The Split Clean

Workout date: 3/13/17

"You're only competing against yourself."

As much as I have enjoyed doing Crossfit over the years, they definitely throw in some whoppers along the way.  The idea that you're only competing against yourself might be at the top of the list.  Whether people openly admit it or not, every Crossfitter has their eye on at least one other person as they do the workout or when they scan the results from earlier in the day.  When the Open comes around, the competitive fires are ratcheted up even further.  HQ's biggest selling point for the Open seems to be the worldwide leaderboard, where you can finally learn how well you stack up against that 42 year old guy from Bulgaria that you will never meet.  Who wouldn't pay $20 for that info?

Then you have the intra-gym competitions during the Open.  At KOP, we split up into four or five teams and the same team wins all the time.  Hard to get too excited about that.  I take care of the spreadsheet that tracks the scoring for the team competition and in there is a tab that shows how everyone ranks individually.  With 114 people signed up from KOP this year, you can look at this tab and compare yourself against practically everyone in the gym.  Now there is a gold mine for the overly competitive amongst us.  (Guilty!)  And you don't have to pay a dime for that information.

Monday marks the last day that you can do the Open workout and I tend to get a stream of last-minute scores from Giulz.  These scores might be for people who couldn't do the workout until Monday or they might be for people who did the workout a second time in an attempt to improve their score.  On this Monday, most of the scores were of the re-do variety.  For 17.1 and 17.2, a couple of people were successful in improving their scores the second time they did the workout.  For 17.3, there were considerably more people who improved their scores during their encore performance.  There were people who were 10-15 reps under my score originally, but had crept within a few reps of me on their second attempt.  There were also some folks who had beaten me by a couple of reps on Friday, but they had found the strength on Monday to complete six rounds under 8 minutes, earning them a shot at the third barbell in the workout.  As I got more of these updated scores, the competitor in me went from "satisfied with Friday's score" to "determined to finish 6 rounds under the 8 minute time cap".  I talked myself into doing 17.3 again.

This is my 4th year of doing the Open and I should be wise enough at this point to know that there are really only two reasons to re-do an Open workout:

1. I completely screwed up a movement that I shouldn't have screwed up.  If I re-did the workout and showed even the smallest level of competence, my score would improve leaps and bounds.
2. I came tantalizingly close to extending the amount of time I'd get in the workout.  This is another instance where a small improvement would result in a much higher score.

Criterion #2 was true when I did 16.2 last year.  I should have gotten through the first round and earned 4 more minutes of time to work with, but I fell a couple of squat cleans short on my first attempt.  Those squat cleans were on the lighter side, so I knew it wasn't going to take much improvement to reach the second round.  On my next attempt at 16.2, I completed the first round and added 17 reps to my score.

I talked myself into believing that the same circumstances applied for 17.3, but the truth was that they didn't.  I was 7 reps from getting 4 extra minutes, but that included 5 fairly heavy squat snatches.  If I had kept going on Friday, I probably would have needed about 9 minutes and 15 seconds to get through round six.  Could I trim 75 seconds off of my Friday performance?  Seeing as that was one of my best Crossfit performances ever, the answer seemed to be no.  Yet there I was on Monday night, trying to convince myself that it was possible as long as I went much faster in the three rounds with the 95 pound barbell.

If I got through those first three rounds in about 2:30 (40 seconds faster than Friday) and didn't mess up on any of my squat snatches at 135 pounds, then maybe I could beat the time cap.  That math was still on the fuzzy side, but I made myself believe that it was possible.  The key was stringing all of the 95 pound squat snatches.  If I could do six in a row for each of the first three rounds, then 2:30 was a legit possibility.  (You've probably noticed a lot of if's by now and that's because this whole thing worked hypothetically.  In practice, it was a totally different story.)

Raj was nice enough to judge for me even though I was making her late for the 6:30 class.  I felt even worse about making her late as my second attempt at 17.3 played out.  The first round went perfectly. I did 6 quick singles of chest-to-bar pull-ups.  They were under control and about as efficient as I could do them.  Then I moved to the barbell and strung 6 squat snatches at 95 pounds.  Super!  Do that two more times and I would be in position to beat the time cap.  I moved through 6 more quick singles on the pull-up bar, but when I returned to my barbell, I knew I was screwed.  I had sprinted through the first 18 reps, leaving me unable to string the next set of 6 squat snatches.  I tried to remain calm, telling myself that three quick sets of two might leave me in good position still.  I did the first set of two, paused for a couple seconds, then went to do the next set.  Remember that part about not messing up any of my squat snatches at 135 pounds?  I should have just said that I couldn't afford to mess up any of my squat snatches period.  I botched the next rep at 95 pounds and less than 2 minutes into my re-do, I knew I wasn't going to finish 6 rounds.

