Frogger

Workout date: 4/20/17

It's a shame when I have to write a post bitching about something that went down in class that I didn't care for.  I would much rather use my blog to talk about how much I suck and how awesome the people that I work out with are.  (Come on, you know that's the general theme of this blog.)  However, there are times when I wouldn't be painting an accurate picture of my experience at the gym if I left out incidents that totally ruined the workout for me.  One such incident happened on Thursday.

Perhaps I set myself up for this situation by attending a class that I almost never go to.  I had a meeting at 6:30pm that I couldn't miss, so I came into the gym on the early side, hitting up the 4:30 class.  Jill A did a double take when she saw me there because I tend to come in for the latest class of the night.  Many others must have had plans later in the evening as well because there was a big class assembled for Coach Aimee, 15 of us in total.  It is always difficult managing a class that big in our gym, but it was close to impossible with the WOD programmed for Thursday:

Thursday's WOD:
5 rounds
4 clean and jerks (205/135)
6 bar muscle-ups
40 ft handstand walk

20 heavy clean and jerks, 30 bar muscle-ups, and 200 feet of walking on your hands?  No problem!  When I first looked at this workout, I thought the following:

• The RX weight is really aggressive for 20 clean and jerks.  It's possible I could do them, but there's no way I'll be able to do the other stuff in the workout if I do.  I'll need to scale down the weight some.
• I've never done more than 9 bar muscle-ups in a workout before, so getting 30 of them (in conjunction with everything else going on) seemed like a stretch.  Using Giulz's recent advice from the workout with handstand push-ups, I was going to scale the number down.  I was torn between doing 3 or 4 per round.  (Note: Once I saw how crowded the class was, it was easy to see that 3 per round was the better option.)
• I can't walk on my hands, so I was going to do whatever scale Aimee suggested to us.

That was a lot of mental accounting already and I hadn't even really considered the logistics of it all.  15 people meant 15 barbells.  It meant 15 people swinging around on the pull-up rig (doing bar muscle-ups or some variation on pull-ups).  It meant 15 people needing a lane to walk on their hands. Okay, it definitely didn't mean that because most of us weren't going to be doing the handstand walk. But the scale was almost certainly going to involve getting upside-down next to the wall, which meant we'd be under the pull-up rig.  That area was about to become very congested.

Aimee did her best to avoid gridlock by announcing that we would all be working with a partner.  One partner would go when the WOD officially started and the other partner would begin two minutes later.  By staggering the group this way, there was less chance that we'd all be bumping into one another.  At least in round one.  And truth be told, I didn't even make it through round one without being impeded.  I also managed to impede someone else.  It got ugly quick.

Before we delve into the chaos, allow me to give you a little more info on the lay of the land.  Matt B was in class and he was the ideal person to share a barbell with.  Neither of us thought 205 pounds was a good idea for the clean and jerks, so we settled on 185 instead.  With at least 8 barbells in use, Aimee asked if a couple of the groups would mind working from the platform.  That left you farther from the pull-up rig, but this was a longer workout and that extra distance wasn't going to matter much in the end.  Matt and I agreed to take up a spot on the platform.  Aimee recommended chest-to-bar pull-ups for those who couldn't do bar muscle-ups, so for the second stage of this workout, there was going to be an assortment of people doing either bar muscle-ups, chest-to-bar pull-ups, or banded chest-to-bar pull-ups.  For the last segment of the workout, Aimee recommended wall walk-ins if we could not do the handstand walk.  Wall walk-ins were just like kick-ups on to the wall, only you kicked up further away from the wall.  With your feet on the wall and your body somewhat hyperextended, you walk forward on your hands until you reach the wall.  Having your feet on the wall gives you stability as you get used to walking forward on your hands.

So to recap: you had a row of barbells on the platform, followed by a row of barbells on the main floor of the gym, followed by a lane for the people doing the handstand walk, followed by the pull-up rig.  The pull-up rig would be used for bar muscle-ups and chest-to-bar pull-ups.  The area under the rig would be used for wall walk-ins.  Those doing wall walk-ins would need a bit of a walking start to kick-up, so they would need to stand in the handstand walk lane to begin.  Got all that?  Don't worry, it was just as confusing when you were in the middle of it.

