Having a genuine fear of gaining a bunch of weight over Thanksgiving weekend, I felt the need to be proactive and get some exercise in before I began gorging on all of the tasty treats I'd avoided (mostly) since September. I was staying with one of my brothers (Brendan), but I knew he wasn't big on running. So I got a hold of my other brother (Shaymus) and asked him if he was going to do the Turkey Trot 5K. Shaymus runs fairly regularly and I knew he'd done the Turkey Trot the last few years. To my surprise, he wasn't doing the Turkey Trot this year, but being the good sport that he is, he agreed to sign up once he heard I was interested in running it. The online signup was easy enough. When you signed up, you had to enter your approximate pace per mile and the website let you know that you'd be assigned a colored bib based on the pace you entered. There would be signs at the starting line indicating the corral where each color should line up.
Shaymus and his brother, Brady, would be meeting me near the starting line. I had gotten a silver bib after listing my mile pace in the 9-10 minute range. Shaymus had told me he wouldn't be running very fast, so I figured he'd have a silver bib too. Brady had just gotten in from Hong Kong (where he currently works) the night before, so I thought he wasn't going to be moving all that fast either. Silver seemed likely for him as well. The announcer made the first call for runners and I moved into the silver corral, standing near the entrance so that I'd see Shaymus and Brady when they showed up. There were two flaws with this plan:
- I didn't realize this was the 100th anniversary of the Troy Turkey Trot, so there was a much larger crowd for this year's run than is typically the case.
- People ignored the system of lining up by what color your bib was. Which boggled my mind. If you wanted to line up with the people who run 7 minutes per mile, just lie on the online registration and say you run a 7 minute pace. Then your bib color will match all of the people that you lined up with. Putting in your real pace and then lining up in a corral with the wrong-colored bib just made you look like a jackass. Yet tons of people did this. And it drove me nuts.
The silver corral was being flooded with not only silver bibs, but yellow and white bibs as well, even though those colors were meant to line up further back. There were also some green bibs among the mix, indicating runners who ran a pace of 8-9 minutes. They were supposed to be in the corral ahead of the silvers. The announcer made a second and third call for the runners, but I still had not seen Shaymus or Brady. They could be anywhere due to this chaotic setup, even if they had silver bibs. The announcer gave a final call for runners and soon after it I heard my name yelled from the sidewalk. Shaymus and Brady had made it just in time for the race. Brady was wearing a silver bib like me, but Shaymus had a green bib on. Apparently his version of slow was still faster than the pace I'd be running. We exchanged hellos, listened to the national anthem, then got ready to run. Shaymus warned me that I wouldn't be able to do much running for the first half-mile of the race. The course went out and back along the river, with one lane of the road free for runners headed out and the other lane for those headed back to the finish. There were over 4,200 of us packed into that outbound lane at the start and it would take well over a half-mile before those of us who started in the silver corral could run for real. Here's a recap of my Turkey Trot experience:
- Mile 1 (slightly downhill): Shaymus, Brady, and I were near each other for most of this mile as there was no room to maneuver anywhere. As we got further from the starting line, people began running up the sidewalk in an effort to get away from the slow-moving mob on the street. It was difficult not running up on the slower people who had lined up ahead of the corral they belonged in. Several people with green bibs were walking before the first mile marker (liars!). One incredibly smart couple was walking in the middle of the lane while holding hands, forcing everyone in the race to dive to the left or the right to get around them. As Shaymus, Brady, and I searched for any opening to move up, we got separated. I assumed the two of them were ahead of me, but they could have been behind me for all I knew. As I got to the clock at the mile marker, it was a few seconds shy of 12:00. What a mess!
- Mile 2 (flat, hairpin turnaround point): I hadn't been able to fully stride during that first mile, but as I closed in on the turnaround point, I began to find pockets where I could run a little bit. I'd get my hopes up that I could start running for a prolonged distance, only to run up on another group of people that stopped me cold. I made my way to the right so that I could run on the sidewalk. There was more space over there, so I began to weave back and forth between the road and the sidewalk in an attempt to avoid having my momentum stopped. The turnaround point was sharp, so I took a bit of a wide turn into it thinking that I wouldn't need to slow down as much. I had one person cut beneath me as I made the turn, with another person following right behind them. That person was nice enough to hit me with an elbow to ensure they'd make the turn before I did. (Why do people behave this way? None of us were in contention for a medal or anything. Assholes.) The turnaround point was the key part of the race as traffic really thinned out once we turned around. I picked up the pace quite a bit. The clock at the two mile mark was a few seconds past 20 minutes as I got there.
