Sasha's Fears

Workout date: 10/4/17

They say you only get one chance to make a first impression.  I would argue that three KOP members got a second chance on Wednesday night.  The only problem is that I think we made the same exact impression.  To be fair, we should have been given a heads up that we were making an impression.  We didn't know!  We were just being...us.

I got to the gym at about 7:28 on Wednesday night.  As soon as I turned my car off, I heard my phone buzz.  It was a text message from Actuary Mike:

"Where are you?  I don't want to take class by myself."

I laughed when I read the message and then hustled inside so that Mike knew he wouldn't have to fly solo in Coach Jenna's class.  I let him know that it probably wouldn't just be me and him either because when I signed up for class, it said two other people were signed up.  I assumed Mike was one of the other two, but he said he wasn't.  Maybe we'd have two more classmates?  A minute later, we saw Neil.  That was one of the two.  Who was the other mystery person?

As Jenna had us do some agility drills, she asked us if we saw the girl who had been in the lobby.  Jenna had a mystery of her own to figure out.  She said this girl was talking on her phone in the lobby for a bit and she got the impression that this unknown female was waiting for the 7:30 class to begin. Then when she got the three of us together to start class, she noticed that the stranger on the cell phone was gone.

I hadn't seen her.  Mike hadn't seen her.  Neil hadn't seen her.  Could our mysteries be linked together?  We asked Jenna who had signed up for class.  She said that she saw my name, Neil's name, and a female name that she didn't recognize.  Wait!  Jenna had a eureka moment.  She remembered that LC had told her a girl might be dropping into her class as she was visiting for the week.  Suddenly, the three guys knew who the mystery woman was.  It had to be Sasha, right?  She dropped in to Dudes After Dark last night, so that was clearly who LC was referencing.  But why would she come all the way to the gym, hang out in the lobby, and then leave?  Oh no.  It had to be us.  She had met me, Mike, and Neil already.  She must have seen us, gotten the same impression she had from the night before, and hightailed it out of there.  We scared her off.  I guess Dudes After Dark might not be for everyone.

Alas, it would just be the three of us in Jenna's 7:30 class.  The format of tonight's WOD was similar to Tuesday's, minus the EMOM.  First part of class: strength.  Second part of class: cash-out.  Here's Wednesday night's fun:

Wednesday's WOD:
3RM front squat (5 working sets at 80% or higher of previous 3RM)

Cash-out:
3 rounds
20 wall balls (20#/14# to 10'/9')
5 ring muscle-ups

It was interesting to see that specific detail about the working sets included with the front squat section.  We're usually allowed to choose our own weights when working up to some sort of max, but here we were told that we had to do 5 heavy sets.  My 3RM coming into the night was 265 pounds, so my 5 working sets would need to be 215 pounds and above.  I came up with a progression of 215-230-245-260-270.

I certainly wasn't optimistic about my chances of emerging from that gauntlet unscathed.  My legs were very sore, mostly from doing 16.1 on Monday.  Tuesday's workout was pretty leg-intensive as well, but doing a ton of lunges leaves you with a lingering pain that is unmistakable.  If I somehow got three reps at 270, it would be a remarkable achievement.

I began with two warmup sets at 135 and 185.  From there, it was on to the working sets.  Things went smoothly on the sets at 215, 230, and 245.  Maybe there was a PR in the cards for me this evening.  Going from 245 to 260 wasn't a big leap, so I had confidence that I'd make it through that set alright.  Instead, it turned out to be a real battle.  The first rep went like I hoped.  The second rep was slower than any rep I had done to that point.  On the third rep, I got stuck.  I desperately tried to push my hips forward and drive upward, but I was barely moving at all.  I had just enough left in the tank to stand that rep up.  I made it through the set at 260, but my prospects for the set at 270 were looking dim.

While I was finding my way to 270, Neil and Mike were working on establishing their own PR's.  What was Neil's previous best 3RM on the front squat?  Let's go to the spreadsheet!  One of the running jokes we've had in the late classes has revolved around Neil's mythical Crossfit spreadsheet.  He claims to have a spreadsheet with information jotted down in it, but whenever we ask him for his personal best marks, he responds with some number that can't possibly be correct.  It's almost as if he's been closing this spreadsheet of his without saving it, so that every time he reopens it, it displays the numbers that he entered two years ago.

Jenna and I asked Neil what his spreadsheet had listed as his 3RM front squat, but he couldn't recall what it said.  It didn't really matter.  We were going to peer pressure him into doing some ridiculous weight anyways.  Neil completed a set about 15 minutes in and then stepped back to figure out what he needed to add to his barbell for his next set.  We had this exchange:

Neil: "What plates do I need to put on to get to 300?"
Me: "Well that's 275 pounds right now, so..."
Neil: "What?  275 pounds?  I thought that was 285!"
Me: "Nope, that's definitely 275 pounds."
Neil: "Dammit!  I don't care.  I'm doing 300 for the next set.  What do I need?"
Me: "A 10 and a 2.5 on each side."

