exactly how close to the end I was. I turned around and saw 8 seconds remaining, so I got back to my dumbbells and squeezed in one last rep before time was called. I got a score of 24 on this station. Total score for the workout: 41 + 105 + 2 + 5 + 24 = 177.
That was a decent score for me. If I had chosen to go RX for everything and used the 55 pounds DBs, my score would likely have only been about 10 reps worse. But I think I made the right decision going with the 45 pound DBs. It would have been agony using the 55 pounders for the final station. I was at least able to do two decent sized sets with the 45 pound weights.
Thursday preview: It's Luke's last class! I say farewell to a fellow Barbull at Endurance, where we have our last 400 meter time trial of the year, followed by some sprints afterwards.
Chris D was not part of the 7:30 fun, but I did chat with him after he finished taking the 6:30 class. The one bit of advice that he gave me: start with the burpees. That was one of the two stations I was considering starting at (along with the wall ascents) because it seemed like you'd be in trouble if you weren't fresh when you got there. (Spoiler: you will see how true that is when I cover how I did on the wall ascents!) I passed this advice on to my partner and she was more than happy to start at the burpees. We let Jenna know we had dibs on that station and let the other four groups figure out where they wanted to start.
Jenna got the clock started and the burpee race between me and Alona began. I knew there was no chance I was going to keep up with her, but I did surprise myself, especially towards the late stages of this 3 minute block. It didn't take long for me to fall behind and I definitely slowed after about a minute, but I did my best not to take any breaks. I also kept the crawling to a minimum. When three minutes had elapsed, Alona had completed 45 burpees, while I hung in there with a total of 41.
Since the breaks were fairly long at 3 minutes apiece, I made the wise decision of having my water bottle near the station I was working at. There was time to grab a drink and recover before heading to your next station, but if you had left your water bottle in your bag and needed to go look for it, you were probably going to be scrambling (rather than recovering) during your rest period.
Alona and I didn't have to move for our second station. The air squats could be done right where we had done the burpees. The second 3 minute segment began and we moved rapidly through the air squats. When we did the first Advent challenge at the gym last December, I did 58 air squats in a minute. I had no intentions of trying to match that pace. Today's pace would be fast but smooth. If I needed to pause for a second, that was okay. If I needed to shake out my legs real quick, that was cool too. What I did not want to do was get to the final minute and have to stop for a long break. I got through 40 reps in minute one. I wasn't hurting at that point, but I suspected I wasn't going to hang on for 80 more reps in the next two minutes. I was somewhere around 75 reps through two minutes and managed to finish up at 105 reps before it was time to rotate.
The prowler push was next and I walked outside long before Alona came out. My prowler was sitting there with 140 pounds on it. What I didn't realize was that the other prowler only had 50 pounds on it. When Alona came out to the barriers where we were starting from, we had less than 30 seconds remaining on our break. She freaked out a bit about the incorrect weight on the prowler, so we scrambled to remove the 25 pound plates and add on the 45 pound plates. Crisis averted. From there, I totally gamed station three. There didn't seem to be much point in doing anything else. Almost everyone had gotten either two full laps or three full laps with the prowler. Partial laps got you nothing, plus you'd have to spend part of your rest period pushing the prowler back to the starting line if you didn't finish a lap. That made things easy for me. There wasn't much of a chance that I was getting 3 laps, so I settled on doing 2. When I got back to the starting line after completing 2 laps, there was less than 20 seconds left, which I used to cheer Alona on as she finished her second lap. Perhaps the extra mini-break I had given myself would help me on the wall ascents.
Or not. I should have realized that the burpees, air squats, and prowler push had probably removed the spring from my legs, but it didn't become apparent until I got to station #4: the wall ascent. The wall ascent is like a shorter, completely vertical version of the Warped Wall seen on American Ninja Warrior. You run at it, try not to get intimidated as you close in on it, try not to stutter step, cave and start stutter stepping like crazy, plant one foot into the wall, grab the top of the wall like your life depends on it, then pull yourself up and over. Piece of cake, right? It is if you can either a) use the speed from your run to propel yourself high up on the wall (meaning you don't have to use arm strength to pull yourself up) or b) have the ability to pull up your body weight without much trouble. The first three stations took away (a) and I've never been able to do (b). So this was not going to go well.
I'm not sure how many times I've fallen off of the wall while trying to scale it, but I know that I've never failed as many times in one workout as I did during the 3 minutes at this station. Things started out alright as I got two wall ascents completed in about 40 seconds. Then came the first rejection. I hit the wall and I got my forearms over the top of the wall, but my hands were slippery with sweat. As I tried to transition into pulling up, my hands slid and my body came off the wall. In many ways, it was like doing a failed box jump. When I don't hit one of those correctly, the box sort of spits me out, hurtling me away from it. The same thing was happening here, only this was a 96 inch box jump.
As is the case with a missed box jump, you need a few seconds to get yourself steady again before you're ready to confront your adversary once more. I took some time before my next run towards the wall. Things went better this time around. From that point forward, I alternated between successful wall ascents and having the wall do its best Dikembe Mutombo impression. I ended up with three rejections and 5 successful climbs during my three minutes at that station. Not a great score for me, but it was all I could muster at that stage of the workout.
One station left and that was the dumbbell thrusters. I wanted to complete at least 20 reps while I was there and I got off to a good start with 7 reps in my first set. Got 6 more in my second set. The biggest difficulty was locking out the reps at the top. I could only manage 4 reps in the next set. That number slipped down to 3 in the fourth set, but at least I had completed 20 reps in total. I knew time was winding down as I did another set of 3, but I was facing away from the clock, so I didn't know exactly how close to the end I was. I turned around and saw 8 seconds remaining, so I got back to my dumbbells and squeezed in one last rep before time was called. I got a score of 24 on this station. Total score for the workout: 41 + 105 + 2 + 5 + 24 = 177.
That was a decent score for me. If I had chosen to go RX for everything and used the 55 pounds DBs, my score would likely have only been about 10 reps worse. But I think I made the right decision going with the 45 pound DBs. It would have been agony using the 55 pounders for the final station. I was at least able to do two decent sized sets with the 45 pound weights.
Thursday preview: It's Luke's last class! I say farewell to a fellow Barbull at Endurance, where we have our last 400 meter time trial of the year, followed by some sprints afterwards.
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