When the date of this year's King and Queen was announced, I was relieved. I know exactly when Opening Day at Saratoga is every year, so hearing that our annual in-house gym competition would be the same weekend saved me from a tough decision. Even if there hadn't been a conflict with Opening Day, my gut was telling me that I should skip this year's edition of King and Queen. I've proven over and over again that I'm not so hot in competitions. With King and Queen, I've finished between 11th and 14th every year and I didn't see any reason why that would change. But if I'm being completely honest, someone at the gym likely would have peer pressured me into signing up if I wasn't away that weekend. How would I have fared had I been there? Here's a rough guess:
- Event #1 was similar to the WOD that I did in the "Box Jump Nancy" post where I lost to Neil by 1 second. Thrusters replaced the overhead squats in this version, but the barbell weight was the same. That likely would have put me a little further behind Neil. Neil finished 13th, with the 14th place finisher ending up 29 seconds behind him. I'm guessing I would have completed this event less than 29 seconds behind Neil, so I'll give myself a 14th place finish to start the day.
- Event #2 was a clean ladder. I can clean 225 pounds. I cannot clean 245 pounds. There was some tiebreaker used in the scoring of this event (I think it included deadlifts if you couldn't clean the barbell), but I know I would have used all of my time trying to clean 245 pounds in vain. 225 pounds would have given me a 7th place finish.
- Now things get tricky. Event #3 required athletes to spend one minute at 4 different stations. They would pass through this gauntlet two times. At the pull-up and barbell-facing burpee stations, I'm guessing I'd get 8 reps in round one, 6 in round two. For the KB swings and light deadlifts, probably 25 in round one, 20 in round two. Add it all up and you get 118 reps, good enough for 15th place.
- The last WOD was the sandbag toss. Another pure guess as to how I would do here, but looking at the standings helped me narrow it down. I think I would fare better than Samson (31 reps) and Actuary Mike (32 reps), but probably not as well as Mooney (34 reps) or Chris S (35 reps). It's an awfully tight window there, but 33 reps for me feels about right. Mark me down for another 15th place finish.
- Based on the scoring system, those placings would net me 224 points, good enough for 13th place overall. See, they didn't need me there to prove that I would finish somewhere in the 11th-14th range!
At least I made up for my absence at the gym's annual competition by winning big at the track, right? Ummm...no. Things looked very promising on Opening Day as I had a Pick 5 going that would have paid about $8,000. In a 5 horse field, my pick was trailing his four adversaries, but he looped around the field at the top of the stretch. I was getting ready to visit the IRS window when my horse suddenly started to shorten his stride. The horse that was on the rail began creeping closer to our hero while the lunch I had consumed about an hour ago began creeping closer to my mouth. As the duo approached the line, their heads bobbed back and forth. My horse saw something shiny in the sky and looked up at the wrong moment, giving the win photo to the horse on the rail. I sat on the bench in shock. My dad took the opportunity to gloat about winning $13 on the race.
I wish I could say the rest of the weekend went better, but it did not. It's hard to express how crushing it is to have something like that happen because you don't get all that many opportunities to win $8,000 on a race. I could have lost every other race the rest of the weekend and still went home a big winner. Instead, I ended up with a small loss on Opening Day and followed that up with larger losses on the other two days we went to the track. Oh well. I can say that Jenn and I had a very nice time spending the weekend in Saratoga. Our hotel was walking distance to the track. We had a couple of good meals in the city. And we were blessed with sunny weather for the majority of our stay.
We drove home from Saratoga on Monday, so I didn't return to KOP until Tuesday night. I was going to try and get back into the swing of things at Dudes After Dark. It wouldn't be easy though because one of the toughest WODs I've done all year was scheduled. It is known as "The Seven" and I had the pleasure of doing it in January because it is one of our benchmark WODs for 2017. Here's what it looks like:
"The Seven"
7 rounds:
7 handstand push-ups
7 thrusters (135/95)
7 knees to elbows
7 deadlifts (245/165)
7 burpees
7 KB swings (70/53)
7 pull-ups
When I tried this out in January, I stopped after five rounds and 32+ minutes of work. A half-hour seemed to be the unofficial soft time cap during that class. If we were still working when the clock hit 30 minutes, we could complete the round we were on, but we were told that we probably shouldn't move on to another round after that. I used two ab-mats for the handstand push-ups, 95 pounds for the thrusters, and 205 pounds for the deadlifts. It was just me and Noel in that class back in January.
