3-2-1 (This is gonna suck) GO!

Nottraining

2010-01-05T11:18:00.003-05:00

I've put lots of thought into how I program for a winter of backcountry and downhill skiing, selecting exercises to develop my fitness in a prioritized fashion:

mobility

power endurance

cardiorespiratory endurance

strength

agility

muscular stamina

and skiing-specific measures of coordination, balance, and accuracy.

but the fact of the matter is I haven't hit the gym at all. Well, maybe a couple times to squat light or kip a few pullups, but since the snow started falling, a typical week (as opposed to the slovenly holiday weeks) has looked like this:

Monday: climb trails at ski area and ski down once or twice, ride lift a couple times and ski

Tuesday: rest

Wednesday: go out to the garage to pretend at working out, maybe foam roll and stretch

Thursday: ski race - two 30-second runs plus a half-dozen lift rides for fun

Friday: one-hour backcountry tour before work

Saturday: ski with kids or play with kids in the snow, drink tea

Sunday: watch football, think athletic thoughts

That's not training. It's physical activity, and it happens to be lots of fun. It keeps me fit relative to where I might be as a desk jockey, but I'm not getting into better shape. At least, I don't think I am. My ski touring hasn't even been regular enough that I've timed my outings. I haven't climbed the same route twice, and I refuse to break out the stopwatch when I'm in the backcountry. I've toured in northern VT, southern NH, and central MA. No spectacular descents; no epic long days. There have been some relaxing 4-hour tours, and there was one 5+hour super-windy, subzero-temp tour that required a special sort of endurance of a kind I have no wish to develop.

I have no regrets about avoiding the gym. I'm having way too much fun as it is, and I'm not really interested in paying good money to hunt for workout space amidst the six different bench press setups at the YMCA. It melted down Monday, so a little balance is likely to return. However, I'm in-season for my favorite sport. There's room for training, but it's not a priority right now. I'll be sure to post workouts and maybe even some thoughts on programming for workouts around in-season activities, but until then, here are a couple photos from Wednesday morning's Nottraining session. Didn't quite get to the top in time for sunrise, but it sure beat a second cup of coffee as an eye opener.

The view on the way up.

The way down.

Establishing a baseline

2009-12-14T11:31:00.003-05:00

After a week on the road that saw a day of squats and a day of running, both of which felt more like rehab than training (such is the pain of starting over), I skipped the deep snow up north to visit with the family this weekend and settled for a quick visit to the local hill Monday morning.

Skin up Conifer

950 vertical feet, ~1 mile

26:32

(First road cut, 10:45, second 16:30, transition to ski 4:48).

Not bad for out-of-shape, as I used to consider a halfway decent time to be a half-hour. Only did a single lap and it was a balmy 30 degrees, so I didn't have my customary 10 pounds of water and extra gear on my back, although I do carry ~10 pounds of gear on each foot. The transition to ski time was pathetic. That needs practice before I do any rando racing.

Was fogged in at home this morning, so I didn't bring the camera. Too bad, since the sun started to break through and I could see for over 30 miles. Got to the bottom just in time to board the lift for a thoroughly enjoyable victory lap. Funny how quickly skiing comes back into my legs these days. The first day used to be an adventure until I finally got a seasons pass a few years ago. Good thing, because I've got my first downhill clinic Thursday.

Core Training

2009-12-05T11:24:00.008-05:00

Thursday, December 3rd workout - Remembering the diagnosis.

Warmup

Shoulder mobility - stretching, foam rolling, dislocates

When I attended Kelly Starrett's excellent workshop at CF Boston in September, I was held up as an example of someone with bad shoulder mobility. He had me trying doing an overhead squat, and he kept telling me to stop cheating. I quite simply could not hold the bar overhead without arching my back. His prescription 5-10 minutes of shoulder mobility work before doing any overhead work. Sometimes even that is not enough lately. Hopefully, things will improve as I build a routine incorporating kipping pullups, mobility work, OHS, and the like.

5 rounds:

3 sets each:

Even when I'm not getting in a full workout, I've been trying to squeeze in a little gymnastics training. Perhaps it would have been better if I hadn't crammed it between my shoulder mobility work and overhead lifting.

Heavy Stuff
Press 5x3 85-95-105-115-115f

As soon as I finished thee fourth set, I knew I'd commited the classic alignment fault, because I could suddenly feel tenderness in my L1-T12 disc. I know the feeling from injuring it by catching some jerks with a hinge at that L-T joint. (Kelly Starret expands on this here.) This was just enough tenderness that I knew I lost tightness in the core trying to compensate for my limited shoulder mobility.

Metcon
Half Cindy

AMRAP 10:

8 rounds -> 9 pullups; 10:20 for 10 rounds

Pushups failed me, like usual, only quicker this time.

Saturaday, December 5th workout - The Start of the Cure

Warmup
10 minutes carrying wood
5 minutes jump rope - no more than 6 consecutive DUs
Shoulder mobility work

5 rounds:

I do the HSPUs with my belly to the wall, so I'm less likely to hinge my spine. If my back is to the wall, I'll arch to keep my center of gravity against the wall. This way I'm encouraged to hollow myself, although you can see that it's not a perfect system. By my fifth set, my form was starting to suffer:

You can see the two problems working against each other here, limited shoulder mobility putting me at a less-than vertical body angle and a softening of the back to make my torso angle even less vertical. This is the classic upstream-downstream mobility issue that Kelly Starrett harped on in his Chasing Performance seminar - a mobility restriction in one part of the body leads to an even worse form issue elsewhere. (This is an amazingly useful analysis tool for a coach.) The solution is even more dedication to shoulder mobility (daily perhaps), and a corresponding effort to strengthen my core, not by situps and back extensions, rather by doing exercises that force me to work to hold my spine straight.

Heavy Stuff
Deadlift 3x5 - 225-275-310

That was harder than I remember, but my form was halfway decent.

Suitcase DL 3x3 each 95-115-135

KB Complex, 12K

One minute each:

Total reps = 175

Some folks like the pump they get after a day of bench press and curls (guess it looks good in the mirror), but I like the pump after a day of deadlifts. Walking around with a tight trunk just makes me feel strong. I won't be doing heavy deads every week, but I'll mix them in with snatch-grip DLs, unilateral DB/KB work, and the like. I've got hips that even after a few months off can move hundreds of pounds, but I spent those months slouched in front of a computer at work, so my spinal erectors got weak much faster. That's an imbalance I won't allow to get the best of me. The same goes for my mobility work. It's time to stretch.

Back to Basics

2009-11-23T10:30:00.000-05:00

As I hinted in my last post, I've had some thinking to do - about how I want to approach my workouts and why I want to ~~torture myself~~ workout in the first place. I had some pretty concrete goals at the beginning of the year. I was in full-on CrossFit-for-CrossFit's-sake mode, training for the Games and shooting for some nice round numbers on my lifts. I had 20 - count them - 20 individual performance goals for 2009 (plus an equal number of intermediate goals). Having taken 3 months more-or-less off, it's safe to say that those goals haven't felt threatened much. (I met exactly one - in March, when I was not only in some of the best shape of my life but was well rested on account of getting too busy at work.)

I'm starting this cycle from a very different place. After a summer of playing with the kids, an autumn of Too Much Work, and recently a bout with the H1N1 flu, I'll be building from a conditioning base of not much better than zero. As such, it's too early to worry about how big I can get my squat this winter or how fast I can row 2,000m. First, I need to simply get in the habit of working out regularly and trying to regain lost capacities. It's not as much fun starting over as it is doing something new, when progress comes easily and each workout sparkles with the excitement of new accomplishments. Right now, however, it's time to swallow my pride and put up some sad-looking numbers and let the cold light of objectivity guide my training.

Training for the Qualifiers burned me out on CrossFit for CrossFit sake. It would be one thing if I were training at an affiliate where I had people to push me through each workout, but not being a mainpager, running out to the garage each night and punishing myself to trim a couple seconds or add a couple pounds had lost it's appeal. Still, laying around on the couch at night wasn't exactly the best programming I've come up with either.

In need of a goal, I decided I'd train for the ski season. Skiing is by far my favorite sport, and it was a day of ski touring in the White Mountains that convinced me to take up CrossFit in the first place. Therefore, it seems the perfect object for my current training. To make it more interesting for me, I'm entering a weekly race series (giant slalom) and will enter a couple of randoneering races (climbing and descending a mountain - usually multiple times). I've never ever raced gates before and my alpine ski touring has not been a timed venture, so I don't have a great benchmark for performance, but having quantitative measures of performance will raise the stakes on my training and force me to be objective about my strengths and weaknesses for my chosen sport. Programming objectively for a sport rather than to get better at working out will be a new challenge for me, and I'm looking forward to it.

For downhill racing, squats are king. I became a better skier over the summer when I did Starting Strength, simply by virtue of being stronger in a deep squat. Obviously, then, squats will be a part of the new program, but what else do I include? Backcountry skiing is primarily an endurance sport - cardiorespiratory endurance and muscular stamina. When alpine touring, I have ~9 pounds strapped to each foot and 10-30 pounds on my back. That adds up over the course of day. There are programs out there that cater to backcountry skiers (e.g., Rob Shaull's mountain athlete site), but those are designed for the long, slow haul of mountaineering. I'm not about to load up on hour-long chippers every day to develop improved slogging ability. That would only rob me of explosiveness and pure strength I want for the downhill (and for the All-Important Stupid Human Tricks that make being fit fun).

Still, I'll be doing more of the dreaded AMRAP 20 thing. When I'm in the gym, I vastly prefer programs like Greg Everett's Cathletics program that combine olympic lifting and short, sharp metcons. Those kind of workouts still have their place, because downhill skiing places tremendous demands on explosiveness, agility, and anaerobic work capacity. Long metcons are not my favorite for general fitness, but they fit my needs for now. They'll include power endurance workouts, workouts that simultaneously tax core strength and work capacity (think DLs and running), and sport-specific aerobic sufferfests (timed ascents at my local ski area).

More immediately, however, I need to work the basics. I need to get comfortable lifting heavy weights again; I need to rebuild my gymnastics capacities, and I need to diligently improve my mobility, both to recover from recent and old injuries and to fight off the decline of old age. This weekend was dedicated primarily to the first of those. To accomplish the latter, I'm going to have to get creative and be diligent in using my time away from the gym.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Coming off the flu and not wanting a Fran cough to cause a relapse, I started off with a pure strength workout. The weights weren't great, but I have to start somewhere.

Warmup
3 rounds swinging Cindy:

RDL 45x5

Heavy Stuff
Deadlift 135x5, 185x3, 225x2, 275x3, 300xx, 310x3

Max strict dips 8

November 22, 2009

I just said that I'm not a mainpager, but today's workout was just the ticket - a squat-centric workout with an aerobic component, but long enough and heavy enough that I could pace myself without taking my flu-abused lungs into the sort of deep respiratory distress that a shorter, lighter metcon would produce.