As is usually the case when Matt and I team up, Matt decided to go first.  He moved through his 4 clean and jerks quickly, giving me the false impression that they might be the "easy" part of this workout.  (They most certainly were not.)  He then headed off to the pull-up rig to do chest-to-bar pull-ups.  I waited for the clock to hit 2:00 and then I did my first clean and jerk.  I've been doing squat cleans all the time when we've had strength WODs, but because I was supposed to be moving fast in this workout, I thought power cleans were the way to go.  And I had just watched Matt do 4 power cleans like they were nothing.  I guess I forgot that he was much stronger than me.  I barely got my first power clean up to my shoulders (maybe I should have stuck with squat cleans) before completing the jerk.  I did three more tough reps like that and immediately became concerned as to how I'd do 16 more of those.  Instead of worrying about that, I should have been more worried about the bar muscle-ups.  I might have thought the clean and jerks were hard, but that was nothing compared to the trouble that awaited me at the pull-up rig.

Matt still making the power cleans look easy in a later round

When I got my first bar muscle-up during the Open, I called it a fluke.  When I got 9 bar muscle-ups during the "do 30 bar muscle-ups in 10 minutes" workout, I dropped the fluke label, but I wasn't convinced that I definitively had bar muscle-ups.  When I got 9 more in a WOD that involved other movements, I finally let myself believe that I could do bar muscle-ups.  And what happens whenever I develop confidence in my own abilities?  The universe decides to remind me that I shouldn't be confident about anything.  I got to the pull-up rig believing that I could get 3 bar muscle-ups each round in a timely manner.  I might not be successful on all of my attempts, but I wasn't going to stall out here.  I went to do my first bar muscle-up, got my right side partially over the bar, but it wasn't enough to complete the movement.  It's okay.  That was close.  Just need to push down on the bar more and be patient.

Wait a second...why does my inner monologue voice suddenly sound like Aimee Lyons?  Oh that's because she was standing right alongside of me when I made this attempt.  And each of my next two attempts.  Aimee kept repeating the same advice to me (because I kept making the same mistakes) before moving on to help someone else.  As I thought about getting my form right, a girl that I didn't know suddenly appeared in front of me.  She was one of the few people in class I didn't know.  During the warmup, she wasn't using the rig directly in front of me and Matt.  I know that because we would have kicked her (not intentionally) had she been there.  I'm not sure where she had completed her first round, but she was now setting up shop in my way.  She began to set up a band, then decided against the one in her hands.  While she went off for another band, I made a 4th attempt at a bar muscle-up.  Rejected again.  This was a nightmare.  As I took some time before my next attempt, the girl I didn't know came back with a new band.  She stood a couple feet in front of me, seeming not to care that she was in my path.  Things were about to get worse.  I had taken so long trying to do the bar muscle-ups that Matt had caught up to me.  I felt awful about slowing him up, so I made two decisions at that point:

1. I was switching to chest-to-bar pull-ups
2. I was letting Matt have our pull-up bar

I have to give Matt credit because he didn't care as much as I did about kicking that girl.  He was nice enough to spread his legs so that when he swung forward, he wouldn't directly kick her.  He actually didn't hit her at all as far as I could tell.  But he was super close to bumping into her each time he swung forward on the 3 chest-to-bar pull-ups he did.  With 3 done, he told me to go.  I knew I could knock out 6 chest-to-bar pull-ups quickly, so I did all of mine and then I got out of Matt's way.  I went off to find some real estate for the wall walk-ins.

Matt and I were both looking to stay out of everyone's way during the wall walk-ins, so we came up with two alternative areas to do them.  The first was over where the rings are.  There are two walls over there (one large, one small) and we'd be on the opposite side of the chaos over at the pull-up rig. Unfortunately, we weren't the only ones to come up with this idea.  As I headed that way to complete my first round, I found that it was totally ocupado.  The second idea was to do the wall walk-ins on the columns that separate the sections of the pull-up rig.  We still might be in the way a little bit, but at least we wouldn't be right underneath the main portions of the pull-up rig.  The downside of this idea was that the columns were smaller in width than the wall, so you had to be more precise when getting upside-down to use them.  This is where I did my 4 wall walk-ins to complete round one.  Did I slide off the left side of the column while upside-down during one of my attempts?  Naturally.  I also had some additional struggles that had nothing to do with the column.  To imitate the action of walking on your hands, you're supposed to take tiny "steps" as you walk your hands towards the wall.  I didn't have enough control in this first round to make that happen, so each of my wall walk-ins consisted of kicking up on to the wall and then taking two large "steps", one with each hand.

