Tia The Skia

Workout date: 4/25/17

While the Festivus Games are usually a well-run event, they often have trouble getting the rankings online.  I'm not sure why that is so difficult since we have competitions at KOP all the time and have updated rankings available almost immediately (brag), but this has been an issue for the three years I've known about the event.  The reason I was pestering Cline for updates on Saturday was because I couldn't go on the Festivus Games website and find out for myself.  The day after the competition, there was a note on their website saying that full rankings would be available on Tuesday.  They were true to their word.

The reason I was looking for these rankings was because I wanted to see how Cline would have fared had he been in the Novice division.  The standards used for the Novice and Masters divisions were the same, so I could calculate where he would have finished in Novice if I saw the scores and rankings from each of the workouts.  (The standards for the Intermediate division were tougher, so I couldn't say for certain how he would have fared had he signed up for Intermediate again.)  As I waited on my coffee at Starbucks, I did some quick math and determined that Cline would have finished 3rd, meaning he would have finished on the podium there too.  So to recap: Cline beat the men's Masters competition, won the 1st place medal for the female Novice competition, and would have been on the podium for the male Novice competition.  That's quite the day.

I sent him a message relaying what I had found before expressing to him that I was shocked at how fast the times were in the morning classes for the partner cash-out we'd be doing later that night.  The main part of Tuesday's WOD was finding a 3RM push press.  That was followed up by this cash-out:

Partner cash-out:
10 rope climbs (15')
150 double unders
50 calories on assault bike or ski erg

Some of the teams from the early classes completed this cash-out in under 8 minutes.  That seemed incredibly fast to me.  One rope climb every 15 seconds equaled 2:30 spent at that station.  One double under per second equaled 2:30 spent at that station.  And me and Neil had needed 2:24 to accumulate 50 calories on the assault bike in a recent cash-out.  Add all that up and you get 7:24.  Even that seemed like an aggressive estimate for this cash-out.  Cline's response to me was that each of these elements would be easier than I thought because you get to rest while your partner was working.  That made sense, but I was guessing that me and whoever my partner ended up being would need close to 9 minutes to complete all of that work.

The assault bike wasn't the only option you could choose for the cash-out and it seemed like people were finally warming up to KOP's newest sadistic toy, the ski erg.  When I got to the gym for Dudes After Dark, I saw several people using the ski erg.  I guess in this cash-out it might be considered the lesser of two evils.  Then I saw something I had yet to see since the ski ergs showed up in the gym.  While the 6 of us taking part in Dudes After Dark were warming up, I watched Caitlyn and Tia do some sort of tabata workout on the ski erg.  It was the first non-mandatory use of the ski erg that I had witnessed.  They continued on for a while before Caitlyn decided she had enough.  Tia was a machine though.  I'm not sure how many more rounds she did after Caitlyn stopped, but she seemed very determined on that machine.

Eventually I had to turn my attention away from the ski erg and focus on the task at hand.  The Prodigy, Bryan, Actuary Mike, Noel, Cline, and I had to get to work finding a 3RM push press.  My best coming into this class was 195 pounds for three reps, so the goal was to try and hit 200 pounds today.  For a lot of these strength-based WODs, we are asked to do 7 working sets, but this was the second consecutive one that I had been to where we were doing 6 instead.  Maybe that's the new thing.  I decided that I would once again just do one warmup set (95 pounds) before heading into my progression towards 200 pounds (115-135-155-175-190-200).

I have a bad habit of falling behind on time in strength sessions, so I was moving quickly through my sets early on.  Instead of worrying about time, I probably should have focused more on my form.  Not that it mattered in the early stages of this workout.  The sets at 95, 115, and 135 were very light and I blitzed through them as fast as I could.  Should I have been keeping the barbell on my body as I transitioned between reps?  Yes.  Could I still handle the weight using mostly my arms if my form sucked?  Yes again.  As I racked the barbell after the set at 135, I scolded myself a bit.  I knew using lousy form on these sets would probably come back to bite me later on.  And I think it did.

I slowed my tempo when I did the set at 155, but I still wasn't doing a wonderful job of keeping the barbell on my body as I moved from one rep into the next.  When I completed that set, I was only three more sets away from setting a PR and I was feeling good about my prospects.  On the next set at 175, my form was much better because I didn't go directly from the top of one rep to the dip for the next rep.  I brought the barbell back down to my front rack, settled myself, and then did the next rep.  That ensured the barbell would stay on my body as I continued through the set.  No stumbles through 4 working sets.  Two more to go.