Warmup
CFCC Mobility drills
Hip mobility

Strict CFWU

10 mountain climbers
3 burpees

Metcon
AMRAP 20:

3 rounds + 25 burpees

Felt pretty bad about this performance as I slogged through it. I carefully worked my way through the squats, concentrating on holding a tight core after a sloppy first squat in round two. I sometimes dogged it on the burpees, but I still felt well spent afterwards. For a post flu metcon, simply lasting 20 minutes is a good enough performance for me, and the soreness I feel today seems about right for where I am in the workout cycle.

Now the part that's been the hardest for me lately - keeping it up during the week.

The Law of Conservation of Momentum

2009-09-10T05:50:00.011-04:00

A body in motion tends to stay in motion. A body at rest tends to...

Maybe you all are a bunch of CrossFit freaks, who can take a week or two off for work or vacation and jump right back into the daily sufferfest, but I'm a creature of habit. I do best when I'm out there four to five days every week without fail - even if that means interrupting a vacation to cobble together a workout using a rock, a tree stump, and my running shoes one day and then doing some sort of inverted burpee creation in my hotel room the next. If I miss three days in a row, I'm still ready to get after it. Any more than that - missing a week or being inconsistent for a month, and I start gravitating toward the couch instead of the gym, because the truth is effective training hurts. Since my allergy to pain has been acting up, my couch has gotten more of a workout this summer than I have.

I've turned into a weekend warrior, as I either work into the evenings during the week or take some down-time after working too much the previous day. Being a weekend warrior isn't too bad, if the activity you pursue is familiar. It's sort of the opposite of training. You do activities that keep you from losing all physicality, but you don't develop new capacities. At the same time, you don't hurt yourself. Of course, if you do CrossFit as a weekend warrior, where the activity is constantly varied, things don't work out quite so well.

After a summer, where my workouts have more often been days at the beach and looked like this:

3 rounds of 10-15 minutes:
Carry 4-year-old daughter and lift over waves that break from chest to head high;
Rest as needed between rounds.

or

Bike 11.25 miles with 1,000 vertical feet of climbing

42:18

rather than this:

Warmup
3 rounds Cindy+20 KB swings

Heavy Shit
Deadlift 135x5, 215x3, 265x2, 305x1, 320x3, 330x3, 305x3

Metcon
Quarter Gone Bad

5 rounds (0:15 on, 0:45 off)

4-4-5-5-4

3-1-3-2-1

7-5-6-5-7

= 63,

I found myself nursing a couple of injuries - a groin injury that developed from squatting heavy, on a day I needed extra warmup and didn't take the time for it, and a wrist injury I picked-up trying to jump back into a PMenu cycle after 3 weeks off. The former is manageable. After six weeks, I'm pretty sure the latter will require medical intervention.

I won't be olympic lifting anytime soon, but there's plenty that I can do to keep myself in motion. First, I need to figure out how to get myself in motion. Sure, there's the "Just-do-it" approach, but that doesn't do much for me. I need a program to follow. I've had good luck with my own (at least the sticking with it part, if not always the results), so I'm not shopping around for the latest fad, whether that's CF Football, MaxFit, or OPT. I need to figure out a program that works for my nutty schedule, but more importantly, I need to figure out what the hell I'm training for.

The blog header reflects this ambiguity. I'll tackle this big question next. How about the three or four of you who read these ramblings? What are you training for? I'm sure you've seen this question dozens of times, and I've had good answers in the past. They just don't work for me at the moment.

Fitness and the summer party season

2009-08-03T10:47:00.008-04:00

It's funny. Summer has always been the season of activity for me. Before I became an avid skier or saw the inside of a gym on a regular basis, I used to waste away in winter and put on muscle and get fit during the summer, just by doing whatever fun activities came up - swimming, biking, running around with some sort of ball. Now that my daylight hours are filled with work and summer weekends usually involve driving-off somewhere for a birthday party, reunion, vacation, holiday get-together, etc., it's actually more of a challenge to fit fitness in. I'd like to be out biking, hiking, and generally playing around, but aside from bringing the kids to the beach a few times, there's been precious little of that sort of activity.

I decided I need to get back to what got me into CrossFit in the first place, the simplicity of squeezing in a short, brutal workout into an otherwise busy schedule. I'll go for the long ride or hike when I get the chance, but this past week I got smart about setting expectations, and as a result, my follow-through was much better. I'm still itching to run up Mt. Monadnock (and might this week), but for now, these sorts of efforts will do quite nicely to get my groove back.

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Two days at CF Rochester:

Saturday, 7/25/2009

Metcon
Fight Gone Bad - 237

One point worse than last summer's effort. I went out strong, gassed and crashed, but that was the plan - shock the system, see what it could do, and fight to hold on. Did my post-workout flop after two rounds, stood-up and staggered through a pathetic third round. Wish I had the numbers to illustrate the severity of the drop-off. Can't wait to do this again, when I've got the conditioning back. Too bad it won't be at CFR, where I've done this twice and wouldn't mind getting a little redemption.

Monday, 7/27/2009

Warmup
3 rounds:
Row 250m
25 DUs (just enough to start to get it again, but no more than 11 consecutive)

Heavy stuff
OHS 45x5, 75x5, 95x5, 125x5x2, 135x5x2

I ran out of time for the last set and wanted more weight, but I kept redoing weight, because my stability was off. I easily got a new max on these a week prior, but I'd rather pile up some reps at a higher percentage of that than increase my max (on the OHS at least).

Metcon
Death by Burpee Pullup

One half-second shy of 9 rounds

I've gone soft. I was only too happy to quit.

Tuesday, July 25, 2008

Just the heavy stuff
Clean and jerk 150x1x4
Clean pull 215x3x3
Clean DL 235x3x3
Back squat (high bar) 245x3, 235x3x4

Got a little wobbly at the end of the first set and dropped weight. Wobbly on the last rep, too. Still, it's good to see the base strength holding-up pretty well through extended periods of inactivity.

Wednesday, July 26, 2009

45 minutes of ultimate frisbee - Yay, something fun.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

The big test of my commitment. After a family gathering which included a slice of pizza, a beer, and some blueberry pie with ice cream, I shook off the carb lazies and put in a decent effort on something I've been meaning to try (posterior-chain-dominant weightlifting and biking). Can't wait to try a version of this at home with a barbell, my own bike, and a 2-mile loop that includes a steep 200-foot wall. The question, can I crank up the hill, after doing heavy deads?

Metcon
3 rounds:
1 mile bike
50 KB swings, 1.5-pood

16:24

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Metcon
3 rounds:
Run 400m
8 Curtis Ps, 40# DBs
(Hang squat clean, alternating lunges, push press)
8 Fingertip pullups

14:12

Redid this one, because I'd done it at my parent's house in May 2008 and wanted a direct comparison. As I gassed during the 2nd set of Curtis Ps, I thought I might not do much better than match my old time, but the runs went better and I pushed through the last set pretty determinedly. I was doing a metcon-free Starting Strength cycle last time around, so it was good to finish well before the old 16:55 mark.

Got off to the beach for a little body surfing and a whole lot of playing with the kids in the surf.

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Time for a day off, then some heavy lifting, and if I can keep it up through the week (perhaps get in that run up Monadnock), I'll call myself back in the game. Either way, I'll post pics next time. I promise.

Extremism

2009-07-20T09:12:00.016-04:00

Extremism in the defense of gluttony is no vice. - Fred Goldwater (Barry's fat brother)

I have to face it - I'm an extremist, but I do it in phases. I go to college and party like a mad man, barely graduating on time. I clean up my act, take up biking and log 100s of miles a week for years. I take up serious chess, studying for hours each night, enter tournaments and don't do half-bad. I get back into martial arts in grad school and hardly miss a class in two years. I start a career and go a year before I take two days in a row off. I buy a house and occupy my weekends and evenings fixing it up a little at a time. I take up a healthy paleoish diet and don't eat sugar or grains for two months. I get on a roll with my CrossFit training and get myself into shape for the Games Qualifiers.

Then, I let work take over my life, and I all but stop working out. I could have spent evenings in the motel room getting in some training. I couldn't have continued balls-to-the-wall, but I could have done something. Instead, I was focused on work and I let my metcon and my diet slip. Even as my schedule has eased, I've had a tough time jumping back into a decent workout routine. I'll get in a good week with workouts and diet, and then it slips. Sure, I've had some good excuses to let things slip, a busy week in the office, vacation, minor injuries, but the pattern is clear. I'm not jumping back into the CrossFit routine, quite simply, because the workouts suck. I'm avoiding the pain.

It's not all bad. I've been enjoying myself, and while my metcon suffers and I've lost a little ROM and CF-specific strength, my overall strength is still decent. I don't intend to jump with both feet into Serious Training or Strict Dieting. It's more important for me to learn to balance the competing interests of family, work, fitness, and fun, but, I offer this little what-have-you-done-for-me-lately post as a means of both catching up on things and restarting my blog in hopes of keeping myself honest in that pursuit of balance.

The notion is to do a mix of oly lifting, gymnastics, and outdoor workouts, whether that be hiking and biking, or tire-flipping and sandbag carrying. I'm figuring a 2-on, 1-off approach would be ideal, as far as recovery and schedule go. We'll see.

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A few highlight since I last checked in a month ago.

That was June. Not a complete washout, but more rest days than work days still. July has featured little in the way of workouts, given two weeks of too much work, bookending the vacation week I spent on the Cape. I brought my rings and dumbbells on vacation, but they never got unpacked. (That was lame. A single workout to get me started would have done me good.) I did get in a demanding 2-hour mountain bike ride and a short, high-speed road ride, but it was mostly about eating, drinking, and family. Lots of playing with the kids in the water and a day of body surfing at Marconi Beach - a fun, little workout that involved getting slammed repeatedly into the stone shoreline, while holding my breath. I repeated this workout yesterday (minus the body slamming) at Second Beach Newport with a solid 1.5 hours in the water, either throwing my kids around or riding the surf. Managed a couple halfway decent handstands and press handstands, too.

Don't get me wrong. I've enjoyed myself and feel good about that. It's the balance I'm seeking. A trail run, some squat cleans, and some muscle-ups would have fit in well with my vacation, if I just got off my ass in the morning.

A few photos:

Marconi Beach

Skaket Beach

whale watching

general vacationing

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My July CF workout (the only one thus far) - Saturday July 18, 8:30 a.m.

Warmup
5:00 Jump rope (double unders not quite there, but they'll be back)
Shoulder mobility
Hip mobility (adductor still not happy with me - even after 3 weeks off)

Heavy stuff
Overhead squat 45x5x2, 95x3, 125x2, 145, 155, 165, 175 (PR)
Muscle snatch 75x3, 95x2, 115x2, 125, 135, 135f (matched PR)
Power snatch 135 x1 x4

I had more in me on the OHS, but I didn't want to risk wobbling about at the bottom and tweaking my slow-to-heal groin injury. Good to know that my solid winter training is still carrying over.

