One Rope Good, One Rope Bad

Workout date: 3/1/17

The Open has caused me to go from working out five times a week to only coming in four times a week.  Because the Open workouts are likely to be demanding, it makes little sense for me to do a workout on Thursday and then attempt the Open workout on Friday.  So for the next month, Thursdays are going to be rest days.  (I think a lot of the other athletes in the gym do something similar.)  That meant the workout on Wednesday would be my last before finding out what awaited us in 17.2.  Dave Castro had posted a "clue" on his Instagram page with regards to 17.2, but it was another one of those extremely vague, probably means nothing types of clues.  It looked like two fish under water to me.  Removing "fish" and "water" from that description left you with "two under", so I assumed this was Castro's way of telling us we'd be doing double unders on Friday.  The Wednesday workout would give me the opportunity to practice them:

Wednesday WOD:
12 minute AMRAP
3 rope climbs (15')
12 push presses (135/95)
50 double unders

Hey now!  A workout with a lot of rope climbs, a barbell, and double unders?  That sounded like something I could get behind.  It was also only 12 minutes long.  Medium-length workouts were the ones I tended to perform best at.  All the tea leaves seemed to be pointing in the right direction.  How could this go wrong?  (It goes wrong.)

There were only two of us in Coach Jenna's 7:30 class, but it was her two favorite athletes!  At least that's what Jenna told me and Julie Foucher.  Josh M was there for a while as well although he was just lingering around after the 6:30 class.  He still had plenty of energy though.  For some reason he was consumed with climbing the rope upside down.  It was actually pretty impressive to watch him sort of caterpillar his way up to the 15' mark feet first.  He urged me to try it, but I did not have a death wish.  I was perfectly happy climbing the rope right side up.  Julie also wanted to climb the rope, but she is too far along in her pregnancy to do so safely.  She was going to do rope pulls instead.

I had looked at scores from earlier in the day and saw that 3 full rounds was a strong score.  That meant 4 minutes per round.  I figured 3 rope climbs would take me a minute at most.  The 12 push presses would take about 20 seconds if I strung them all, closer to 45 seconds if I broke them into two sets.  The double unders would take about a minute to do.  Adding that up, it seemed like 3 rounds shouldn't be that difficult for me.  Was this simply my workout, one where I could legitimately expect to put up one of the top scores of the day?  Possibly.  However I thought it would be better to skip doing this RX in lieu of trying to complete 4 full rounds with a lighter push press weight.  17.1 told me that my cardio needed improving, so I wanted this to be a lighter sprint where I'd have to keep moving really fast to reach my goal.

Everything seemed fine during the warmup.  Climbed the rope easily enough.  Jenna corrected my form on the push press as I was exaggerating shooting my head through as I pressed the barbell overhead.  I did a few reps with 115 pounds and it felt like a weight I could do 12 reps of, at least in round one.  I might need two sets for the later rounds, but that was okay as long as I kept my break short.  At the jump rope, we started with single unders and then moved to double unders.  I might have hit myself with the rope once during the warmup, but I felt very comfortable with my double unders.  My only concern prior to the workout was my mental state.  To get 4 rounds, I needed to attack this workout and continue to be aggressive for all 12 minutes.  If I did that, I'd be fine.  Or so I thought...

Jenna got us started and I did my first rope climb.  My feet slipped a little right as I was about to reach up and hit the 15' mark.  I had to pause for a second and fix that problem, but it didn't slow me down too much.  If anything, it was a reminder that I couldn't ignore my form just because I was trying to do this workout quickly.  Message received!  I did two more quick rope climbs and walked over to my barbell.  I picked up the 115 pounds and began doing push presses.  I got through 10 of them before it started to hurt, but I wasn't putting it down with two reps to go.  I strung all 12 reps and moved to my jump rope.  I only got a couple of reps with my first set, something I attributed to the fact that I was rushing.  I was trying to average one round every three minutes and with the later rounds likely to be slower, I needed this first round to be lightning fast.  My second set wasn't much better than the first, causing me to stop and take a break.  I needed to be calm.  When I felt like I had calmed down, I started again.  The third set was better, but I still only got about a dozen reps.  This was a disaster compared to my round of 50 double unders at the end of the Filthy Fifty a week ago.  I had done 35 minutes of work in that WOD when I got to my jump rope, but I rallied and completed the 50 double unders with a set of 15 and a set of 35.  That form was nowhere to be found today.