190 pounds would be the set where the barbell began to feel heavy.  On the earlier sets, I was generating enough force with my dip-drive that I didn't need to exert a lot of energy on the press.  Now I had gotten to the point where I needed my upper body to work as hard as my lower body had.  There was a little bit of stickiness in each of the three reps that I did at 190, but I was able to press all of them out at the top.  I had done a good job of managing my time up to this point, so I was able to build in a few minutes of recovery time for my arms before my PR attempt at 200.

A lot of success in Crossfit (and probably in life in general) comes from having the belief that you can do something.  I believed I could handle 3 push presses at 200 pounds when I walked up to my barbell.  Then I took the barbell off of the rack and the needle on my belief-meter began to move to the left.  The first rep wasn't too bad, but it took all of the strength I had to press out the second rep.  My level of belief had now trended down to the atheist zone.  I took my time and reset before trying the one rep that stood between me and a PR.  I dipped, drove, and...barely got the barbell over my head.  My arms didn't have enough strength left in them (maybe you shouldn't have wasted so much of it trying to go fast on the lighter sets, dummy!) to press out the barbell the rest of the way.  I let the barbell drop behind me.  A 3RM at 200 pounds wasn't meant to be this day.  Final score: 190.

LC gave us some time to put away our barbells and get ready for the cash-out.  She asked us to partner up and form three teams.  Cline and I hadn't cemented our partnership earlier in the day, but the fact that we had discussions about the cash-out already meant there was a strong chance we'd be teammates and that's how it played out.  Mike and Noel were also a team, as were Bryan and The Prodigy.  There was a note included in the cash-out description that said we could choose to do the three movements in any order so I asked Cline if he had a preference.  He couldn't think of a reason to do it in a different order from how it was written and neither could I, so we stuck with the original lineup.  The only other decision we had to make was whether we'd use the assault bike or the ski erg at the end.  This was the day that the ski erg was receiving plenty of love and we added to it by deciding to end our cash-out there.

I was leading us off on the rope climb because that was my specialty.  Cline was going to carry us on the double unders as he is still more consistent than I am when it comes to jumping rope.  Then we'd just plow through the ski erg calories as fast as we could.  LC got us on our way and I scampered up the rope.  When I hit the floor, I tagged Cline and he went up the rope.  I thought I might get a little breather each time Cline did a rope climb, but he was just as fast as I was in getting to the 15 foot mark.  Back and forth we alternated until I finished the 9th climb.  As I got to the floor, Cline yelled to me to do the 10th climb and that he would get us started on the double unders.  I went back up to the 15 foot mark one last time.  When I reached the floor, Cline started twirling his rope.

Having done two rope climbs in a row, I was desperately hoping that Cline would put together a big set of double unders so that I could catch my breath.  He did not disappoint.  He strung 40 in a row before it was my turn to go.  I didn't do too shabby on my 1st set, although I couldn't match Cline's 40 consecutive reps.  I did 25, leaving us with 85 to go.  From there, we each did about 10-15 at a time before giving way to our partner.  Cline's last set ended at 133, so I told him to run over to the ski erg while I completed the last 17 reps.  Once double under #150 passed under my feet, I yelled to Cline to start on the ski erg.

I didn't pay attention to how many calories we had when Cline came off of the ski erg, but I pulled and pulled until I reached 20 calories.  I felt like I could have gotten more, but I thought we might be doing 10 calories at a time and I didn't want to mess that up.  Cline got us to 30 calories and then I had my final turn on the ski erg.  I made it to 8 calories on this turn really quickly and I knew Cline was getting stuck with an extra set on this machine, so I decided to go beyond 10 calories a bit.  I brought our score up to 42 calories before tagging in Cline.  He clicked off the last 8 calories and we were done.  Final time: 6:40.

I'm not sure I've ever been more proud of a cash-out that I had done.  Earlier in the day, I couldn't fathom completing this in under 8 minutes.  Forget 8 minutes, we had just completed it in under 7 minutes!  Each of us kept things moving every time it was our turn.  There were no struggles along the way.  We were a well-oiled machine.  We finished 3 minutes ahead of Bryan and The Prodigy, 5 minutes ahead of Mike and Noel.  I'm glad I paired up with the female Novice champion from this year's Festivus Games.

Wednesday preview: One of KOP's athletes is moving away.  Another one of KOP's athletes is confused about where she is moving to.  Also, we get to do the workout that I watched Gordy perform on Facebook Live while I was eating at a Mexican restaurant in Atlantic City.  (Spoiler: I don't complete any ring muscle-ups either!)