Metcon
3 rounds:

5:10

A bit too many pullups for the first day back in three weeks. Shoulder mobility is way down and I can't straighten my arms fully. Hopefully, the latter will mend itself by tomorow. I won't be doing pullups or going overhead, I suspect, but it would be good to not feel I need to marshall my recovery resources to tend to an injury.

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While on the topic of extremism, I stopped off at a Whole Foods on my way back from Rhode Island yesterday and picked up the a nice sampling of the four food groups: beef, lamb, pork, and chicken. The latter three spent the evening on my smoker. (Can't let the diet slip as much as the workouts, or I'll really suffer.

Affiliate hopping

2009-06-16T22:07:00.008-04:00

One of the advantages of having to travel for work (even if it isn't that far) is that I get to bop about New England visiting different affiliates. The travel really only started recently, and I'm just getting caught on to the possibilities for expanding my garage CF perspective. Meetings in Boston and Hartford on consecutive days got me to Revolution CrossFit in Boston and CrossFit Persevere in Glastonbury. These two affiliates couldn't be more different.

RevFit is a globo gym with the shiniest of fitness machines and a CrossFit room. Some marketing guru named it "The Pit" since I was last there, although it only feels that way if you close the garage door to the room and let the sweat build-up. It's got your full array of CF trappings, bars, bumpers, nice pullup bars, rings, KBs, rowers, Dynamax balls, jump boxes, etc. The one thing missing from RevFit - a CrossFit trainer providing feedback. There's just a group of athletes who mostly follow the mainpage WOD, except on Thursdays when a trainer does lead a workout or during an fundamentals class, when all the regulars get kicked out of the pit and exiled to the land of chrome gym furniture to complete their workouts. Last night was just such a night. It's not the gym's fault. We were strength training and happily shooting the shit while we rested between sets and didn't get to our metcon before they began their fundamentals class. Thus, our metcon was done in an open space amidst the chrome-plated furniture of Globoland. We lined up three barbells and did our burpees right in front of the person DLing behind us (watch those fingers, kids).

Most of the RevFit regulars were languishing on the IR. Laura was still recovering from her marathon and limited to upper-body work; Sharon was visibly pained by a neck ailment; and Chris was suffering a nasty cold. Thankfully, Renee was going strong, and Samantha Aurelio was also visiting from out of town, so we got in a good workout together. They did a modified CrossFit Football WOD, and I did most of it plus some ring work.

Sam showed off her one-armed handstand, which got me inspired to try some gymnastics stuff. My press handstand was working well, although I've still got some work to do to hold that freestanding handstand consistently. Apparently the oly work has helped my flexibility, because I sure as heck haven't been doing passive stretching). My front and back lever progressions were suprisingly good, too, given that all I've been working with any regularity is skin the cats, L-hangs, and MU progressions. (It's always good to have your skilz working when it's time to show-off. ) The most impressive showing-off, however, was Sam's ATG squat. She quietly added 5# to her 5RM, while retaining rock solid form throughout. She easily has another 10# in her.

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RevFit Workout - Monday, June 15, 2009

Warmup
Hip and shoulder mobility
10 C2B pullups
5 L-pullups
10 ring dips

Skill work
5 Skin the cat to hollow hang to L-sit
2 failed MUs
1-arm handstands against wall
2 press handstands (first strict straight-arm press HS in a long time )
pike back lever - 5 seconds x2
one-leg-extended front lever - 5 seconds, 3 seconds

Heavy stuff
Press 45x5, 70x5, 95x3, 115x3, 120x3, 125x2+f, 122.5x3, 122.5x1 (burned out from too much ring work between sets)

125 is my prior 3RM, so this isn't bad. Overhead strength still needs attention, given the low numbers overall, but my loss of strength is not as grim as I thought.

Metcon
5 rounds:

10 burpees

7:05

Last time out was 6:26, so this isn't great. I should have checked my log-book before starting, and maybe I could have pushed closer. Metcon probably isn't good enough to take 40 seconds off, but 20 was certainly doable, even though I was thoroughly gassed here.

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In contrast to RevFit, CrossFit Persevere is a spartan setup - no showers (yet), no shiny chrome machinery, no internet/juice-bar cafe, no after-work crowds either on this particular day. They do have a sweet, new pullup bar, on which to do flying pullups, however, climbing one bar to the next four times until you've gone from 8 to 15 feet above the ground. (I stuck to the lower two rungs, thankyouverymuch).

Where RevFit had an array of globogoers gawking at the three of us doing DLs for time (I'm sure the 275# thump helped draw attention), CFP had two coaches there to encourage (i.e., yell at) me to fight through the pain and complete my WOD. Kim Malz, aka fitmom, is co-owner of CFP. She has a tremendous energy that is reflected in her athletes and her performance. Kim qualified for the CF Games in Aromas, less than two years after her cancer diagnosis. As inspiring as that story is, you should have seen her work her way from 24th overall at the Qualifiers to 5th, by charging through the brutal final workout. The kind of fighting spirit she showed in the workout clearly goes a long way in life. It's hard to wimp out on a workout with that kind of example cheering you on.

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CrossFit Persevere Workout - Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Warmup
Pullups
Hip mobility
2 muscle ups (felt good enough that I put them in a metcon for the first time ever)
Burgener clean warmup

Metcon
Nasty girls

3 rounds:

50 squats

7 muscle ups (switched to jumping MUs after one round plus 2 reps & 5 failed reps)

10 hang power cleans, 135#

12:57

Felt good to finally use muscle ups in a metcon. The 11 MUs are by far the most muscle ups I've done in one session. How it is I go from zero MUs one day to 11 the next escapes me entirely. I'll just keep working these and hope they don't go away again.

The new program

2009-06-11T11:21:00.007-04:00

Having completed the qualifiers, I've wondered what I should do next. They were motivational, and certainly, a part of me wanted to raise my firebreather quotient and hit more heavy metcons and see what kind of intensity I could generate on a day-to-day basis. However, the reality of the situation is that I'm lacking in some fundamentals that I think will have more long-term benefit to me than enhancing my ability to suffer more and longer. Certainly, long metcons remain a goat, but my olympic lifting technique and gymnastics skills need to be brought to the next level and I think focusing on them for a while will give me a more functional strength than anything else right now. It's summer, though. I can't be spending 4 or 5 days a week inside a gym while it's gorgeous out, so I decided I better program in some good outdoor activties - certainly flipping tires, dragging sleds, throwing tires, etc.; but also some LSD work, like trail runs, hikes with heavy packs, and biking.

The program is thus a compromise. I'll follow the current Catalyst Athletics strength cycle, which started back in April. However, I'll only do two or three workouts a week, so that I end up completing two weeks of the 10-week cycle each month. On my other two or three days per week, I'll play in the mountains, do those outdoor metcons and get in some much-needed gymnastics work.

I'm sure dragging a 10-week cycle out for five months is dreadfully wrong on some fundamental level, and at some point, I'll post the question to the CA forums, so Greg Everett, Steven Low, and company can tell me in excruiating detail exactly how I'm short-changing myself. However, my priority right now is to enjoy my workouts. They'll be hard - sometimes brutally so, but I got into CrossFit because I wanted to have more capacity for my outdoor pursuits, so I best enjoy the great outdoors while I have the luxury of living in a beautiful rural setting. I promise to bring my camera, when I do.

Now that the qualifiers are over, I'm not sure what form this blog will take or how often I'll update it, but for now, I'll post an abridged version of my most recent workouts, which with commentary will still make this an insanely long post, but until I come up with a better idea, this is still a workout blog, so...

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June 3, 2009
Back squat 255x5, 265x5, 275x5
Press 115x4+f, 115x3+f, 110x5

Was quite pleased with how readily I got within 5# of my 5RM on the squat, but my press remains anemic. My 5RM is 121, so I'm not off by much. However, it's apparent that I need to continue to emphasize overhead work in my supplemental work.

June 4, 2009
Power clean 145x3, 155x2, 165x2, 175x2, 185, 195, 195f

Redid the 195, because my initial catch wasn't pretty. I had the bar plenty high on both reps, but I didn't drop myself into a proper quarter squat to catch it. Instead, I feebly tucked my tail between my legs to receive the bar. This was a problem at the qualifiers, too. Then, I blamed it on my lack of confidence in my quads, which had been thoroughly thrashed by the heavy thrusters, burpees, and rowing the previous day. However, I'm starting to think that I need to train my body to get accustomed to finishing both power cleans and push jerks in a 1/2 to 1/4 squat without dropping to the bottom of the squat. I could definitely lift a lot more weight, once I get that movement pattern down. Sounds like something to throw in my warmup using PVC.

June 10, 2009
Snatch 115x2x2
Snatch Pull 150x3x3
Snatch DL 150x3x3
Front squat 185x3x5

My first Cathletics WOD. Interesting working a bunch of exercises at submaximal loads. I've done mostly ME work for strength training, and while the individual sets were all done fairly comfortably, I could definitely feel the accumulated volume afterwards and can see how the program would develop strength.

June 11, 2009
Muscle snatch - 2 snatch balance couplet 95, 95, 115, 125, 135f, 135
OHS 140, 115x2x2
Power C&J 155, 155x2, 155

8 TGU
C2B Pullups 15x2

Worked up to a muscle snatch PR, after failing on my first attempt at that weight. This was a shoulder intensive workout and is something that will definitely help with overhead strength, perhaps in ways that diligently working the shoulder press with minimal progress might not (although having some fractional plates would probably help in that regard). Shoulders were too toasted to pull off the 30 TGU I had programmed, so I called it a night.

Weekends are supposed to be fun

2009-06-01T09:30:00.008-04:00

It's summer - time to get my workouts in outdoors; time to throw things around the yard; time to head out to the mountains; time to play with tires and sleds. Sunday, it was the tires, and as much as it hurt, this was decidedly fun, and a good workout, too.

Warmup
Hip mobility work
Good mornings, 45x10
10 ft2bar

Heavy stuff
Deadlift 135x5x2, 185x3, 225x2, 275x1, 305x1, 315x5

Needed to get used to lifting heavy again. It's been 7 weeks since I picked up over 300#, and I definitely needed that extra warmup set at 135# to get things working right. By the time I got to my work set, however, they felt solid. Looking forward to restarting linear progression on the DL.

Metcon
3 rounds:

6 tire flip and jump through
200m run
20 wall ball, 25# to 10 feet

9:13

Tire-flipping fun from Patrick Haskell on Vimeo.

The pressure is off

2009-05-30T13:59:00.007-04:00

Seeing the final qualifier workout come up today for the last chance qualifiers gave me a nice feeling of "I'm glad it's not me." I actually am looking forward to tackling this workout again, but first I need to practice the oly lifting technique I learned at Greg Everett's seminar a few weeks back. I want that technique so engrained that some approximation of it remains my default mode of liting, even when I'm so far gassed that I can't count reps (like last Sunday).