My time at the end of my first round was north of 5 minutes.  I was hoping to keep my time under 20 minutes (4 minutes per round), so I was way off the pace I needed already.  I thought I could still make up the time though, as I wouldn't be wasting any more of it on bar muscle-up attempts.  Rounds 2 and 3 were faster and I managed to re-create the initial stagger that me and Matt had started with.  We were no longer in danger of bumping into each other at the same station.  Bumping into other people was still a problem.  After I completed my clean and jerks, I had to weave past the next row of barbells and then the handstand walking row before trying to avoid anyone who might be in my path on the pull-up bar.  Then I would try and stay out of the way of other people while trying to secure a spot to do the wall walk-ins.  It felt very much like the gym version of Frogger, although more often than not I was getting T-boned by a truck or eaten by an alligator.

KOP chaos: from left to right, Andrew between bar muscle-ups, me about to do a wall walk-in, Maggie mid-handstand walk, Jill about to handstand walk, and Matt on his way to do chest-to-bar pull-ups.  Not pictured: the two rows of barbells to the right (see earlier picture).

I was drawing closer to that 20 minute pace I was aiming for as I began round four.  The power cleans were starting to feel more natural so I got through the clean and jerks faster in this round than I had any of the previous three.  Then I ran into my nemesis at the pull-up bar.  I was in between reps of chest-to-bar pull-ups when she walked in front of me again.  This intrusion was even more infuriating.  It was one thing to call an audible and choose the area right in front of me as her new place to do banded pull-ups.  It was something else to be done with her workout and standing in the way as she tried to remove her band.  It is generally considered bad form to put your equipment away while your classmates are still completing the workout.  I don't even know what you'd call blocking someone's path as they are working out so you could put your stuff away.  Rude is the only thing that comes to mind.  Completely frustrated at this point, I moved to another area to finish my chest-to-bar pull-ups.

That was my last interaction with her during this WOD.  I completed round four right around the 16 minute mark, so I just needed another solid round to creep under the 20 minute mark.  I brought over my rage from the pull-up bar to the barbell.  I ripped the barbell from the floor and angrily popped it up overhead before slamming it to the ground.  I did that three times in a row, getting some cheers from Andrew and Neil as I went on a weightlifting hissy fit.  The fourth rep was more of a struggle, but I got it done.  I was very tired at this point, but I could see the finish line.  I found an open bar for my chest-to-bar pull-ups.  Then I went back to one of the columns to complete my last set of wall walk-ins.  (Note: My wall walk-ins also improved as the rounds went on.  Towards the end, I was taking four small "steps" rather than two large ones, which was more in line with how the movement was meant to be done.)  Final time: 19:07.

I spent most of the next 5 minutes bitching to Matt about the girl who had no issues with being in our way during the WOD.  I'm not sure how often she was in his way, but he seemed to deal with it much better than I did.  After I was done venting, I went over to cheer on Jill A.  She was doing this workout RX and was having some problems with the handstand walk towards the end of her workout.    She definitely didn't have any problems with the bar muscle-ups, belting out two sets of three consecutive reps in her final round.  Her last trek down the floor on her hands looked better than the one she did in the fourth round, although she looked as angry about her handstand walk form as I had been about my neighbor.  She stuck with it though and finished up in about 27 minutes.

This was the end of a frustrating week at the gym for me.  On Monday, a classmate had snagged the rower I set up for no good reason.  And in this workout, I had a classmate repeatedly encroach on my space after we had all picked out the areas we were going to work in so that we didn't bump into one another.  I tend to go out of my way to avoid interfering with my classmates' workouts when I'm at the gym, but I'm beginning to think that I should just stand my ground if other folks aren't going to respect my space.  I dunno.  Maybe it was just a bad week.  Here's hoping this isn't an issue that persists at the gym.

Monday preview: After a weekend away in Atlantic City, I am greeted by Fran.  (Fran and I are not close.)  I also work on my snatch at Open Strength.  Plus a recap of one gentleman's triumph at the Festivus Games.