- Last 1.1 miles (slightly uphill): There was one girl who was in front of me at the start of mile 3 and she was determined to not let me pass her. She didn't pick up her pace. She just kept glancing to her left and repeatedly moved over in front of me as I kept moving further left to pass her. (Again, why do people do this stuff?) She thought she had me blocked off completely after moving from the middle of our lane all of the way over to the cones that divided the outbound and inbound lanes, but I surprised her by crossing the cones and going to the outbound lane, sprinting forward, and saying sayonara for good. There was an incline that began with about a half-mile remaining in the race. I tried to maintain my pace, but I must have slowed down some as I headed uphill. When I saw the 3 mile marker, I knew there was only about a tenth of a mile left, so I kicked it into high gear. I wasn't going to sprint to the finish (more shoving matches likely would have ensued), but I did want to have a strong finish. I think the three mile mark may have been spotted incorrectly as it was definitely more than a tenth of a mile form that point to the finish line. After one final turn, I could see the finish line off in the distance, as well as the official clock. I had to hustle if I was going to stay under 30 minutes. I made it with 6 seconds to spare. Unofficial time: 29:54.
I would later find out that my chip time was 1:41 less than the official time, so my first mile took just over 10 minutes, the second mile was about 8:10, and the last 1.1 miles was run in 9:50 (about a pace of 8:55 per mile). With any room to run in that first mile, I could have lowered my chip time from 28:13 to something in the 26:30-27:00 range. As I received water and an orange lanyard for finishing, I saw Shaymus and Brady. Shaymus had finished two minutes ahead of me with Brady beating me by a minute. Shaymus commented that it was funny how the high school football player was now the faster runner, while the high school cross country runner was now the one with muscles. I gotta admit: that's a trade-off I am okay with.
I made my way back to Brendan's with a hearty appetite. I stopped at the store to pick us up some snacks as the main meal wouldn't be ready for a couple of hours. When I got to his house, I began eating. I ate until it was time for dinner. Then I really began eating. Two big plates later, I felt disgusting, yet happy. I had one hand on my belly, rubbing it as if this would somehow create space for dessert. It worked. I had a slice of two different pies before letting things digest for a little while. Then I got back up and had a slice of two other pies (we had 6 pies for dessert because you simply cannot have too many pies at Thanksgiving) before watching the second half of the Cowboys game. Forget putting on 5 pounds over the weekend. It was possible I took care of that all in one day.
I didn't exercise the rest of the weekend and I ate plenty of leftovers, so it was with great trepidation that I stepped on the scale Monday morning. Please don't be as bad as I think it's going to be...
Original weigh-in: 213.2 pounds
Last week's weigh-in: 207.4 pounds
This week's weigh-in: 207.0 pounds
What? How? Never mind, I don't want to know how. I simply want to live in a world where I eat like I did over Thanksgiving and I somehow lose weight. Hallelujah!
I returned to the gym on Monday night to take on Jackie for the last time in 2016. Jackie is a WOD that I have struggled with because it contains a lot of pull-ups. At least that's what I've told myself. The truth is that it's a tough workout overall that happens to end with a bunch of pull-ups. Here's what the WOD looks like:
"Jackie"
1,000 meter row
50 thrusters (45)
30 pull-ups
The first time I attempted Jackie, we did it with a 10 minute time cap. I thought I might be able to sneak under the cap because the row would take about 4 minutes and those were some light thrusters. The pull-ups would take a long time, but if I could finish the thrusters in, say, 2 minutes, I'd have 4 minutes to do 30 pull-ups. Not impossible, right?
Wrong! The thrusters were worse than I imagined. I tried to slowly churn through them so that I wasn't too tired for the pull-ups, but that strategy failed. The next time I did Jackie, I broke the thrusters up into smaller sets, but that didn't work either. On one of my last sets, I did discover that it felt better to do the thrusters quickly, so I made a mental note to try that when Jackie popped up again. The next attempt went a little better (under 11 minutes finally!), but it still felt like I wasn't close to threatening 10 minutes. An attempt in May was a regression as I finished over 11 minutes again. What was I doing wrong? There must have been some reason that so many others were able to keep this workout under 10 minutes yet I could not.