So today, rather than trying to start rebuilding the metcon that I lost over the last couple of months, I decided nothing would be better than spending some serious time working on my snatch. I invited John Barney over, both to share what I learned and in hopes that the act of teaching would reinforce some of the lessons for myself. (I had planned to do this immediately after Greg's seminar, but my schedule screwed this idea up until I'd had time to forget much of what I had learned.) The drills, positions, and movement patterns, actually came back pretty quickly and the bar was moving well, even though I never loaded it up heavy.

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Saturday, May 30, 2009

Warmup
Shoulder mobility drills
Air squats
Lunges & sampson/psoas stretch
Boz OHS drill

Skill work
Burgener warmup elements, 15# - many times through
OHSs and snatch balance sequence, several times through at 15 & 45#
tall snatch 45x3
3-position hang snatch, 45x3x2

Snatch 75x3, 95x1x2, 125x1x2

Good speed on that last rep, but I wasn't feeling the heavy stuff today, so I moved on.

This workout has been sitting on my to-do list, ever since Byers posted it at CrossFit 603 - and not just because I'm a math geek or because BW-normalized squat workouts are in my wheelhouse and I just wanted to feel good about the first metcon in my new program. I think it's an interesting approach to build scaling explicitly into a WOD. It was also high time I had a good core-stability workout, since in my limited prep for the Qualifiers, I was mostly focusing on strength and power-endurance work.

Metcon
OHS for a total of 20xBW - choose your weight

I did 74# x 47 @ BW 173

1:57

A similar CF603 WOD, 40xBW C&J made it's way into the Rocky Mountain Qualifiers (at the Qualifiers, it was done with fixed volumes of 7000#/5000#). For the Qualifiers, this sort of choose-your-weight workout is especially interesting, because to do well, you need to know your personal power curve (those weights at which you can most efficiently move weight with a movement). By choosing the optimal weight, you maximize your power output and thus the intensity of your workout (in the strict CrossFit definition of Intensity = Power).

This was rough. With the OHS, the focus is on core (and shoulder) stability, so maximizing the power output doesn't have the same cachet. I think I ended up picking a weight that maximized my speed on the workout, and the effort left me with a nice post-WOD headache. My right shoulder was starting to take a walk around the joint capsule on those last couple of reps. I was definitely at my limit finishing this workout in a single set, but next time I'll try it at 95# and maybe heavier again after that to see how well I can keep the overall intensity going when the intensity of each rep goes up. I expect it will be an entirely different workout that way.

Ring work
1:00 in a mature support
MU progressions
1 MU
4 STC to hollow hang & quit

My post-WOD headache came back with a vengeance when I was inverted, and I called it a day.

The perfect storm

2009-05-25T11:03:00.008-04:00

It's hard to imagine worse prep for the qualifiers. Sometimes it felt like I was maintaining a decent level of conditioning with the workouts I was able to squeeze in around work, but the dramatic drop-off in workouts in May, while I fought to meet my May 22 deadline at work, led to a humbling performance at the Qualifiers. I suffer no illusion that I would have climbed up the leaderboards significantly. Those were some brutally hard workouts, but it would have been nice to go in at my best and see what I could do. Still, I learned a ton about my training, but more to the point, the entire weekend was an amazing experience. Did I mention that I got crushed out there?

I was super nervous when I arrived Saturday morning. I watched the women complete the thruster-burpee workout and was suprpised to see almost none of them trying to jerk the weight, despite a number of them struggling with the 95# thrusters. I went to the warmup area and practiced my thruster-jerk and was happy with how natural it felt and how comfortable the Rx'd 135# weight felt. As I said on Saturday, it felt pretty damn heavy after a while.

I was in the men's first heat, so while I had a chance to say hello to a couple of familiar faces, I hadn't caught up with half the people I knew there. It was therefore a pleasant surpise to hear folks cheering for me from the sidelines. It's funny how this sort of support works. In a pure metcon, like the row, I'd hear somebody yell, "Dig deep, Patrick. It's gonna hurt, but you can do it," and I'd dig deep and soldier on; but when I heard a coach shout "Get on the bar, Patrick," I could squat clean it fine, but if my shoulder muscles weren't ready to lock it out, all the encouragement in the world wouldn't help - at least not in terms of objective performance. It definitely helped me push through the pain and put aside the frustration of yet another failed rep. The funny part about this is that aside from the judges whose athletes didn't show who in front of me cheering me on and Sean Manseau ("Dammit" owner of Pioneer Valley CF), whose voice I recognized and focused on for cues, I had no idea who was cheering me on until I collapsed on my back in the shade by the edge of the cordoned-off workout area and looked up and saw Samantha Aurelio waving and the rest of the CF Tribe tribe standing there cheering me on. It was very cool to have such a supportive crew of virtual friends materialize to offer support when most needed.

After recovering from the pain, I spent the rest of that first workout cheering on people I knew - most often yelling as they stared at the ground before hitting their next burpee, "Rest on the bar," or "Lie down and stand up." I didn't need to shout this to Joe Celso, who upon finishing his last thruster would dump the bar, turn 90 degrees and just drop into his first burpee. His 7 rounds + 5 thrusters and 5 burpees won his heat. Particularly impressive was how he dug down for the last two thrusters as time was running down, after having been doing singles for several rounds, because he knew that if he dumped the bar, he'd never get in any burpees. That one double rep was good for 6 reps on his final score. It was also neat to watch a verteran of two CF Games, Dale Saran (CFHQ and formerly of CF Veritas in RI), pace himself - checking his watch after every round and patiently waiting to start-in again. Needless to say, he put up some solid numbers over the weekend.

The row was intense. It turned the competition on it's head. Some folks who were beasts of the barbells were humbled by those C2 contraptions. It was only 7 minute or so, but it was an every-placing counts format. With times clustering together as they inevitably did on such a simple workout, a loss of a second on the clock could mean a loss of five places in the standings. As a result, everybody had to dig for all they had. The format with the judges holding up color-coded cards as their athlete passed the 500m, 1000m, 1500m, and 1750m mark made the event a spectator favorite. Plus, because there was no heavy equipment flying about, everybody was able to crowd in and really make the competition rock.

I already described my experience in the row. I gave it everything, as the post-workout picture on yesterday's post will attest. (Thanks for catching me at my best, Samantha.) Maybe it's a case of Stockholm Syndrome, but after she mercilessly coached me through row, Erin Davidson is one of my favorite CF Trainers. Inspired by her contribution to my suffering, I lent the same support to a few folks I'd met in my CF travels, usually emphasizing the long stroke when the suffering really kicked in during the 3rd 500, and positively screaming a stroke countdown for the last 200m. (It was quite odd being so enthusiastically thanked for screaming in someone's ear, but that's the kind of energy required to finish an erg test strong.) My voice is almost as thrashed as my quads, back, traps, and triceps right now.

After the row, there was a barbecue, which created a stunning contrast to the noise of competition. I walked into the Court Club lounge where maybe 50 folks had gone to eat and stay out of the rain (which thankfully lasted for all of 5 minutes), and people were so intent on stuffing their faces that you could have heard a pin drop. There was a live band that played off and on through the rowing workout and barbecue, which made for a fun atmosphere, although when they busted out Eye of the Tiger for the third or fourth time, I decided that the band didn't quite get CrossFitters. I'm just glad they didn't play Superstition when I was on the rowers, or I might have shimmied my ass right off the slider. Talk about messing with a sensible stroke rate.

Sunday's workout was the bomb. It blew up the competition and was an obvious test of work capacity. Heavy cleans and C2B is a lethal combination. I had thought they'd go better with running than KB swings, but as it was, it was brutal enough and I was thankful not to have to shuffle about the parking lot between trips to the barbell and pullup bar. For the first six heats, hardly any of the men finished, and I'm pretty sure that only 6 women finished at all. As a result, one woman jumped from 23rd overall to qualifying for Aromas. No worries about an inappropriately difficult workout, however. There's little question that the women who finished this workout were the fittest of the lot. The demands were incredibly high, but the workout was composed of fundamental CrossFit skills and those who got through this brutality will represent the Northeast well.

The men's heats started to get really exciting with three heats to go. In fact, by then, enough folks were finishing that it actually looked like a race, rather than a contest of survival, and that's when I knew the organizers had developed a winning workout. In Jason "Rhabdo" Kapan's heat, we witnessed another amazing display of pacing. Just about everybody hit the pullup bars at the same time in the round of 10, but Jason was still working his cleans patiently - clean, dump, set, clean, dump, reset. By the round of 8, he was in the lead - his beautifully efficient butterfly kip gaining him tons of time. However, even he couldn't maintain a butterfly kip throughout the workout, and he wasn't exactly enthusiastically running to get to the pullup bars at the end. (Of the ~180 competitors, only Lauren Erwin from CF Milford, who won this workout for the women and finished 2nd overall, managed to keep running from station to station at the end. The rest of us would move extra slow to whatever exercise it was that we most dreaded.) Jason set the time to beat, being the first to go under 12 minutes for this workout, and he was appropriately fired-up afterwards. His Guerilla Fitness crew was staying at my hotel and said that he was extremely but quietly disappointed in having what was for him a bad day Saturday. His comment after the workout was that he realized before going out there that all the pressure was off. He could just walk in there and do his workout, and he put in an awesome performance. (I think it was the third best time overall in the end.)

The finals of this event were insane. Judges were given cards to hold up as their athlete got to the rounds of 7, 5, 3, 2, and 1. As before, the fastest out of the gate in the rounds of 10 and 9 didn't take the day for either the women or the men.

As an aside, that first round was of the workout was crazy. They had constructed this pullup bar contraption, which when laden with 16 competitors agressively kipping at the same time, shook like crazy. There were a couple reps where my chest didn't hit the bar, not because I hadn't pulled high enough or hard enough, but because the bar I was pulling on had moved a couple of inches during my kip. My judge either had mercy on me or I came close enough that my shirt made contact. (He wasn't so merciful when I truly missed a rep.) I actually sped up my second round, so I could get on the pullup bars at a less popular time relative to the folks on my end of the contraption. (That strategy may have backfired a little.)

Sorry, back to the finals. The women's heat was neck-and-neck all the way among the top three overall finishers. By the time they were at the round of 7, Heather Keenan (CF New England) was in the lead, then Stacy Kroon (CF Boston) passed her, then Lauren came on in the later rounds. They all finished within ~30 seconds of one another and the emotion of the moment as they all completed the workout was truly inspiring. They were the top three going into the finals, and they each knew that their finish would send them to the Games.

The men's heat was harder to follow - only becase there were so many more guys who kept going strong into the middle rounds. Of the 15 in the final heat, only one didn't finish. The rest of them handled the weight and the C2Bs most capably. It was obvious that the earlier workouts had already selected an elite crew. As the round of 3 came around, it was clear that it was a race between James Hobart (CF Boston) and Brad Posnanski (displaced, I assume, from CF Invictus). They were within seconds of one another, but James's light weight on the pullups was the difference. His form never wavered on the cleans, so he was able to keep pace moving the heavy bar and stay just ahead of Brad. Brad, incidentally, is a complete beast. I watched him during the first workout, and he was doing strict burpees with a proper pushup, and still put up better than 9 rounds. He was tied for 1st going into the last round and ended up tied for points with James Hobart, who won on the tiebreaker, which was based on the final workout time. I was also thoroughly impressed with Dave Lipsom (CF Gotham), who came into the final workout in 1st place but was clearly suffering on the c2B pullups as the workout wore on. He fought through, however, finishing after most men in the final heat but finishing well enough to earn himself 4th place overall and a trip to Aromas.