Noel would be keeping me company on my second attempt at this workout, along with 7 others. I was really excited to see that John McHugh was also in class as I don't see him as much as I used to. The two of them would be at the far end of the gym with me once the workout got started, but first LC needed to run us through each of the movements to make sure we knew what we were doing. And when I say run, I mean that quite literally. There wouldn't be enough time to get through this workout if we didn't hustle through the warmup. So we jumped from station to station, completing a few reps at each one to show LC that we could handle the movement (or the scale) that we planned on doing in this workout. It was almost like doing a cash-out before the WOD.
You will be shocked to learn that it was insanely hot inside the gym. By the time we had finished our abbreviated trip through a round of "The Seven", the shirt I was wearing was soaked. My original goal for this workout was to complete 5 rounds in less time than it took me in January. I was going to do the WOD the exact same way I had done it 6 months ago: same scales, same weights. I figured if I was in better shape than I was back in January, I might be able to complete 5 rounds in under 30 minutes. Maybe I'd even take on a 6th round. But my perspiration made me revise my aspirations. Completing 5 rounds in 35 minutes was a more practical goal. I just needed to make sure I began the fifth round before a half hour passed.
To my surprise, the time cap was extended for this attempt. Instead of a soft cap of 30 minutes, LC was giving us a hard cap of 45 minutes. I wasn't sure if I should be happy about this new development. If I was able to maintain the pace I had in January, 45 minutes would be just enough time to complete all 7 rounds. Even if the heat made me tire out quicker on this attempt, I'd still be able to get into round 6. That was a good thing, right? Maybe, maybe not. I seemed to remember just wanting to be done with this WOD when I was putting the finishing touches on round 5 in January, so I wasn't sure how geeked up I would be about additional rounds. My focus was on getting through round 5 at which point I could reassess whether I wanted to continue on.
The nine of us staked out some room for all of our equipment and got ready to begin. I was happy with where I was located because Noel and John were both good people to gauge my performance off of. I hung with Noel for quite a while back in January before he pulled away from me in the last two rounds. John is always someone that I'm aiming to keep up with in workouts and there is no single person at the gym who motivates me more than he does. There was no doubt that he would be barking at me to keep going if I started slowing down during this WOD.
If there is one skill of mine that he has really deteriorated over the course of the year, it would be handstand push-ups. I was so excited at the beginning of the year to get better at these, but once I reached my goal of completing 5 consecutive reps without any ab-mats, the idea of practicing this movement lost its luster. I have been egregiously delinquent about putting in time to get better at handstand push-ups. As a result, I've gotten much worse. That was obvious when this workout got underway. I had a lot of trouble getting through the handstand push-ups one at a time. I was forcing myself to kip each rep like I did in January, even though I could have done them strict. I would have preferred to do them that way actually. By the time I reached my 7th rep, I had spotted the rest of the class a large head start. I tried to make up some time stringing all 7 thrusters, but the knees to elbows would slow me down again. I think I would be good at that movement if I had the grip strength of a normal adult, but sadly I do not. I was still able to go 3-2-2 at that station.
Over at the deadlifts, I tried something new. Faby had given me the idea that I might be stronger on the deadlift if I switched my mixed grip, so I was trying that out today. Yes, this probably wasn't the workout where you want to be tinkering with things, but the deadlift was the easiest station of "The Seven" for me when I did this six months ago. Maybe this change would make it even easier. The verdict? I don't think having my right hand under the barbell and the left hand over the barbell made much difference. With some practice perhaps it would, but all I could think about as I did my deadlifts was how weird this new grip felt.
After completing the deadlifts, I moved on to the burpees. At least initially these seemed to go better than last time. Back in January, I remember moving very slowly through these, especially in the later rounds. Up next was the heavy KB swing, which would be the pleasant surprise of the day. I can't say enough about how much better the KB swing feels after making the adjustment that Jenna helped me out with. Thinking of the swing as though it is a push press has helped me out tremendously. The deadlift was my best station back in January, but the KB swing was my best station on this night.
That left the dreaded pull-ups. There was something about having to do them at the end of each round which somehow made them worse. Or perhaps the heavy KB swings just taxed your shoulders and made you weaker when you got to the pull-up bar. I'm not sure what it was, but I could only do singles when I got to this station. They were definitely not on the quick side. When I complete a round in most WODs, I would typically note my time, but I decided against doing that here. I was well behind the class and I didn't want to know how bad the damage was. I just moved on to round 2.
Round 2 was certainly slower than round 1, but that had more to do with fatigue than struggling with form at any of the stations. I couldn't pinpoint one station along the way where I took more time. I think I just got slower overall because I wasn't as fresh as I was at the start of the workout.