The short answer is that this workout is more devilish than it looks. Crossfitters convulse in fear when the name Fran is brought up, yet the name Jackie doesn't seem to have the same effect, even though she clearly seems to be a first cousin. Fran involves heavier thrusters (less reps) and more pull-ups. Jackie tacks on a 1,000 meter row to the festivities. With Fran, you go back and forth between the thrusters and the pull-ups, with the rep count decreasing each round. With Jackie, you have this cruel domino effect. The row takes the energy out of your legs, which you need for the thrusters. As you focus on how much your legs hurt during the "light" thrusters, you don't notice how much your arms and your core are being worked. That is, until you get to the pull-up bar, where those two parts of your body get tested. In Fran, you're sprinting the whole time, so you're constantly aware of how much everything sucks. Jackie is more subtle. You understand during the workout that it's terrible, but you don't appreciate how bad it was until the very end of it.
There were 8 of us in the 6:30 class with Coach Giulz. I was happy about that because in a bigger class, there could be a lot of congestion on the pull-up bar. If I was going to make a run at 10 minutes, I couldn't afford to wait on someone else swinging on the low bar that crossed with my high bar. We did some warmup, but with this workout, the warmup tends to go by fast. Rowing is rowing. The thruster in the WOD involves an empty barbell, so you don't have to spend time working up to the weight you'll use in the workout. And these were your garden-variety pull-ups, so we only had to go through our typical routine of doing shoulder activations, kip swings, and then kipping pull-ups to get ready.
I would normally try and stay with Cline during this workout, but he couldn't do thrusters on this night, substituting 65 pound front squats in for them. I wasn't sure who else in the class was doing this RX and battling for that 10 minute mark. Cline was on one side of me and on the other was Matt C. I figured he'd be well under 10 minutes for this workout, so no point trying to keep up with him. Nate and Mike C were a little further away from me, but I had no idea how fast they tended to do this workout. Erik, Phani, and Danielle were down towards the front of the gym, too far away to really use as motivation. I needed to do this one on my own.
Giulz eventually got us started on the row and I kept my usual pace over the course of the 1,000 meters. I knew Cline was going to hop off his rower way before me, so I ignored him for the most part. (Note: With about 100 meters left, I got curious as to how much more Cline had left to row. I turned my head and he immediately let go of his handle and jumped off his rower. I should never have looked.) My goal is always 4:00 for a calm 1,000 meter row and I did a bit better than that, wrapping things up in the 3:50-3:55 range. I went to my empty barbell and started doing fast thrusters. Somehow these end up feeling worse and worse every time, even though I am now prepared for the fact that they will suck. I did 20 and placed the barbell on the floor. Two more sets of 15 and I could move on to the pull-up rig with likely 4 minutes or so to go. Except I wasn't strong enough mentally to make that happen. 10 reps later, I was putting down my barbell again. I completed two more sets of 10 to finish the thrusters. I likely had spent too much time here, so I needed to go faster than expected on the pull-ups.
Despite breaking up the thrusters more, I was still exhausted when I got to the pull-up rig. All of that holiday food may not have registered on the scale, but I had a suspicion it was registering now. I tried to replicate what I had done during Wolverine: two sets of 2 reps at a time, with as short of a break as possible in between. I got 4 reps, then rested. Made it to 8 reps, then rested again. I did a set of 2 to get to 10, but my second set of 2 fell apart on the second rep. After 11 reps, I needed to do 19 singles to finish. My failure on the 12th rep broke my spirit a bit, which is precisely why I avoid pushing along in workouts when I think I'm going to fail on a rep. That failed rep immediately introduces the thought "uh oh, am I all done?" into your mind. And when you are as tired as I was at this stage, it seems very possible that you're not going to be able to finish.
A longer break was needed before I began my single reps. I tried to string them together in sets, but those sets ended up being relatively small. Before I got to 20 reps, I glanced back at the clock and saw that 10 minutes wasn't happening on this day. In fact, I was going to need to turn things around just to stay under 11 minutes. From that point forward, I didn't look at the clock. I did my best to keep things moving on the pull-up bar. I heard more and more voices cheering me on, always a bad sign because it indicates they have been finished for a while. Most people take a good 10-15 seconds (if not more) to catch their breath before they go and play cheerleader. Eventually I made my way to rep #30, twirling around to look at the clock after it was complete. Final time: 11:10.
It was another disappointing finish to this workout and it made me once again think about why I struggle so much with it. My newest conclusion: that I haven't considered how much energy is needed to jump up to the high bar for the pull-ups at the end. Usually I don't mind doing quick singles for pull-ups, because my legs are the strongest part of my body. But at the end of Jackie, I don't think my legs have any desire to jump up to the bar over and over again. Throw in that I hate pull-ups and that my core is destroyed by this stage and I think it all adds up to a lot of time needed on the pull-up bar. The solution? For this workout more than any other, I think I need to string larger sets of pull-ups. It's just too difficult to jump up to the high bar over and over again at the end of this WOD. I'll try that out next time Jackie gets programmed.