The intensity these athletes mustered both in the arena and out-of-view doing their training was amazing. The effort put out by all the competitors, from those who tossed a 155# barbell around like it was a plaything to the woman who didn't have a kip and grinded-out deadhang C2B pullups in the final workout - literally spending minutes in isometric contraction trying to finish the last few inches of each rep, was truly inspiring. I made a bunch of new friends, connected with old ones, and have about a dozen affiliates that I now absolutely must visit. As poorly as my training ended up going leading into the event, I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

The truth hurts

2009-05-24T20:32:00.003-04:00

A brutal Sunday workout. Going into my heat, only one guy had finished the WOD (Joe Celso - CF Rochester) and he was 12th overall going in and had to get his workout in early to attend a friend's wedding. (As an aside, Joe is a great trainer and his place is well worth a visit should you find yourself wondering what to do with your free time in Rochester.)

I went in pacing myself to finish the WOD within the 15-minute time-limit and things were going well. The C2B pullups were flowing (which doesn't always happen) and the cleans were heavy, but manageable. However, I started gassing late in the 8th round. I didn't slow down too much. I'm pretty sure I was leading my heat when I was in the 7th round, but I couldn't hold my pace. That itself wasn't so bad, but as I tired, my form went to shit on the cleans. I started muscling them and catching them with my ass tucked under, rather than dropping down into a deeper squat. My legs were still toasted from yesterday, and I didn't trust them to lift the weight or catch it. (BTW, my 20-minute foam-rolling session this morning was every bit the equal of the workouts for depth of pain.) Before long, my back was smoked, and in the round of 5 (which I reached with 2.5 minutes left), I just started failing miserably on the cleans. I must have pulled 9, but only 4 of them were good. I was cooked through.

I knew that my training wasn't up-to-snuff. I just didn't expect to be let down so suddenly and harshly - being simply unable to move the bar sufficiently to keep trudging on. I wasn't so suprised by it yesterday, since I've always been weak overhead, but today's Epic Failure blindsided me (in the way it happened - it was no secret that I haven't been training properly lately).

It's a truism. You can't expect to bring it all on game-day, if you don't bring it every day in practice, and I sure as hell haven't practiced much lately. Looking back on my log, I worked out only 4 days in May leading up to the Qualifiers and in all have had more off-days than on-days in 2009. Training was decent in January and especially in early February, averaging 2 days on for 1 day off (a schedule that was probably close to ideal when I was managing the CFSB volume). Work changed that. At least it the final presentation was the day before the Qualifiers - ideal timing to use my Qualifiers experience as motivation for my training.

I'm quite excited about starting up again - not because I've seen my weaknesses and need to attack them. I knew my goats (metcons greater than 10 minutes and overhead lifting, for example) but simply stopped training enought to tame them. I'm excited because now I can train for Nothing in Particular. I can focus on the fun stuff - oly lifting; gymnastics; backyard tire-flipping, object-throwing, crawling, jumping, rsled-dragging craziness; and even some LSD on the mountain bike or the hiking trails around here.

I swear I'll write-up the qualifiers properly tomorrow.

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Oh yeah, the workout.

10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1:

155# power clean
C2B pullups
1.5-pood KB swings

Completed rounds of 10 through 6 and got 4 out of 5 cleans within 15 minute time limit.

The moment of truth

2009-05-23T20:41:00.005-04:00

I may not have trained the hardest this past month, but I came to the Qualifiers fresh. Being in the first men's heat, I got a quick reintroduction to what CrossFit is all about.

12 minutes of:

I don't know if it was not being ready for this or the combination of burpees and thrusters, but I only manged 5 rounds. I must have missed a half-dozen reps - not fouls, simply being unable to lock it out, starting in the third round. Every rep was a push jerk, and every pull was a squat clean. I was as efficient as I knew how to be and kept moving on the burpees, in no small part because I was so well rested after standing around staring at the bar for so long. I thought for sure I'd be DFL in my heat. I simply could not get those thrusters going. Most heats were won in 8 to 9 rounds. Top score was 10 plus a thruster, better than twice my output (unless you count those last three almost thrusters).

After the expectation the first ugly workout, having the row, a comfortably known workout (if not a strength) was actually a relief. After screaming some friends through the thruster-burpee workout, I settled down and took a 5-minute nap, which really helped me reset.

The atmosphere of this workout was amazing. The rowers all had coxswain/coaches urging them on, and the judge's job was simply to hold up a color-coded card when each rower got to 1500k, 1000, 500, and 250m to go. Jason Ackerman was running around with a microphone calling out the leaders distance in even finer detail. The spectators kept creeping closer and closer, shouting encouragement, and despite the open-air arena, it felt like a crowded stadium.

After watching Melissa Mulligan, whom I met at my cert, win the first heat with her boyfriend cheering her on, I decided maybe it would be best if I found a coxswain of my own. I recruited Erin Davidson of CF Tribe & Center City, who had just finished telling me about this rowing class they've been going to down there. She got me on the rower quickly, glad to see my form had improved since I posted a video to the Digital Coaching forum on the Message Boards. She also had me try the strategy that they'd been working, start hard for 10 pulls, settle in, and go hard (long, fast pulls) every 500m for 10 pulls. I figured, what the hell, it sounds better thought out than setting a pace and seeing what I had in the tank at the end.

First, I have to say that Erin is an awesome coach. It was obvious from the Message Boards that she knows her shit, but she also had the sharp eyes and toughness to not let me get away with a single short pull or loss of form by letting my chest cave and back soften. The hard (fast, long) pull worked like a charm after the first 500m, but the one at 1000m cost me pace afterwards. It wasn't until after the hard pull at 1500, where the end was in sight that I was able to get my pace back properly, and then I bombed the last 200m. I was really glad to be able to dig down and crank the pace for those last 20 pulls. Despite the morning thrusters and burpees, I managed a good time. (I thought it was a PR, but apparently I was in pretty good shape in February and pulled an even better post-workout time.)

2000K Row 7:25.5

Much more to talk about. It's a spectacular experience, but it's time to crash. Tomorrow:

10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1:

The kicker: there's a 15-minute cap. If I finish that puppy, I'll be beside-myself thrilled.

Overtraining and under-recovery, Part 4 - A little physiology

2009-05-15T07:15:00.001-04:00

This post will be the last and was by far the hardest of the series. I starting it in late March, after missing a full week of training because I'd been working too hard. I had the kids to myself for a long weekend, worked until late in the evening several days, and spent 3 days out-of-town. I had my travel kit of adjustable dumbbells, rings, and a jump rope, but the thought of squeezing a 30-minute workout in around my work commitments never quite gained traction. As I watched my carefully planned programming fall to pieces, I kept berating myself for falling off the fitness wagon, but the two times I came close to motivating myself to get in a workout, I realized that I was severely under-recovered, short on both sleep and good food. Whether my decisions that resulted in me missing an entire week of training were the right choices in each case, I don't know. However, I decided at the time that getting enough rest was more important to my fitness than getting in a workout.

I previously discussed the difference between overtraining and underrecovery, but physiologically they are often identical phenomena. Training produces an adrenal response, where our bodies enter flight-or-fight mode in response to the release of hormones like epinephrine (adrenaline), cortisol (hydrocortisone), and norpinephrine. In the short term, this has lots of helpful effects, like increased alertness, improved glucose and fat metabolism, reduced inflammatory response and pain sensitivity, even improved memory. In stress situations, our bodies respond hormonally to boost our metabolism to enable us to adapt to the stressor. This response is similar whether we're dealing with mental stress from moving, loss of a job, or our wedding or with a physical stress, like a 10K run, short-intense workout, or an olympic lifting meet. The stress response is good. It improves performance in the face of the stressor. However, when the stress levels remain elevated, the body's response to the stress changes. We can't remain in a heightened metabolic state all the time. The effects of overtaining and chronic stress begin to appear: fatigue, increased inflammation, lowered metabolism, and a weakened immune system. (Note how these effects are the opposite of those produced by adrenal homones in the short-term. It's almost like a low-level adrenal fatigue, or more likely a reduced sensitivity to the hormones (because elevated cortisol and ephinephrine levels are associated with overtraining). I'm also craving carbs more than usual - probably because my body gets used to the elevated glucose levels that correspond to states of stress.

As I balance training and my insane project at work, I've been hyperconscious of the potential for being underrecovered from one or the other. I simply can't afford a few days off to illness, and I have no desire to injure myself in advance of the Qualifiers. When I got his project I knew the two events, this project and Qualifiers would be adding stress to my life in parallel. There's a beautiful symmetry to them - the final presentation for my project is the day before the Qualifiers. (For my next trick, I will attempt to avoid a letdown after these two events.)

In coping with this fine conjunction of events, I'm pretty sure I'm erring on the side of undertraining. I've dialed back the intensity, not in the gym so much as the way in which I drive myself to workout. If I feel fatigued, I don't push it. Instead, I make an effort to eat well and plenty and get my sleep. To date, my performance hasn't suffered much. I may not be peaking for the Games, but I won't be a mess either (at least not until halfway through the first workout).

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I've been skipping out on the posting of workouts lately. I haven't been working out much, but I figure time spent doing that is better than typing away at the computer. (Remember, I started this post in March.) It two Saturday's ago that I ran a 5K. I got a mediocre time.

May 2, 2009

Run 5K - 25:12

The noteworthy thing in this was how messed up my legs felt during and afterwards. Since I have colitis, my immune system can get me jacked up when under stress. Aside from the ordinary symptoms of blood loss, I can get an awful athritic response. This run was one of those days. I pushed through OK, but my left knee hurt like hell afterwards. Some of it was IT-band related, so foam rolling helped. I'll just have to hope we don't hit a long run at the Qualifiers. I'm no good at them anyways.

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May 6, 2009

Warmup
10 C2B pullups
10 ring dips
Burgener warmup and snatch skill transfer exercises
Shoulder triplet
Boz OHS drill

Skill work
3 position: hang snatch-OHS couplet 45x3
Snatch 75x3x2, 95x3, 115x1x2

Metcon
Snatching Fran - Mid-Atlantic Qualifier WOD

21-15-9:

95# (squat) snatch
C2B pullups

13:52

Didn't push this, as my shoulder was unhappy during warmup, but it felt better as I went along and I sped this up in the 2nd and 3rd rounds.

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May 9 & 10, 2009

Attended Greg Everett's Olympic seminar. This will get it's own detailed write-up, because it's more deserving than anything else I've thrown up here. Saturday we worked the snatch, and Sunday we worked the clean & jerk. Set PRs in the snatch and clean, but was too spent to try to set a jerk PR.

