Friday's Workout

Call me a masochist, but when the alarm goes off at 4:20 in the morning, I'm already buzzing in anticipation of the early-bird class at CrossFit Palo Alto. It's not 'til I arrive in the parking lot that a little bit of rationality fear creeps in.

Strength Skill:

• Weighted Pull-Ups (2 sets of 3, 3 sets of 1)

Horrible. I've lost about 15 pounds off my PR. I'm either getting weaker or heavier. Or both. Plus, I almost strangled myself with the weight vest. All in all, my pull-ups were kind of a disaster this morning.

Metcon:

For time:

• 500-meter row
• 21 sumo deadlift high-pulls
• 500-meter row
• 21 push jerks
• 500-meter row
• 21 barbell thrusters

The RXed weight for men is 95 pounds (65 for women), so I loaded up the bar without pausing to consider that we'd be finishing with thrusters. More on that later.

The rowing was surprisingly un-terrible today. No one's going to mistake me for having blazing speed on the erg, but at the very least, I was able to keep a consistent pace and reasonable stroke rate.

The lifts, though, were tougher than I expected. When I got to the sumo deadlift high pulls, I felt like I was still on the rower. With SDHPs, the full-body pulling movement is very similar to rowing -- down to the hand positioning and sequencing -- only it was heavier and much less smooth with a weighted barbell. 

I found the push jerks to be slightly better, and was able to crank out more than a dozen in a row before having to drop the bar. (I still need to work on consistently and fully locking-out at the top, though).

In the end, it was the thrusters that did me in. I went in thinking that 95-pound thrusters were totally doable. It's no worse than the first round of Fran, right? But after over 10 minutes of explosive hip-driving movements, I was spent. I reeled off a half-dozen reps at the start before dumping the bar, and then I managed another four in a row, but then had to eke out the rest in dribs and drabs -- three here, two there. My form was disastrous: I was jumping off the ground to heave the bar up, and landing on my toes. By the end, my brain was fried; I lost count twice, and had to dust off my crappy math skills to calculate how many thrusters were left in the set. So while I think I did 21, I honestly wouldn't be shocked if I actually did 19 or 23.

Even as I sit here now, I can't remember my time. 14:30, maybe? 14:20? 14:50? Whatever it was, it felt like forever.

T.G.I.F.

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Friday's Workout

Despite the lingering soreness in my throat, I felt more than good enough for class this morning.

Strength Skill:

• Strict Weighted Pull-Ups (2 sets of 5, 3 sets of 3)

It feels like I've lost some strength since the last time we did weighted pull-ups. Even without throwing much weight in the weight vest, I had trouble clearing the bar on my last couple of reps. Looks like I gotta start greasin' the groove again.

Metcon:

5 rounds:

• 30 seconds of overhead kettlebell swings
• 30 seconds of rest
• 30 seconds of burpees
• 30 seconds of rest

The folks who showed up at CrossFit Palo Alto yesterday did "Jackie," so in comparison, this workout looked (on the whiteboard, anyway), like a lark. After all, today's WOD requires only five minutes of work. How hard could it be?

Pretty hard, actually. This was a maximum-effort, all-out sprint, and it involves two of the best full-body exercises around: kettlebell swings (a.k.a. the "brutal distillation of everything ketttlebell training is about: power, explosiveness, flexibility and lung searing 'cardio'”) and burpees ("the one exercise to rule them all"). The 30-second rest intervals gave us just enough time to catch our breath, scrawl down the number of reps we just cranked out, and hustle back into position for the next round of work.

My goal: To squeeze in 15 swings and 12 burpees in each round, for a total of 135 total reps.

Result: 132 reps, using a 53-pound kettlebell. I managed to hit my targeted number of swings each round, but towards the end, my burpees got slower and more awkward-looking, and I missed my goal by 3 reps. Still, I'm pretty happy with my performance today -- it was a great (read: ass-kicking) way to launch into the weekend.

(Final note: XFitMama is super-hardcore. After the WOD was done and the rest of us were splayed on the floor, she wanted to keep going. And she's five months pregnant.)

Friday's Workout

First up: Weighted chin-ups.

I managed to crank out some 1.5X bodyweight chin-ups (with a 50-pound weight vest on and a 20-pound dumbbell between my legs) but was completely out of gas by the end.

I need to practice these at home -- which means I'm either going to have to shell out some moolah for a weight vest (good ones are not cheap) or cram some heavy rocks into a BabyBjörn.

Next up: Metcon.

3 rounds for time:

• 10 chest-to-bar pull-ups
• 10 barbell front squats
• 10 burpees

It took me precisely 7 minutes to finish, and another 3 before I could breathe normally again.