Dizzy Up The Boy

Workout date: 7/12/17

I didn't have to worry about having one of my classmates beat me by a second for a 3rd consecutive night.  That's because when I showed up to coach Jenna's Wednesday 7:30 class, I discovered that I would be doing the WOD by myself.  I don't want you to have the impression that I attempted this workout in an empty, cavernous gym.  It was actually filled with about a dozen people.  Everyone else was just there to take part in this week's session with the Bridgeport Barbell Club.  I wish I had joined them in practicing Olympic lifts rather than taking on this ridiculous WOD:

Wednesday's WOD:

5 rounds:

15 shoot throughs

20 KB swings (70/53)

30 calories on the rower

Shoot throughs are one of the hardest movements we do in the gym and this WOD had 75 of them.  It's not that shoot throughs are technically complex, they just destroy your core and they do it quickly.  To perform a shoot through, you plank on a set of paralettes as if you were going to do a push-up.  Why are you set up that way?  Because you're about to do a push-up.  When you come out of the push-up, you swing your legs out in front of you without touching the floor.  Now you're ready to do a dip.  After completing the dip, you swing your legs backwards to where you started.  And once again, your feet may not touch the floor along the way.  So a shoot through is basically a push-up, a swinging crunch, a dip, and a reverse swinging crunch.  That's one rep.  75 of them is craziness.

But there's more!  There were 20 heavy KB swings per round.  The 30 calories on the rower sounded like the most pleasant part of this WOD, but even that wasn't going to be a picnic.  It was also likely to be about 140 degrees inside the gym.  A peek at the scores early in the day showed that most athletes went beyond a half hour on this workout even if they scaled it.  

Without watching anyone do this workout, I could have told you it was going to be terrible.  But getting a glimpse at the 6:30 class finish up should have made me pivot and head right back out the door.  There were 5 people in that class, with Neil and Conn closest to the front door.  I watched them as they slowly worked through reps, sweating as badly as your follicly-challenged narrator typically does.  Whenever they stopped working, they had this distant stare in their eyes that portrayed hatred for whoever came up with this heinous workout.  Neil was the first one done at around the 34 minute mark.  That didn't seem like a bad time to get through this entire WOD.  Except Neil had stopped after 4 rounds.  Uh oh.  Run to your car!  Run around Bridgeport and then to your car!  You can claim you exercised that way.  Just don't do this workout!  Despite all I had seen, I made the incredibly poor decision to stick around and do this workout anyway.

Jenna walked me through each of the movements in the warmup.  The shoot throughs were just as difficult as I remembered, so I made an attempt at a wise decision by letting Jenna know that I was scaling down from 15 per round to 10.  50 shoot throughs was plenty.  When it came to the KB, I wanted to prove to myself that I could handle more than 10 consecutive swings with the 70 pound version.  Even if the 20 reps at that station would eventually require 3 sets, I felt like that wasn't too much to ask.  In retrospect, maybe I should have looked at the big picture and went with a lighter KB.  That might have saved me later on.  But sometimes I look at subsets of these workouts and think "I just want to prove to myself that I can do that".  I knew my shoot through form would be lousy and that even doing 10 of those per round would take me a long time, but I didn't care.  I wanted to show that my KB form had improved and that I could use the heavy KB in a metcon.

There was nothing to talk about with the row.  I guess I could have done less calories than the 30 that were prescribed, but it seemed like this was the station where I'd get to catch my breath a little bit.  Why not stay at that station as long as possible?

So to recap: I thought this workout would be near impossible.  I watched a handful of people do this workout.  What I saw not only confirmed my suspicions, it actually let me know that this WOD would be worse than I had given it credit for.  And after all of that, the only scale I used was dropping 5 shoot throughs per round.  I may have reached for the brass ring.

Here's a round-by-round summary of how things went for me:

• Round 1: Completed 2 shoot throughs at a time.  Felt like I was breaking those up pretty well.  At the KB swing, I went 12-8.  Was happy how I held on for what I would call "big sets" with the 70 pounder.  The row didn't exactly provide recovery, but it was also not as taxing as the other two stations were.  Round 1 time: about 6:30.
• Round 2: Still attempted 2 shoot throughs at a time.  Began failing on the swinging reverse crunch.  Had to stop and re-do a few of those.  My breaks between sets of 2 became longer.  I was sweating a lot, so wiping off the paralettes between sets became a ritual.  I went 12-8 on the KB swings again (hooray!), but the row was much more unpleasant than it had been in round one.  Round 2 time: about 8:00.
• Round 3: Needed a decent break after completing round 2.  Began the internal debate as to whether I should do all 5 rounds or stop after round 4.  (Spoiler: I ended up going with a third option!)  Tried to stick with doubles on the shoot throughs, but the paralettes had gotten so slick that I was drying them off after every rep.  Missed more of the swinging reverse crunches, had to re-do them.  At the KB, I went 8-6-6.  Took a ton of effort to make that happen.  I was miserable during my 30 calorie row, but I kept it close to 2 minutes like I had done in round two.  Round 3 time: nearly 9:30.
• Round 4: Shoot throughs are becoming a mess.  My right hand slid off the paraclete on my 4th rep, so I went flying forward as I did the swinging crunch.  Landed just in front of my paralettes.  Hopefully nobody saw that.  (Everyone saw that.)  Was beginning to feel light-headed as I tried to complete the shoot throughs.  When I got to the KB, I only made it through a few swings before dizziness became a major concern.  After 4 swings, I stopped to try and get my equilibrium back.  I did another swing, but felt woozy again.  It didn't feel safe swinging that 70 pound KB.  Jenna offered to get me a lighter KB, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed swinging any weight over my head was a bad idea.  I put up the white flag and stopped right there.

The combination of intense heat and me biting off way more than I could chew forced me to put a DNF on the whiteboard after about 28 minutes of work.  It is rare that I have to throw in the towel on a workout that isn't an EMOM, but this was way too much for me.  I should have scaled a lot more than I did.  (Perhaps 5 shoot throughs per round and a 53 pound KB next time?)  I think I made the right call on stopping when I did because I could have injured myself or one of the others in the gym.  (I definitely could envision myself losing my grip on the KB and accidentally launching it at one of the unsuspecting BBC members.)  It was a bad WOD combined with some bad decision-making.  I tried to make up for it by making one good decision.  Thursday would be a rest day.

Friday preview: My first tussle with Gwen.  One of my classmates has a very unique way of doing this WOD.