Nothing Left in the Tank

Workout date: 3/16/15

The re-do.  Twice I had attempted it and twice it did not turn out well for me.  The first time, I legitimately thought I could do better with a few tweaks.  The second time, I may have been dreaming a little bit.  After 15.3, I had returned to the idea that some tinkering would get me a better score.  It was only wall balls to a lower mark than usual and single unders.  I should be able to handle those.  Or maybe not.

I didn't find my initial attempt at 15.3 incredibly difficult to recover from.  After all, I went out drinking that night and still made it through a workout early the next morning.  And I didn't find it mentally scarring or anything.  So I was a bit surprised when only a couple of people decided to re-do 15.3.  It wasn't the sexiest workout or anything, so perhaps a large part of the gym simply said "screw it, I'm not doing that again."  But I almost always feel that I have room for improvement.  It is one of the perks of sucking at a lot of stuff.  Slowly but surely, you tend to climb that hill.

I got ready for the workout and Giulia let me know that she would be counting for me.  My plan was to break up the first set of wall balls into a set of 30 and a set of 20.  Giuls felt that I should do 5 sets of 10.  I wasn't in love with that idea.  So for round 1, we compromised on a set of 20, followed by 2 sets of 15.  For the single unders...well, I was having problems.  As I warmed up, I couldn't get my body to stop thinking that I was doing double unders.  It led to lots of awkward jumping and sets that were over before I started.  Eventually I was able to get it straightened out a little bit, but it still felt awkward trying to go "single under fast" and not "double under fast".

I would be attempting my re-do with Dave S., who was also taking a second shot at this workout.  The only difference (and really this is only a fine distinction) is that Dave S. can do MUSCLE-UPS!  He was taking this workout on RX, while I was stuck doing Scaled.  We got going and I did the 20-15-15 strategy as planned and moved on to the single unders, although I was aware that I had clearly gone much slower than I did during my first attempt.  When I got to my rope, I told myself to breathe and to simply stare off in the distance.  Perhaps I should have focused just a touch more on "get the rope to pass under your feet".  I was trying to go much faster than my first time, but it was only leading to small sets.  I was struggling already.

Eventually, I got a few big sets in that helped chip away at the 200 reps I was required to do.  And unbeknownst to me, I was apparently jumping to the beat of whatever song was playing.  Watching me jump rope wasn't awkward enough, so I had to throw some random dancing in there with it.  I feel bad for everyone who had to witness that.  When I finally wrapped up the 200 reps, I was a little over 4 minutes, meaning I was more than 30 seconds behind Friday's pace.  Not wonderful, but let's see if I left a little more in the tank for round 2 this time!

I did not leave more in the tank.  Round 2 was awful yet again, although I did manage more medium sets this time around.  In fact, once I finished another 50 reps, I saw the clock and noticed that I was now ahead of my pace from Friday.  That was nice to see.  But the volume of single unders that we were doing was wearing me out.  I would have a good set going and wanted to keep knocking out fast reps, but then I'd get to the point where I wanted to stop.  And not long after having such thoughts, the rope would hit me.  I managed to get a big set right near the end of this round, leaving me 20 reps left, and I was able to finish off those 20 to get back to the wall.

I was still ahead of Friday's pace, but finishing three rounds was looking nearly impossible at this point.  I led off round 3 of the wall balls with 13 reps, trying to will my body to keep going, even though I had next to nothing left in me.  From there, I did sets of 5-7 until I found my way to the 50th rep.  I was 8 reps ahead of Friday's score with about 30 seconds left to pick up some cheap reps.  I got going at a controlled pace because it would have been heartbreaking to make it all the way to this point and not build up some extra reps.  Eventually I did pick up the urgency as the clock closed in on the final seconds.  When the buzzer sounded, I had finished with 589 reps, a 47 rep improvement from Friday.

I was relieved to know that I had a better performance in me.  It was a little disappointing not getting close to that 750 mark which signified finishing three rounds, but it would be silly to hang my head over a 47 rep improvement.

And hey, I ended up within 200 reps of Rachel!  After shellacking me for the fourth consecutive workout, I think it is safe to say she has won our bet.  I wish I could have made her sweat it out even a little bit in one of these workouts, but she's kind of a powerhouse.  That being said, there are two more workouts to go and I'm going to give it everything I've got in order to avoid being shut out.