Month: June 2018

Wednesday – GraceDay

Beginner Option:
30 clean and jerks for time
OR:
30 snatches for time

Men: 75 lb.
Women: 55 lb.

CFHQ says, if you’re aiming to do it right: complete Grace in under 5 minutes. My squat is still for shit, but I can Clean, and so I did: Grace at 55lbs. in 4:38.

If it was a WOD with squat cleans, I’d still be on the PVC and typing to you tomorrow afternoon about what happened tonight.

Afterwards I did 10 front squats and 10 back squats with the 35lbs. bar, all to a med ball, just to get used to the motion of a forced full squat. While I did not put the bar down between reps, the squats were not unbroken. As I’m moving through the reps I think things like: I’m too old for this, just give up, what’s the point, I can’t squat anymore, I’m too old for this, I’m going to hurt myself. The “too old for this” mantra kept repeating over and over in my head. But I pushed through nonetheless. F it. Gotta do something.

The Bear Complex is one of my all-time-favorite-WODs. At some point will revist. DT is my all-time-favorite-hardest-WOD, not sure when I’ll be revisiting that. Perhaps that should be a goal. Even during my fittest CF days, I was never able to complete DT at the women’s RX weight. I’ve also never had a pull up. We will see. That’s it for today.

 

Tuesday

Beginner Option
5 2-minute rounds of:
12-cal. row
Max rep sit-ups

There is no rest between rounds.

Complete in 10:55. Instead of cutting short my time, I aimed for a consistent 18 sit-ups per round. Forgot what it’s like to do sit-ups too. Hooray.

Monday

Greetings from the garage. Yesterday the CFHQ WOD was swim 1,000 meters (1,094 yards) for time. 1,000 meters equals approx. .6 miles, or around 20 laps in a 25 yard pool. Either way, I do not have immediate access to a pool, nor will I anytime soon, so instead of swimming on Sunday I ran 2.5 miles for the first time since the 5K last weekend. The route from my house is uphill on the way out, a gently sloping uphill for approx. .9 miles, so I tend to feel slow when first embarking. It’s not until getting about a mile under the feet that I begin to warm up and gain some cadence and comfort in my stride.

The dog loves to go for these runs, that’s an understatement. When I pull out the training collar he wags his tail and circles at my feet making it difficult for me to get my shoes on. There’s a cornucopia of chipmunks and squirrels and robins along our route. There’s also the old white farmhouse down the road, home to two white farm geese. Winter or summer, the geese are out there. Sometimes the farmer closes them up in the warmth and security of their shelter—a small wooden house-like shed painted green with white trim and a shingled roof—but mostly they wander freely around the property.

On Sunday afternoon the farm owner was outside putting up fencing around his rather impressive gardening plot. The dog and I stopped to say hello.

“Oh hey, Mary,” the farmer said. The geese honked loudly in the background as if to say, Intruder! Intruder!

“Beware of my attack geese,” the farmer said.

“Do they have names?” I asked.

“No, no names,” he said.

My dog tilted his head from side to side, listening and studying the creatures before him as German Shepherds do. He didn’t bark or tug on the leash to get to the geese and I felt relieved for his restraint against a normally pretty high prey-drive.

Then a bug flew into my mouth and I gagged and coughed and gasped for air and unsuccessfully tried to spit it out. “Oh my goodness, COUGH, COUGH… excuse me,” I said.

“Black flies, they’re out this time of year,” the farmer said.

“Well, enjoy the afternoon,” I sputtered and then turned to go. The dog dutifully stepped in-line at my side.

A few weeks before we had met two young black labs, Jupiter and Indigo, another half mile up the road and I get the sense that my dog was more interested in seeing them again. After some brief introductions the dogs were tumbling along the roadside and thrashing in and out of the creek in a playful roughhouse that dogs do and their humans love to watch. The newly acquainted neighbors seemed to get along just right.

My dog picked up an optimistic pace as we headed in Jupiter and Indigo’s direction once more, but sadly, the siblings were not out. So we turned and headed back the way we came; the dog noticeably slower then, lacking a certain bounce even if we were on the downhill home.

3rd Inaugural WOD

First of all, tomorrow is a rest day. Let’s just get that out of the way.

Today’s WOD per CFHQ:

Nancy
5 rounds for time of:
400-meter run
15 overhead squats (OHS)
Men: 95 lb.
Women: 65 lb.

I opted for a modified scaled version:

5 rounds for time of:
400-meter row
10 overhead squats

Completed in 16:40.

At first, I thought fer-sure I’d be doing the OHS at the suggested beginner weight of 35lbs. But, no. My OHS squat jumped out the window over a year ago. I can barely get below parallel. So, I opted to use the PVC and squat to a medball. I’m 6″2′ (sometimes even 6″3′) and squatting to a med ball is an act of courage. But, I did it today, each and every time. Granted it was with some measley-peasely PVC overhead, but I’ll take it, bitches. There’s no ego in CF, or is there… Well, there shouldn’t be. Not if you’re doing it right.