I don't think I even had a chance to do my next set before Neil took on 300.  He made it look easy.  He dropped the barbell back on the rack and declared that he knew he got the weight right this time.  It was definitely 300 pounds.  I decided to have some fun with him by telling him that it was technically 299 pounds.  He told me to shut up, but I wasn't lying.  The barbell is 20kg, which works out to 44 pounds, not 45 pounds.  We just say it is 45 pounds because it makes adding up the weights easier.  Neil asked Jenna if that was true and she nodded her head.  Neil looked like he was going to find some tiny plates to put on the barbell to make it a true 300, but we assured him that he got credit for 300 pounds with the barbell the way it was.  If we didn't give him credit for 300, then Mike wouldn't get credit for the 200 pounds he had just completed.  Their new PR's would be much harder to remember if they were 299 and 199, so Jenna wrote 300 and 200 up on the board.  (Why am I such a jerk in these situations?)

I had no faith in my ability to get the set at 270 pounds and now I had karma working against me as well.  I probably wasn't even going to manage one rep.  I had to try though.  I took the barbell off the rack and descended into my first rep.  It was similar to the second rep that I had done at 260.  It was slow, but I wouldn't say I got stuck along the way.  Maybe I could pull this off if I really took my time.  I went into the second rep.  As I tried to stand up, I got stuck.  I tried to recreate the magic of the 3rd rep at 260, but I was just spinning my wheels.  I had nothing left, so I bailed the barbell.  Final score: 260.

We moved on to the cash-out.  All of us could do wall balls.  None of us could do ring muscle-ups.  I thought this might be one of those moments where someone says they can't do a complex movement, gives it a try, and magically discovers that they can do it.  That someone wasn't me, nor was it Neil.  Mike became good at pull-ups in a flash and the same thing happened when he started spending more time on handstand push-ups.  It didn't seem unreasonable to think that he would give this ring muscle-up thing a try and find himself up above the rings before he knew it.  Mike did make a few attempts at a ring muscle-up, but this was one movement that wasn't going to come easy for him.  I still believe it won't be long before he conquers it though.

All three of us decided to go with jumping ring muscle-ups as a scale.  I can't speak to my classmates' form, but mine was pretty awful.  I imagine their form was not so great either based on what Jenna would write on the whiteboard for us once we were done.  My main focus for this cash-out was stringing all of the wall balls.  Last week, I had done a WOD that seemed like more of a mental challenge than a physical one.  I was viewing this the same way.  My legs were really sore, but there was no real justification for not being able to do three sets of 20 consecutive wall balls.  Letting the ball drop was giving in mentally.  No matter how the jumping muscle-ups went, I would base my performance on this cash-out on whether I held on to that wall ball.

We got started and I believe all three of us did 20 consecutive wall balls.  We came over to the rings and I struggled the most.  I'm not sure how strict Neil and Mike were on their attempts, but I was very hard on myself when it came to my form.  I wasn't my harshest critic though.  That distinction went to Jenna.  She didn't no rep me at all, but she kept telling me that I wasn't doing the jumping muscle-up correctly.  Sometimes I wasn't leaning back enough at the beginning of the movement.  Sometimes I wasn't pulling the rings into my chest as I went up over the rings.  Sometimes I wasn't landing in the bottom of the dip like I was meant to do.  I was taking my time before each attempt trying to do all of the things she was describing to me, but I probably only had 3-4 good reps in the entire cash-out.

I was well behind Mike and Neil when I came back to the wall balls.  I was also pretty tired.  That was no excuse for not holding on for all 20 wall balls though.  I tossed the ball up in the air and got my second set underway.  You never know when you'll discover something that might help you in future workouts, and during this second set, I think I randomly stumbled upon a technique that will allow me to do longer sets of wall balls going forward.  I've always approached wall balls with the thought that I needed to generate a lot of power out of the squat and then unleash that power as I fired the ball high up on the wall.  But due to fatigue, I found that I wasn't throwing the ball that hard at the start of my second round.  And then I noticed that I didn't need to.  It was only 20 pounds after all.  I was just doing front squats with 260 pounds, so why in the world would 20 pounds ever feel anything but light?  For the rest of the cash-out, I took something off my fastball.  I'd come out of my squat and then consciously make the decision not to strain as I threw the ball upwards.  I still had to make sure it cleared the 10' mark, but I figured out how much energy was required for that pretty quickly.  I felt better at the conclusion of the second set of 20 than I had at the end of round one.

There is little to say about my second round of jumping muscle-ups other than they were still very disappointing, both to Jenna and to me.  Back at the wall, I easily made it through 20 more wall balls.  I refused to consider my third round of jumping muscle-ups complete until I got at least one comment  from Jenna that sounded like approval.  On my 3rd or 4th jumping muscle-up, she said "that was a good one", which is a phrase I hadn't heard often in this cash-out.  I completed my 5th attempt and called it a night.  Final time: 9:01.

Up at the whiteboard, Jenna wrote "transitions" next to all of our names.  None of us had done enough to earn the designation of "jumping muscle-ups" for the cash-out.  I guess we did a decent job of flopping over the rings and extending out of the bottom of a dip.  It wasn't wonderful hearing that I had messed up a movement that I've been decent at in the past, but I had at least learned something about wall balls.  And let's face it, those show up in workouts a lot more than muscle-ups do.

Monday preview: Four days of rest make my legs feel like new again.  It's October and it's still obscenely muggy in the gym.  The Flight Simulator becomes a phenomenon.