Round 3 was where things began to turn around for me a little bit. It took a mildly traumatizing event to get me going, but I apparently needed some adversity to get through whatever mental blocks were holding me back. I had 4 handstand push-ups completed when I kicked back up on to the wall again. My form hadn't been very good up to this point and now I was battling sweaty hands. Getting upside down wasn't too bad, but as I began to descend for each handstand push-up, my moist hands would begin sliding outwards. I had to find a way to keep them in place if I was going to kip a handstand push-up. Every time I came down from the wall, I tried to dry off my hands, but there was very little dry garment covering the upper half of my body. As I went to do the 5th handstand push-up of this round, my soaked shirt attacked me. Usually when I'm upside down on the wall, my shirt will hang down towards my face. That didn't happen here. The weight of my wet shirt caused it to fall off me almost completely. It ended up draped over my nose and mouth like a giant face cloth.
My initial reaction was to panic. It was hard enough to breathe already, now it was damn near impossible. I wanted to come off the wall and fix my shirt. But reason kicked in at that point. Wasn't this going to happen every time I kicked up on to the wall unless I took off my shirt? (Shirtless Dave was not happening.) Might as well get these 3 handstand push-ups done now that you're already upside down. I ignored the fact that I could barely breathe and focused on getting all 3 of the remaining handstand push-ups. And whaddaya know, I did them! That set of 3 was my longest up to this point of the WOD. I kicked off the wall and fixed my shirt, happy to breathe normally again. But what made me even happier was the fact that I would now have some confidence the next time I returned to the wall.
By round 3, I was breaking up the thrusters, the knees to elbows, and the deadlifts into mini-sets. My burpee pace had slowed down, but I never stopped during the set of 7, something I'm pretty sure I did the first time I took this WOD on. The KB swings were still solid. The pull-ups were not. I grinded through them one at a time, then slid a bead across my abacus to note that my third round was complete.
When I began round 4, I noticed that I was slowly closing in on Noel. I was pretty certain that he hadn't lapped me, so I now had a target to go after. Noel wasn't using the same weights that he did when we took this on in January. His thruster barbell was heavier, his deadlift barbell was heavier, and his KB was heavier. That might explain why his pace slowed down considerably this time around. I couldn't tell what round John was on, but it seemed like he was well ahead of me. He was doing stinkbugs instead of handstand push-ups, so he was spending considerably less time at that station than I was. I got the sense that he was going to lap me before 45 minutes was up.
Confidence and fatigue were the magical combination that led to handstand push-up success over the next two rounds. During the early rounds of this workout, I was having trouble keeping my body on the wall as I brought my knees down to my chest to perform the kip. I half-expected to hear someone yell "timber!" as I slowly fell away from the wall in frustration. But as I wore down in the latter stages of this workout, I noticed that exhaustion was causing my butt to sag against the wall. That doesn't sound like a positive, but in this case it was. Your butt should be touching the wall as you bring your knees down for the kip. I was struggling with that early on, but once I got tired, I didn't have a choice in the matter. My butt stayed along the wall, meaning my form improved purely by accident. There was no more falling off the wall during the kip. And because my resolve had been boosted by the three reps I did while suffocating, I was able to stay on the wall for all 7 handstand push-ups in rounds four and five.
Cutting down my time (and level of frustration) at the handstand push-up station was the main reason that I started to cut into the lead that Noel had on me. By the end of round 4, we were even. When I completed my handstand push-ups at the start of round 5, I had pulled ahead of him. It was becoming really difficult to breathe at this stage of the workout, but I told myself that I needed to shorten my breaks. It would have crushed me to work that hard to pass Noel and then have him pass me again while I was taking a break. I didn't really extend my lead on him during the thrusters, knees to elbows, or deadlifts. It wasn't until I moved through 7 "fast" burpees that I had more than a station lead on him. I picked up the heavy KB and took care of 7 quick swings. That left 7 pull-ups to go. I already knew that I wasn't participating in a sixth round, so the finish line was in sight. It felt like I was sprinting to get those 7 pull-ups completed (I'm sure it was much, much slower than I realized), but once they were done, I was able to collapse on the floor and recover. Final time: 40:57 (5 rounds).
That was eight and a half minutes longer than it took in January, but I wasn't upset about my time. This workout would be brutal in a climate-controlled setting. To complete it in the sauna that is KOP was 100x worse. I got through it though. Noel finished his 5th round about 90 seconds after I was done. John proved what an animal he was, working all the way to the 45 minute time cap, getting into the early stages of round 7. The entire class needed a solid 5 minutes to recover before we began putting our equipment away.
Wednesday preview: With my Olympic lifting debut on the horizon, I get one last opportunity to practice my snatch before the BBC meet.
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