We did have a mini-cashout afterwards. We had to attempt weighted pull-ups and record the highest weight we could successfully complete a rep with. It's been a long time since I've tried this. It was back when I had nothing resembling a kipping pull-up. I put on two one-pound ankle weights and tried to do a pull-up on the monkey bars. Couldn't even do that. So if I managed any sort of weighted pull-up, it would be my first. There were vests galore, so I grabbed one that didn't look quite as bulky as the rest and weighted it on the scale we have at the gym. 31 pounds. That was a little more than I really wanted, but I figured if I got it on my first try, I could call it a night. I jumped up to the high bar, swung, kipped, and got my chin over the bar. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. My beginner's luck even deluded me into thinking I could get a rep with a 55 pound KB hanging from my waist. That attempt did not go well. All I got out of it was a big bruise on the inside of my right knee when the KB ricocheted off of it. No matter, I was more than happy with a score of 31 pounds to finish up my night.
Tuesday preview: A long workout including burpees (boo!), rope climbs (yay!), and double unders (it's complicated).
Last week's weigh-in: 207.4 pounds
This week's weigh-in: 207.0 pounds
What? How? Never mind, I don't want to know how. I simply want to live in a world where I eat like I did over Thanksgiving and I somehow lose weight. Hallelujah!
I returned to the gym on Monday night to take on Jackie for the last time in 2016. Jackie is a WOD that I have struggled with because it contains a lot of pull-ups. At least that's what I've told myself. The truth is that it's a tough workout overall that happens to end with a bunch of pull-ups. Here's what the WOD looks like:
"Jackie"
1,000 meter row
50 thrusters (45)
30 pull-ups
The first time I attempted Jackie, we did it with a 10 minute time cap. I thought I might be able to sneak under the cap because the row would take about 4 minutes and those were some light thrusters. The pull-ups would take a long time, but if I could finish the thrusters in, say, 2 minutes, I'd have 4 minutes to do 30 pull-ups. Not impossible, right?
Wrong! The thrusters were worse than I imagined. I tried to slowly churn through them so that I wasn't too tired for the pull-ups, but that strategy failed. The next time I did Jackie, I broke the thrusters up into smaller sets, but that didn't work either. On one of my last sets, I did discover that it felt better to do the thrusters quickly, so I made a mental note to try that when Jackie popped up again. The next attempt went a little better (under 11 minutes finally!), but it still felt like I wasn't close to threatening 10 minutes. An attempt in May was a regression as I finished over 11 minutes again. What was I doing wrong? There must have been some reason that so many others were able to keep this workout under 10 minutes yet I could not.
The short answer is that this workout is more devilish than it looks. Crossfitters convulse in fear when the name Fran is brought up, yet the name Jackie doesn't seem to have the same effect, even though she clearly seems to be a first cousin. Fran involves heavier thrusters (less reps) and more pull-ups. Jackie tacks on a 1,000 meter row to the festivities. With Fran, you go back and forth between the thrusters and the pull-ups, with the rep count decreasing each round. With Jackie, you have this cruel domino effect. The row takes the energy out of your legs, which you need for the thrusters. As you focus on how much your legs hurt during the "light" thrusters, you don't notice how much your arms and your core are being worked. That is, until you get to the pull-up bar, where those two parts of your body get tested. In Fran, you're sprinting the whole time, so you're constantly aware of how much everything sucks. Jackie is more subtle. You understand during the workout that it's terrible, but you don't appreciate how bad it was until the very end of it.
There were 8 of us in the 6:30 class with Coach Giulz. I was happy about that because in a bigger class, there could be a lot of congestion on the pull-up bar. If I was going to make a run at 10 minutes, I couldn't afford to wait on someone else swinging on the low bar that crossed with my high bar. We did some warmup, but with this workout, the warmup tends to go by fast. Rowing is rowing. The thruster in the WOD involves an empty barbell, so you don't have to spend time working up to the weight you'll use in the workout. And these were your garden-variety pull-ups, so we only had to go through our typical routine of doing shoulder activations, kip swings, and then kipping pull-ups to get ready.