I probably let that miss get to me as I remained frustrated the rest of the way.  There were several times where I wanted to stop as I knew I wasn't matching my score of 65 from Friday, but I felt like that would have been disrespectful to Raj who had taken the time to judge me.  The least I could do was keep pushing through the entire 8 minutes.  I had two misses on the squat snatches at 135.  I even had two no-reps while doing chest-to-bar pull-ups.  I was able to end things on a good note though.  With time left for one last lift, I got under 135 pounds and stood it up.  Final score: 56.  Stop re-doing Open workouts, Dave!

I hung around for a while to watch the 6:30 class.  Then I got some extra skill work in.  I spent most of that time doing handstand push-ups with Josh M.  Josh was helping me with my speed as he is very fast when he's moving through his handstand push-ups.  I began by doing sets of 5 fast reps using 2 ab-mats.  I would do a set, then Josh would do a set of real handstand push-ups.  Eventually I dropped down to 1 ab-mat, where I did quick sets of 3.  Josh transitioned to strict handstand push-ups while I worked with 1 ab-mat.  Finally I got rid of the last ab-mat and tried to do real handstand push-ups with speed.  I was able to do 2 in a row quickly, but couldn't make a third rep happen.  I did two sets like that before calling it a night on working upside-down.

As I was wrapping up my handstand push-up practice, I saw Danielle working on clean and jerks.  Danielle, Ashley, and Raj had stuck around to work on some WODs for the upcoming Girls On Girls competition.  Danielle was resisting the urge to squat clean by starfishing her power clean.  For those unfamiliar with the starfish, it is when you spread your feet apart about as far as you can in an effort to avoid squatting.  I can still remember doing a lifting WOD where I kept trying to power clean everything.  Jim C came over and told me to "stop with the starfish crap" since I knew how to squat clean.  He was right.  It would have been better to go with the squat clean, but I was still at a stage where I was resistant to it.  I think that's the stage Danielle is at right now.  She kept starfishing and missing her cleans, even though she was getting the barbell plenty high enough.  I told her that she needed to do a squat clean.  Her response was "I know, I know" before promising me that she would squat clean her next attempt.  Danielle walked up to the barbell for her next attempt and did something I had never seen before.  Rather than performing the promised squat clean, she did what I jokingly called a split clean.  (Note: Apparently split cleans are a real thing.  I was just too ignorant to know that before this happened.)  Her legs split even further apart than they had on her prior attempts and her feet were pointing in random directions instead of pointing straight ahead.  Somehow she worked her feet back inwards and was able to hold on to the barbell.  The whole thing looked painful and I certainly would not have the flexibility to pull it off.  She made it work though.  Unfortunately, she was laughing so much (I was too!) that she couldn't complete the jerk.

I moved on to the pull-up rig where I wanted to work on toes-to-bar.  I needed to get used to kipping properly again.  In the past, I've always had to violently stomp down in order to get that kip working. It was never long before my core got tired and I'd have to revert to single reps.  When I've watched the Open announcements or Regionals, I've seen the top athletes kip toes-to-bar without that violent stomp.  There had to be some trick to it.  (Or maybe they had abs and I didn't.)  As I was playing around with doing sets, I managed to get into a fairly steady kip without the stomping motion.  The trick was that your body had to stay engaged in the movement even if you weren't stomping.  I think there is a natural tendency to be engaged as you bring your toes up to the bar, but when you are dropping your feet back below you, you can't just let gravity do the work.  I got 9 reps in a row without stomping.  Felt like a mini-breakthrough for me.  I definitely need a lot of practice with it though.

The last thing I worked on was double unders.  It seemed likely that they were going to make an appearance in one of the final two Open workouts, so it made sense to start preparing.  After a few sets that were less than 15 reps in length, I managed a long set where I got 55 in a row.  My form began to deteriorate around the 40-45 rep mark, indicating that my stamina is not quite what it was when I was practicing these all the time.  Guess I should be grateful that my double under ability hasn't gone away completely now that I rarely spend time practicing them.

Wednesday preview: After a snow day on Tuesday, I return to the gym on Wednesday for clean and jerks and a cash out of double unders and toes-to-bar.  Good thing I practiced those Monday night!