I had to scrape my way through medium-sized sets to reach the end of the round.  The good news is that the clock showed only 2:40 had elapsed despite all of my double under troubles.  I might have been struggling with the rope that I owned, but I was fine with the rope that hung from the gym's ceiling.  My next three rope climbs were all fast, though I needed a little more of a breather between ascents.  When I returned to my barbell, I knew I was going to need to break the 12 reps into two sets, so I led off with a set of seven before completing the push presses with a set of five.  I was really happy with how round two was going.  If I improved on my double unders even a little bit, I was going to finish this round in under three minutes.  It was time to put round one out of my mind and perform double unders like I knew I could.

Or not.  Somehow round two went even worse than round one.  Couldn't put together 10 in a row.  Kept hitting my sneakers over and over again.  I took a few profanity breaks along the way.  I just didn't get it.  I've been practicing double unders and I felt like I was at a stage now where I could reliably do sets in the 20-25 rep range.  That wasn't happening in this workout.  I tried everything I could think of to make things right, but for whatever reason, I simply didn't have it on this night.  By the time I finished round two, 7 minutes had gone by.  Four rounds was off the table and three rounds was very much in doubt.

My aggravation with the double unders carried over into the rope climbs.  I think I was flustered more than tired, but I had to stop after the second pull on my second and third climbs in round three.  The good news is that I had learned from the mistake I had made on the very first climb of this workout.  I was able to stop 12 feet up in the air without much concern because my feet had formed a tight clamp on the rope.  I wasn't going to fall or start slipping down the rope.  I was locked in.  When I felt ready, I did the last pull for each of those climbs, smacked the 15 foot mark, and slid back down to the floor.

My third round of push presses went exactly the same way my second round had gone.  I started off with a set of 7 reps and finished them off with a set of 5 reps.  That left me with nearly 3 minutes to do 50 double unders and complete round three.  No sweat, right?  On any day but this one.  I encountered all of the same problems that plagued me in round two.  I think my best set was 9 reps in a row.  There were more profanity breaks.  I started to look at the clock and began wondering whether I was going to fall short of 3 rounds.  That would have been pathetic.  50 double unders should have taken me about a minute to complete.  Now I was doubting whether I could complete 50 in three minutes.  If I couldn't finish 50 reps in 3 minutes, then I was in deep trouble when they showed up in the Open.

I used up most of that 3 minutes to get to 50 reps and the end of round three, but I made it.  There was about 20 seconds left when I got to the rope, which was plenty of time for 1 climb.  I'm pretty fast on the rope, but not fast enough to squeeze two climbs into that small window.  Final score: 3+1.

I have had my share of workouts where I laid on the floor afterwards disappointed in my performance.  This wasn't one of them.  I wasn't disappointed at the end of this.  I was furious.  I couldn't help but be mad when this fiasco was over.  There was no doubt in my mind that I could have finished 4 rounds if I was even remotely competent on the double unders.  This was a skill I had spent a ton of time on, yet it had disappeared on me at the point in the year when I needed it most.  I left the gym on Wednesday night feeling like double unders were an absolute certainty for 17.2 on Friday.  Was there any chance I could remember how to do them over the next 48 hours?

Friday preview: 17.2 is announced and I get a reprieve on double unders.  The workout involves more dumbbells and plenty of gymnastics.  Ain't no one confusing me for Simone Biles.