When I made it back into the house I finally cooked up the curry cauliflower rice I’d be meaning to slap together since Tuesday of last week (not exactly this recipe, but something similar—there’s a bunch of delicious options out there). By the time it was ready, I was too pooped to eat so put it away for lunch at work tomorrow. That’s the thing about WODing—it kicks your ass. You haven’t much left over for the bullshit, like thinking too much or the obligatory bottle of wine while binge-watching or doom scrolling. You just want to go to sleep. At least I do. And that’s another part of it, once in the routine of the workouts you sleep like a bossperson.

So there we have it.

2nd Inaugural

The second inaugural DCCF WOD is in the books.

Per HQ:

Hang squat clean 3-3-3-3-3-3-3 reps

Scaling
The hang squat clean is a good opportunity to practice full hip and leg extension, and speed under the bar. Ideally, each set will be as heavy as possible for 3 reps, but newer athletes should start light and slowly add weight as they are comfortable.

Completed: @ 35#, 35#, 35#, 45#, 45#, 45#, 55#

Holy that felt good. So light, but so good. It’s amazing what the body remembers and the mind forgets. As I was sinking into the squat under the bar I was thinking, I’m doing it. I’m doing it! In total disbelief. But the body, the body knew exactly what to do. The body said, leave it to me. Somehow these familiar movements bring you back to some place you once knew but long forget and miss nonetheless. It’s like going home. The familiarity found in rediscovering a movement it took years to learn and then left behind. There’s comfort in the body remembering what to do.

According to the notebook, I PRd my Squat Clean at 100lbs. on 7/28/2015.

Tonight’s an early night. Coffee machine is cued up. Dog walked. Check. Check. Check.

Every Day, Begin Again

Sometimes it’s exhausting to think about—having to start over every single day. Like, can’t I just keep building on the momentum I created today and carry it over into tomorrow and the day after tomorrow?

Sometimes we’re grateful for the reboot, not every day is good and we look forward to another start. Sometimes, for me, it’s the starting again, again, and again, that I get a little overwhelmed by, especially when it comes to health and some level of personal fitness. Even just maintaining in the ballpark can be too much, like I just want to chuck it and go on vacation from trying.

Despite knowing how this all works, that every day we begin anew, some part of me keeps looking for a finish line; a place where we reach our destination and we’re done, no more hard work and sacrifice. One could say that finish line is the ultimate finish line, when you’re dead, but I’m talking more about some hypothetical place of ultimate fitness and health where you can stop working so hard and sacrificing so much, and you get to sit inside your accomplishment with a margarita pizza and relish your new home without worrying about sliding back to the place you once were, the day, week, or year before.

You can’t go back in time, but your body and your mind can certainly regress to places you’ve spent a lifetime of meditating, abstaining, and scratching your way out of. It’s the hamster wheel that can wear one down. At least it can beat me up pretty damn good. Same shit, different day. But that’s a crappy way of looking at things and it gets no one anywhere which is probably why, we begin again.

After talking and thinking and pondering and planning and saying I will begin again tomorrow, okay maybe the day after tomorrow, I finally did it: I WODed. Right in my own garage. I’ve only spent the better part of the last 8 months collecting bits of equipment, like my lovely bella bar and a 44lbs. kettlebell and a pvc pipe (which you’d think would be the obvious simple first purchase, but it took me forever to remember the benefits of warming up with pvc, and then it took me another month or so to get up the nerve to ask the guy at Home Depot to cut it in half for me). Then there was the gift of a Concept 2. The box appeared in the garage one day after work. Somehow I knew what it was, I could just feel it. I was beyond excited. What a fkcn awesome gift.

That gift, the Concept, took my little garage gym/box to the next level. Suddenly, I felt legitimate. I still wasn’t WODing, but I could WOD. At. Any. Moment. To be fair, I did row quite a bit when the Concept first arrived; I was getting into a routine of 2K per day. But then I woke up one morning on a new day and I stopped. And as the rower collected dust, I slid backward into some sort of funk. It’s easy to simply do nothing, it’s difficult to keep starting over and over.

Then, tonight, after a couple months of cleaning and dusting and reorganizing the garage with the hopes that one day would be the day that I would feel the spark, I did it: I WODed. Yes, on the first Sunday of June in the year 2018 at approximately 6:39 pm, I set Pandora to shuffle and I hit the start button on the timer, and it was 3, 2, 1, Go.

Bloody unbelievable.

As posted on CFHQ:

3 rounds for time of:
25 deadlifts
Bike 1,000 meters

Men: 185 lb.
Women: 125 lb.

Beginner Option (that’s me!)
3 rounds for time of:
20 deadlifts
Bike 500 meters

Men: 95 lb.
Women: 65 lb.

Completed in 12:28.

I substituted 500 meter row for the bike. Yes, it was the beginner version. Yes, the deadlifts felt heavy. But I was doing it. I was bloody doing it and it felt fan-fckn-tastic.

Perhaps beginning again day after day is a form of hope.

1st Inaugural WOD complete.