Heavy stuff
Snatch 165#
Clean 225#
Clean & Jerk 185#

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May 13, 2009

Warmup
25 DB swings, 35#
10 C2B pullups
10 ring dips
Hip mobility drills
Deadlift up to 250#

Metcon
3 rounds:

10 Deadlift, 250#
15 C2B pullups
30 squats

8:57

It's called training

2009-04-28T19:36:00.006-04:00

There's a tendency in CrossFit to make everything about competition. I'm not talking about the Games. That is a competition. I'm talking about the WOD, whether it's MainPage, an affiliate WOD, or your own programming you're following. People follow the MainPage to compete against everyone else on the same day. On the message boards, challenges go up to compare times in a metcon taken from someone's log. In our own training, we break out our favorite workouts and try to bust them out in a few seconds less than the last time we did them; we chase new 1RMs more often than we should; or we tackle some obscene workout from a MainPage video or the Qualifiers to see where we stack up. There's nothing wrong with this by itself. As Coach says, "Men will die for points," and so the competition provides valuable motivation to push through the pain that accompanies most CF workouts - to generate the intensity needed to get the most out of our training.

The problem comes when the daily competition takes the place of intelligent training. Last fall, I took this to the Stupid Zone. Last fall, I got in a contest with some folks on the message boards to see who could first get 10 consecutive muscle ups. I got stuck at three before my efforts to Grease the Groove led to some unpleasant elbow problems. Somebody else developed their own arm problem. We called the contest off, and as far as I know, none of us has made it to 10 still.

Lately, I've been doing workouts from the Games and Qualifiers, to train the kinds of heavy metcons I'm likely to face, but also to see how prepared I am - how I stack up against top competition. When I stepped into CF Central CT tonight and saw that they had max deadlifts programmed, I had a notion to try the brutal Sunday WOD from the Great Basin Qualifiers. However, after warming up with 155# cleans, common sense got the best of me. It didn't make sense to tackle another workout that would leave me staring at the bar wondering when I'd be able to complete my next rep. I needed an intense metcon, so I decided to cut the workout in half.

The decision paid off. I pushed to my limit. I had a couple failed reps on the cleans and C2Bs; I fought off room spins for a moment during each round; and I ended up lying on the ground for a couple minutes waiting for the pain to stop. Post-WOD bliss wouldn't come for a while, but I felt great about this (even if I wouldn't have been competitive).

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Warmup
Shoulder triplet
Dynamic mobility drills
Mountain climber burpees, 5x5
Burgener w/u
15 C2B pullups

Power clean/clean couplets 95, 135, 155x4

Metcon

1,000m row
3 rounds:

5 cleans, 155#

10 C2B pullups

15 box jumps, 30"

14:21

What a difference a day makes

2009-04-26T18:39:00.010-04:00

Yesterday felt so lousy that I figured I should hit a day reminiscent of the CFSB program and see if I didn't fall back in the working mode, instead of the whining mode. I did declare "CF Sucks" again after round 1 of the metcon, but I kept after it. It wasn't a goat fest, but aside from the short time domain, I wasn't exactly playing to my strengths. Felt good to go hard and heavy. Now, to do it again tomorrow.

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Warmup
Wind sprints
Air squats
Sampson stretches
Shoulder mobility drills

Heavy stuff
Bench press 45x5, 95x5, 135x3, 165x2, 185x3, 195x3, 205x3, 210x2

Got a new 3RM and 2RM in there despite not working bench since Fall. Gotta love how strength transfers from one movement to another.

Box jumps for height

Got 37 inches pretty readily, but the next jump was to 47 inches, and there's no way that was happening. Did a few horizontal tire-to-tire jumps too. Good fun, but not exactly a workout. Here's photo sequence of John hitting the 37-inch jump.

Deadlift 135x5, 185x3, 225x2, 265x2, 275x1

Metcon
5 rounds:

5 Deadlift, 275#

10 Burpees

6:26

Nice cycling of burpees. I have a lousy habit of landing from the jump and then dropping into the bottom of the squat. Today that only happened two or three times, and that made for a halfway decent time on this WOD - despite me stopping to valsava with every DL rep.

Here's hoping I can get in a workout tomorrow and build on this momentum.

I've lost my edge

2009-04-25T21:01:00.007-04:00

It was only a matter of time before my 2-on, 2-off, 1-on, 2-off schedule caught up to me. Today, I lacked not only the strength and endurance but the mental strength to push through. I had a workout that aside from the usual suffering would have been good fun, but not today. Today I couldn't muster the intensity, and I spent far too much time looking at the weights. It was all I could do to hobble down the road without walking. Today, I was hating CrossFit, and CrossFit was hating on me. I'll have to give this one a go some other time. It's a good combination of movements. It deserves a shot on a day that I actually feel like moving.

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Warmup
Hip mobility drills
Burgener warmup
Bear complex 45x3, 95x2, 115x1

Metcon

3 rounds:

400m run

Dimishing reps (9-6-3) of:

115# bear complex
Tire flip and jump through

20:17

That was ugly. It hurt plenty, but that may just be indicative of bad tire-flipping form. I'm guessing I never bore down and flattened my back, given my lack of focus. That only served to slow the runs down, too. Feh.

At least tomorrow is another day.

Exposing my own weaknesses

2009-04-21T23:59:00.001-04:00

Took a little detour on the way home from CT yesterday to catch up with Sean Manseau at Pioneer Valley CrossFit. He had already done Jason (a total of 50 muscle ups and 250 squats) in the morning, but he was still ready for a late-night workout. Sean is a great coach and a really interesting guy - a former graphic artist, writer, and now affiliate owner. We were on the same page regarding tackling a qualifier WOD. He had in mind the Great Basin Sunday workout but I had no interest in box jumps because my calves have been locked up tight since skiing Sunday, so instead, we tackled the second European qualifier workout.

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Warmup
Shoulder mobility work
Kipping pullups and 5 bar muscle-ups
3 HSPUs

(Sean's sweet pullup bars gave me a chance to try these for the first time. Way easier than ring muscle ups if you've got a big kip. Take home message: I need more deadhangs.)

Burgener warmup
Tall cleans
C&Js up to 135#

Workout
15-12-9:

C&J, 135#

HSPU

DNF - got through the last set of cleans in 19:50

So simple on paper, but this was awful. Even concentrating on form on the jerks (to the extent I'm able to execute well), the HSPUs were brutal - way, way harder than the 21-15-9 in Diane. They took Forever. By the end of the second set, I was teaching myself how to kip them and got pretty decent with it - a skill I'll put to use at the Qualifiers, if necessary, but not something I ever intended to learn. It's kind of stupid, really. Talk about non-functional. At the end, I was perfectly happy to accept a DNF rather than wasting time doing 9 more kipping HSPUs.

I don't relish the idea of doing HSPUs at the Qualifiers. Therefore, once I recover from this effort (my traps are killing me), I'll be greasing the groove on HPSUs - sets of 5 or less whenever I get the chance. (I wonder if there's somewhere at work I can do this without them deciding that I need to be laid-off for my mental health?)

Sean finished this workout ahead of me, having the sense to scale and do strict form using bands - what I tried to do in the last round with Zero success. (I couldn't budge myself). As a result, I got some helpful coaching in my last round. The highlight of the workout was when Sean told me to think of the Third Law of Newtonian Mechanics right as I was about to attempt my last rep. I decided I better stick with the previous cue about pushing myself under the bar. We had a good laugh over that one later, but he did bring up a good point. I had spent so much time working my form on the simpler push press that I've gotten out of practice with the jerk. No worries there, really. It's already at the top of my list for exercises to incorporate into my workouts over the next few weeks, and it's a skill that I know I've got in the bag of tricks somewhere.

Snow day

2009-04-19T23:59:00.000-04:00

With the family out of town for the week, I decided to get in a ski day before it was too late. Drove up to Stowe to enjoy their closing day. It was an absolutely perfect day in the mountains. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and temperature hovered in the 40s all day - enough to soften the snow, but not so much to turn everything to slush. Mixing runs through the soft bumps, with high-speed cruisers, and adventure runs through the trees (where the late-season conditions left a few more rocks, stumps, and streams kept things interesting), I got in a little of everything out there. The quads started to go, but I figured I was skipping a CF WOD for this, so I kept pushing through to the end of the day. Finished up with a nice tailgate party until the sun went behind the mountain. A fine day. I owe you all some pictures on this blog, but the camera went with the kids for the week. (They're a lot cuter than me.)

16,000 vertical feet in 5 hours
3 beers and one t-bone steak in the parking lot

You're never ready. It's just your turn.

2009-04-18T11:06:00.005-04:00

They say it about death and bullriding. I often find myself saying it about CF workouts, so the last time I asked myself whether I was (or would be) ready for the Qualifiers, I just said "Screw it." It was time to find out. There's no more time to patiently build strength or perfect technique. I need to hit some of those heavy Qualifier workouts and just see what happens. Enter Qualifier workout #1 - Fat Helen. I bottom loaded my DB, so it would swing more like a KB. I'd never swung a 70# DB for more than a few reps before, and the longer lever arm of the bottom-loaded DB was a rude shock to the system, but it wasn't any worse than a bunch of heavy DLs. I don't feel great about my performance, but it didn't totally suck either, so I can't complain.

I've got another four weeks to train before the Qualifiers. The objective - make the time cut in every workout, and don't finish DFL in any heat. (Anything better will be a pleasant suprise.) Regardless, I don't intend to be suprised by the workout elements. There will be a lot of heavy metcons between now and then.

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Warmup
Jump rope 5:00
CFCC Dynamic mobility
Shoulder mobility quartet
Burgener warmup (just because)
TGU 35x3
DB Swings 35x10, 55x5, 65x3, KB-style 70x3

Metcon
Fat Helen

3 rounds:

Run 400m
21 KB swings, 70#
12 C2B Pullups

15:20

C2B's were broken into singles and doubles, because the swings took so much out of me. Swings were broken into 10 to start but mostly 4-6s thereafter. Pretty sure I could get down near 14 minutes, now that I know what a bunch of 2-pood swings feel like on my back.

Ring work
5 STC, pike through to L-hang (gotta get back to more of these soon)
MU progressions
4 consecutive MUs (PR)

Strength is king

2009-04-16T06:26:00.004-04:00

It's no secret anymore. The strongest athletes are the best athletes. As Rip says, "Stronger people are harder to kill and more useful in general." That harder-to-kill bit rang lound and clear last night, as I tackled DT - the newest hero workout, dedicated to Staff Seargant Timothy Davis who was killed by an IED in Iraq in February.

The strength displayed by elite CFers is amazing. It's not the instantaneous, explosive strength of Dimas or the massive, grinding strength of Konstantinovs. It's the ability to move reasonably heavy stuff repeatedly without tiring. Guys like Jason Khalipa, Josh Everett and other Games contenders have unreal work capacities. Me, well, not so much.