I would normally try and stay with Cline during this workout, but he couldn't do thrusters on this night, substituting 65 pound front squats in for them. I wasn't sure who else in the class was doing this RX and battling for that 10 minute mark. Cline was on one side of me and on the other was Matt C. I figured he'd be well under 10 minutes for this workout, so no point trying to keep up with him. Nate and Mike C were a little further away from me, but I had no idea how fast they tended to do this workout. Erik, Phani, and Danielle were down towards the front of the gym, too far away to really use as motivation. I needed to do this one on my own.
Giulz eventually got us started on the row and I kept my usual pace over the course of the 1,000 meters. I knew Cline was going to hop off his rower way before me, so I ignored him for the most part. (Note: With about 100 meters left, I got curious as to how much more Cline had left to row. I turned my head and he immediately let go of his handle and jumped off his rower. I should never have looked.) My goal is always 4:00 for a calm 1,000 meter row and I did a bit better than that, wrapping things up in the 3:50-3:55 range. I went to my empty barbell and started doing fast thrusters. Somehow these end up feeling worse and worse every time, even though I am now prepared for the fact that they will suck. I did 20 and placed the barbell on the floor. Two more sets of 15 and I could move on to the pull-up rig with likely 4 minutes or so to go. Except I wasn't strong enough mentally to make that happen. 10 reps later, I was putting down my barbell again. I completed two more sets of 10 to finish the thrusters. I likely had spent too much time here, so I needed to go faster than expected on the pull-ups.
Despite breaking up the thrusters more, I was still exhausted when I got to the pull-up rig. All of that holiday food may not have registered on the scale, but I had a suspicion it was registering now. I tried to replicate what I had done during Wolverine: two sets of 2 reps at a time, with as short of a break as possible in between. I got 4 reps, then rested. Made it to 8 reps, then rested again. I did a set of 2 to get to 10, but my second set of 2 fell apart on the second rep. After 11 reps, I needed to do 19 singles to finish. My failure on the 12th rep broke my spirit a bit, which is precisely why I avoid pushing along in workouts when I think I'm going to fail on a rep. That failed rep immediately introduces the thought "uh oh, am I all done?" into your mind. And when you are as tired as I was at this stage, it seems very possible that you're not going to be able to finish.
A longer break was needed before I began my single reps. I tried to string them together in sets, but those sets ended up being relatively small. Before I got to 20 reps, I glanced back at the clock and saw that 10 minutes wasn't happening on this day. In fact, I was going to need to turn things around just to stay under 11 minutes. From that point forward, I didn't look at the clock. I did my best to keep things moving on the pull-up bar. I heard more and more voices cheering me on, always a bad sign because it indicates they have been finished for a while. Most people take a good 10-15 seconds (if not more) to catch their breath before they go and play cheerleader. Eventually I made my way to rep #30, twirling around to look at the clock after it was complete. Final time: 11:10.
It was another disappointing finish to this workout and it made me once again think about why I struggle so much with it. My newest conclusion: that I haven't considered how much energy is needed to jump up to the high bar for the pull-ups at the end. Usually I don't mind doing quick singles for pull-ups, because my legs are the strongest part of my body. But at the end of Jackie, I don't think my legs have any desire to jump up to the bar over and over again. Throw in that I hate pull-ups and that my core is destroyed by this stage and I think it all adds up to a lot of time needed on the pull-up bar. The solution? For this workout more than any other, I think I need to string larger sets of pull-ups. It's just too difficult to jump up to the high bar over and over again at the end of this WOD. I'll try that out next time Jackie gets programmed.
We did have a mini-cashout afterwards. We had to attempt weighted pull-ups and record the highest weight we could successfully complete a rep with. It's been a long time since I've tried this. It was back when I had nothing resembling a kipping pull-up. I put on two one-pound ankle weights and tried to do a pull-up on the monkey bars. Couldn't even do that. So if I managed any sort of weighted pull-up, it would be my first. There were vests galore, so I grabbed one that didn't look quite as bulky as the rest and weighted it on the scale we have at the gym. 31 pounds. That was a little more than I really wanted, but I figured if I got it on my first try, I could call it a night. I jumped up to the high bar, swung, kipped, and got my chin over the bar. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. My beginner's luck even deluded me into thinking I could get a rep with a 55 pound KB hanging from my waist. That attempt did not go well. All I got out of it was a big bruise on the inside of my right knee when the KB ricocheted off of it. No matter, I was more than happy with a score of 31 pounds to finish up my night.
Tuesday preview: A long workout including burpees (boo!), rope climbs (yay!), and double unders (it's complicated).
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