The difference between the traditional benchmark barbell metcons - Fran, Grace, Elizabeth - and the Games workouts (e.g., 30 squat C&J, 155#) or hero workouts like DT is remarkable. An extra 20# on the bar doesn't sound like that much when talking about max DLs or squats, but it makes a world of difference when you need to do 30 reps. Make no doubt about it, heavy metcons are the future of CrossFit. You might not be there yet, and I'm clearly not there yet, but it's my future - my immediate future. Kelly Starrett calls "225 the new 135", the way to separate the wheat from the chaffe. Last night, I was the chaffe, but I wasn't going to give up on this hero workout.

Whether that was the best choice for my physical training, I don't know. The Rx'd weight was my previous 3RM for hang power cleans. I do know, however, that workouts like this are important mental training for me. I may not have mustered maximum intensity, but I learned something about the lay-of-the-land in Heavy Country. In the last two rounds, in part motivated by a desire to not have to clean that bar again, I managed 6 consecutive push jerks. While that was clearly a sign that I could have pushed harder. It was also a mental victory, forcing myself to both increase my work rate and to adopt better form to get the job done.

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Warmup
CFWUx1
Burgener warmup
DL-HPC-PJ 45x5, 95x3, 135x2, 155x1

Metcon
DT

5 rounds:

12 Deadlifts, 155#
9 HPCs, 155#
6 PJs, 155#

27:13

My hormonal milieu

2009-04-12T21:26:00.007-04:00

As you probably know, my training has been irregular with weekday workouts getting pushed aside by the working world pretty frequently. I've spoken about the slippery slope with respect to diet and carb cravings. However, I find that there's sometimes an equally dangerous slide when the workouts don't come regularly.

It's not any one thing I can put my finger on, but the loss of routine hurts in more ways than you might expect. Not only do I miss out on valuable training time, but I lose my training mentality. The notion of a Running Grace still sounds cool, but motivating to do such an ugly metcon does not come as easy. During the week, my body is adapted to resting comfortably in the evenings (even though that resting is usually me working on the computer). It takes some planning to convince my body to get off its ass. The other problem is my planning. I've had this nice CFSB program going - squats Saturday, deadlifts Sunday, metcon Tuesday, front squats or cleans Wednesday, and press Thursday. However, that neat little schedule hasn't been kept since the third week in March, and it was only kept once prior to that. Being off schedule isn't bad in-and-of itself. (Y'know, constantly varied and all that.) The trick is to not get thrown by it, to keep training when the opportunity presents itself, to not say because there's only a half-hour available that there isn't time to train. However, that's exactly what happened - too often. I got so wrapped around what my next workout would be that I'd put it off for a day, so I'd have time to do the workout I had planned, and then wouldn't have any time the next day. It's something I've been known to rant at others about - to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good - whether we're talking training or diet. Forget about 3-on, 1-off or 5 days a week; in March, there were many more days I didn't train (18) than there were days I did train, and I'm barely breaking even this month. (The scary thing is: I'm supposed to be getting ready for the Games.)

So, I've missed a bunch of training days. It happens to all of us at one time or another. My timing is particularly bad, but somebody doing a bad job of squeezing in workouts isn't something new. What I find interesting is how quickly my energy levels changed as I reduced my activity level - how comfortable the couch would look when I'd get home at 730 at night. That's the time I most often start my workouts, but after a long day at a desk and a few days without a workout, my body was fully adapted to inactivity and pretty happy with stasis.

The weird thing isn't that the body adapts to the easiest form of existence it can. That's the way we evolved to minimize stress. Unfortunately, it's my stress levels that cause the most trouble. It's not the stress of a high-pressure job. There's lots to do, but it's pretty interesting, and the long days come with comp time that I'm sure to put to good use. However, the travel and the associated diet, the disrupted schedule that has me working some nights and weekends, nights with too little sleep, and the challenge to find time for myself and my family amidst the increased workload, produces a classic physical stress response. My cortisol levels shoot up; I get inflammation of joints and tissues; and my work capacity suffers. It's like I get all the problems of overtraining without any of the benefits of the training that got me there. I'm doing a strength bias program, where I'm trying to encourage anabolic metabolism, and the rest of my life is telling my body to catabolize itself. Thus, some of my reduced training load is simply a sign that I'm listening to my body, doing what I need to do to keep putting up PRs when I do train, but but that doesn't mean I haven't also been slipping into some bad habits.

Part of the stress response is that I found myself craving carbs - more ice cream, dried fruit, chocolate-covered espresso beans (yum), a beer or glass of wine; even the bread looked good at Easter dinner. Fortunately common sense won out on that count, and I settled for a modest dessert of cheesecake with syrup-laden strawberries and a side of ice cream. Yes, this was a deliberate indulgence - an admission to myself that I'd slipped and might was well enjoy it, because it was high time I cleaned up my act. While this sounds like the classic case of giving up on discipline altogether because I slipped up a bit, it worked. My diet has been dialed-in these last two days - starting with an 18-hour fast from cheesecake until late Monday morning, done with the express intent of getting my insulin levels back under control. This is a strategy I've employed of late, when travel and a hectic life get in the way of a sound diet, I work in a fast to help get myself back on track, and then I return to the strategy of Just Eating good food.

I had every intention of working out last night - hitting that lovely row-burpee-run WOD that is just the sort of metcon Rx that my I need. Unfortunately, work kept me going until far too late, so today I ducked out of the CT office in time to visit CFCC and suffer whatever WOD Tom had cooked up for everyone.

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Warmup
Dynamic mobility sequence (hips and ankles)
Shoulder mobility drills
3 x 10 of supermans, mtn. climbers, situps, lunges
30 jumping jacks

Skill work
Power cleans 75x10x4 - focus on efficiency of movement and finishing with elbows up and active hip

Metconnish
50 squats - 2 16K KBs in rack
250 single unders
10 floor wipers

5:33

Metcon
Tabata rowing

925m

Tom actually had the fish game programmed for his athletes. I took on the tabata myself. Needless to say, it sucked. I really lost it on the last three rounds. (I was on a 960m pace before that.)

A pretty short session when you get right down to it, but I needed to just be given a workout and do it. I had my rings, jump rope and DBs with me, but figured the external motivation and a workout partner would do me some good. Good to see Tom's new place. It's in the back of a kickboxing place with a climbing wall. I could make good use of those facilities, if I get there earlier in the day before the kickboxers show up. They've even got a climbing wall. Hopefully, however, my travelling days are numbered and within a couple weeks, I'll only be down here occasionally. While I'm here, however, I might as well make the most of it. On that note, I was too tired to shower and then head out to dinner, so I stopped at the grocery store and made a nice dinner - tuna steaks in coconut milk with an arugula/spinach salad. Maybe not the most impressive workout, but I got the most out of my day.

Get with the program

2009-04-11T23:59:00.001-04:00

Now that I've decided to leave the CFSB behind until after the Qualifiers, you may ask, "What does my new program look like?" Funny, I have pretty much the same question. The new program has a few key characteristics, including:

an emphasis on intense metcons and associated suffering;
skill work to address my weaknesses (overhead lifts [shoulder strength and the dip-drive], hamstring/shoulder flexibility, and have I mentioned endurance and muscular stamina?); and
not too time consuming, as I'm busy at work.

Sound familiar to anyone? Could be the MainPage WOD, couldn't it? Just what I was doing back in January to get on track for the Games, before I decided to do a CFSB cycle first. Well, as much as I admire Coach G's programming, he doesn't know my weaknesses, my varying schedule, the equipment I have available in my travels, or the weather around here. Still, the format of this new program will be familiar. There will be the occasional CFSB-like day (particularly shoulder press day), where I warmup, do skill work, do heavy work, endurance work, and a metcon, but I won't have the time for that every day, and I need to attack some longer metcons. I will regularly pick metcons from the mainpage, not cherry-picking so much as goat-herding; I will do my share of short, brutish, heavy metcons of the style that I expect to see at the Qualifiers; and I will do a series of Girls to benchmark my progress relative to where I was when I started to think about going to the Qualifiers. Many days, I'll also do skill-work also to address weaknesses, like push presses and jerks, muscle-ups, handstand pushups, etc.

Saturday's workout also marks another change in my workout program. I went to the Y and had a fun, little warmup, where I did a nice variety of gymnastics work as part of my warmup on the plush gymnastics mat. However, when I went down to the weight room to do some overhead lifting, I couldn't find a single space where I could safely bail. This, despite the fact that there were only three other people there. They'd moved the furniture around in such a way as to maximize the impression of space for people whose intent was to find a place to rest their alternately underdeveloped or oversized ass, while they isolated that particular muscle group that was sure to make all members of the opposite sex swoon with desire. Now, I'm in the habit of redecorating the room to make space for myself, but this time, there was simply nowhere to move the various benching units to make space for some snatches and overhead squats that wouldn't put them on top of one of the three other people in the room. I simply gave up and went home, deciding that it was preferable to hit my workout in the 40-degree garage and out in the rain. I owe the directors at the Y a letter explaining the reason for my cancelled membership, but that's a matter for another day, because my hope is that I can be diplomatic and persuasive enough that they'll consider their failure to provide value to somebody with the simplest of needs by the time next winter rolls around. (I don't intend to live in this same place long enough to make insulating, heating, and pouring a new floor in my garage a worthwhile investment.)

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Warmup
Suicides

Skillwork
Free-standing handstands
Forward rolls, shoulder rolls, handstand rolls, hand-walking, cartwheels
HSPU on parallettes (partial ROM and full ROM [ears below bars] in pike position)

Burgener warmup x 2 (once at Y; once at home)
Snatch-OHS-snatch balance complex 75x2, 95

Metcon
Nancy

5 rounds:

16:26

Pretty happy with that for my first time as Rx'd. I did everything unbroken with the only rests coming before I picked up the bar and then with the bar overhead (unless you count that slow first half of the run in the last round, where I was recovering from a screaming metcon headache). This almost gave me the Fran cough - just the kind of effort I need to produce more often.

Changing gears

2009-04-10T23:59:00.003-04:00

Got my last max effort day in at the tail-end of my CFSB program. It wasn't the smoothest implementation of programming with all my travel and missed workouts, but I definitely got stronger just the same. With six weeks to the Qualifiers, it's time for me to direct my programming more directly toward my weaknesses, which means more metcons and fewer squats. I'll keep deadlifting and working on my overhead lifts every week, but I need to focus on work capacity over time, rather than strength and short-term power. I'll go back to training those, because strength, speed, and power are quite simply fun. However, I need to focus on cardiovascular endurance, muscular stamina, and building my willingness to just plain suffer. First, however, I got to enjoy seeing how much progress I made lifting heavy 3-4 times per week for a couple of months. I was pleasantly suprised.

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Warmup
Jump rope 7:00
Messing around on rings

Heavy stuff
Deadlift 45x10, 135x5, 205x3, 275x2, 315x1, 345x1, 365x1 (PR already), 375x1, 385x1

Metcon(ish)
45 1/2 BW thrusters, 85#

3:38 in sets of 26 + 19

Goal was one unbroken set, resting in the rack or overhead. It's one of two remaining Level II fitness standards, both of which relate to work capacity and muscular stamina. This one is particularly tough, and there are plenty of damn strong athletes who have struggled with it, so I don't feel too ashamed of falling short, but I'm going to keep after it, as it gets after one of my primary weaknesses - stamina on the overhead lifts.

Core work
Overhead barbell walk, 95# X 150 feet

Felt more like shoulder work than core work, but that's too be expected after the thrusters.

All in all a pretty easy day, but max effort lifts have a way of catching up with you, so tomorrow I may feel differently about it.

A reasonably comfortable PR.

Embrace the suck

2009-04-06T22:00:00.006-04:00

A few days ago, somebody on the boards posted a question about how you master the mental game of CrossFit. That is, how do you dig down halfway through a brutal metocn and convince yourself to do the very thing that all your instincts are screaming at you to stop doing? There were plenty of good replies to this question, but the phrase that occurred to me (and it's one that I've never really liked) is "Embrace the suck." For some reason I never liked the sound of the phrase before, but when I thought about it I realized that it is exactly the mindset I need to push through an upleasant challenge, a particularly nasty WOD.

When you get right down to it, you need to be willing to accept discomfort, to relish that discomfort, to know that the pain you experience at the moment will bring you strength later. It won't bring you comfort. Sure, it may make the physical and psychological challenges of your day-to-day life easier to bear, but it won't make the next workout any easier. Learning to push yourself through discomfort only makes things worse. You get stronger, yes, but by pushing harder, the pain increases. It's a vicious cycle. The more you suffer, the stronger you get, the more it sucks the next time. You'll get stronger, but don't expect it to get any easier. It will just hurt that much more. To make the next step as a CF athlete, I need to learn to love that pain - to recognize it as future strength and hold onto it rather than turn away; I need to Embrace the Suck.

The cruel irony was that yesterday's workout was one of those challenges that was bound to make me question that entire philosophy. Whatever Evil Genius first decided to pair running and DLs can go fuck himself. Heavy DLs screw the back up tight and encourage the body to develop an antiPose stride, where you struggle to simply lean forward slightly. I knew that as soon as I went out for the second run, I'd be in that sort of discomfort that comes from getting your core squeezed mercilessly by itself. Fuck embracing the pain; the pain was embracing me. I knew this would be the challenge of this WOD coming into it. I knew that I had to push through, but when it comes to heavy DLs, pushing through needs to be done with a measure of caution.

I've never been a fan of DLs in a metcon. Maximizing power output is too easily done at the expense of proper form and loss of form on heavy DLs is a recipe for injury. However, after working the DL almost weekly for over a year, I've got the form locked in pretty well and can tell when I'm starting to slip. If Coach G. is going to program DLs on the mainpage with regularity and they're thus likely to show up at the Qualifiers, I need to figure out a way to get efficient at doing them with solid form. I'm not sure I didn't err on the side of caution yesterday (breaking the DLs into sets of 2 and 3 for the most part), but it was a good effort toward pushing through the discomfort and keep putting out the work I know I can produce. As I get accustomed to this particular flavor of pain, I hope I can up my power output on workouts like this. (Of course, there are many flavors of suck I need to learn to embrace more fully, but that's where that Constantly Varied bit comes in. More on programming soon.)

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Warmup
Agility drills
Barbell TGU x 3 each
OHS 45x15

Skill work
Muscle up progressions
4 MU singles

Finally getting the hang of this as a controlled movement. Hope to give the 30 MU for time WOD a go before the Qualifiers.

Metcon
3 rounds:

Run 400m

10 DL, 260# (1.5 x BW)

20 Box jumps 30"

19:07

Hey, this CFSB shit works

2009-04-04T14:29:00.005-04:00

I'm certainly not the first to say it, but it was the first time I got to test it myself. I'd gotten "PRs for reps," while working through the program, but I hadn't gone after a 1RM before this week. Thursday's shoulder press test was unsatisfying, due in no small part, I'm sure to the inconsistency with which I worked it (5 times in the last 7 weeks and not at all for the 5 weeks after I set my PR in December). My squat, on the other hand, has been getting lots of love and attention from ME sessions, to DE box squats, to sets of 20, and a handful of new 5RM efforts, but I hadn't done ME sets of less than 5 since January. Today, I got to see how those lighter weights translated to the truly heavy stuff. As you might guess by now, the anwwer is: quite well, thank you.

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Warmup
Row 500m D6 144.5
Hip mobility drills

Heavy stuff
Back squat 45x5, 135x5, 185x3, 225x2, 275x1, 295x1, 305x1 (PR), 315x1 (PR), 320f

A little more aggression and I would have had that 320. I got stuck halfway up with my form locked in solid and held it there for a couple of seconds, but couldn't push through. If I'd hit it harder to begin with, I'm pretty sure that would have gone up too. Still, I'm very happy with this.

Skill work
Handstand practice 8:00

Need to do some shoulder mobility work ahead of time next time. I'm getting pretty solid, but I just don't have the range of motion to lock everything out where it needs to be to make these easier.

Metcon
3 rounds:

13:56

That was rough. The swings were hard, but unbroken. The squats got broken every round. I was really feeling the heavy stuff. Still, the performance wasn't half bad. I'm planningto give metcon more attention between now and the Games, and hope to have this workout under 12:00 by then.

Core work
GHD 2x15

Bring what you got

2009-04-02T21:51:00.004-04:00

Sometimes you've got plenty in the tank and are firing on all cylinders. Sometimes, you just gotta limp on through. There was nothing objectively wrong with me tonight. I just didn't feel it. My timing was off, my strength wasn't there, and I felt all kinds of strange during the metcon. Still, you can't wait for everything to be right; sometimes, it's just time to get after it.

Yesterday I managed a morning workout that didn't even merit a post.

CFWUx2
One mile run 7:23

Was supposed to be 5K, but my back/left glute were attacking me, much like they did during my three-hour drive the previous day, so I bailed on the run. Was short on time anyways, so no big deal. Felt much better today, but didn't get out to the gym until 8:30 pm - not my favorite time of day (unless I'm getting to bed early or grabbing an after-dinner drink). No such luck tonight.

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Warmup
Jump rope practice 4:40 (max 3 DUs)
Shoulder mobility triplet

Heavy stuff
Shoulder press 45x5, 95x5, 115x3, 125x1, 130x1, 135x1, 137f (141 is my PR)

Had hoped for a better showing after my CFSB work, but no matter what I do with my programming, I'll be keeping the shoulder press and other overhead work in a regular rotation. One of these days, I'll see some strength gains there.

Metcon
Filthy 50

30:11 (PR by almost 3:00)

Box jump, jumping PUs, swings, lunges, PPs unbroken, but
DUs took 5.5 minutes
Got to burpees at 18 minutes (previous best was to wall ball by then)
Burpees took 5.5 minutes
DUs took almost 7 minutes (in 1s, 2s, 3s & 4s)

Felt like puking after the wall ball. (Yes, Jenna, I walked away twice. Even tried to walk away from the burpees, at which point I just dropped and did three more.) Sat down after the burpees at the hands of a metcon demon. Felt pukie close at hand and had weird muscle spasms that made it feel like somebody had placed a heavy hand on the side of my neck. Very strange. Got some evil calf cramps as I was finishing up the DUs and hobbled inside feeling Angry Hungry. I swear, if I found a person in the fridge, I would have ripped off their arm and eaten it. Thankfully, I was able to take out my primal aggression on some leftover London Broil and fruit. Good to get in a solid midweek session.

Holy hamstrings

2009-03-29T13:18:00.006-04:00

Got up this morning and thought I had no chance of having a good workout today. Slept a solid 8.5 hours (for the first time in ages) but it was a gray, rainy day, I felt sluggish, and my hamstrings were downright angry. Yesterday's workout was a tough one, but I didn't expect to feel it this much. I could tell something was off warming up. Double unders weren't happening and even the basic bounce was causing me difficulty at first.

As I finished the warmup, however, I figured out the cause of my malaise. I had pizza and beer for dinner last night. I was at a niece's birthday party and wasn't prepared for the carb fest. That was the first pizza dinner I'd had since at least November, maybe as far back as August, and my energy levels were all screwed up as a result. Knowing this was oddly reassuring. I told myself that I was stronger than I felt, and brought a little extra attitude to my workout. It didn't cure everything, but it gave me the confidence that if I warmed up to it, I could pull some heavy deads.
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Warmup
Jump rope 5:00
Boz OHS
TGU-windmill, 45x3

Heavy stuff
Deadlift 45x5, 135x5, 185x3, 225x2, 275x1, 295x1, 305x5, 320x5 (new 5RM)

Metcon
Josh

21-15-9

95# OHS
2 pullups

8:12

Core work
Getup-situp 20x5 each, 30x5 each
SLRR 30x5 each, 40x5 each

My pullups sucked and were broken to hell and back, but I managed the OHS unbroken, which felt good. Maybe I could have gone faster on the pullups, but I felt like I was on the edge of muscular failure the whole time and thought that would kill my metcon. Guess I should have pushed a little harder, but given how I felt coming in, this was a good showing.

Vacation week

2009-03-28T13:26:00.004-04:00

This last week has been a doozy. I had the kids to myself from Thursday through Monday, was in Connecticut on business from Tuesday through Thursday, and had five nights where I worked until after 9pm. There never seemed to be a good time to get in a workout and in the few times where it was possible, spending time with family or time contemplating the inside of my eyelids seemed a better choice. The upshot was that today, I was able to pick up my programming pretty much where I left off - hitting a workout not that unlike my last one. So much for constantly varied. At least I kept it functional, and I hit it with a well-rested intensity.
----------------------------------------------------

Warmup
Hip mobility drills
Shoulder mobility drills
Agility drills (dot, triangle x 5, W x 3)

Skill work
Handstands, 5:00 (four solid 10-15 second holds, these felt really good)

Heavy stuff
Back squat 45x5x2, 95x5, 135x5, 185x3, 225x2, 255x1, 260x5, 270x5, 280x5 (PR)

Burgener warmup

Metcon
Running Grace

3 rounds:

10 C&J, 135#
Run 400m

14:10

Core work
Abwheel 2x10

Nice to hit a PR on the squats in consectuve weeks. That felt heavy. It's fun thinking I'll be going even heavier next week. Reminds me of my starting strength days.

My running Grace got messed up by a malfunctioning treadmill in round 1. Lost about a minute there, but I kept pushing afterwards and was laying in a heap by the end. Got a bit of a Fran cough coming on at the moment. I don't that I got a good time and it's hard to compare to others with the extra 100m spent going from bar to treadmill, but I sure brought what I had to it. Very little standing around and I kept the pace up on the treadmill outside the beginning of the last round. Was spent enough that even after a 5+minute rest prior to my core work, I literally fell on my face at the end of the first set of abwheel rollouts.

Overtraining, part 3 - Enough is enough

2009-03-21T05:58:00.012-04:00

So far I've covered the easy stuff - describing what over training is. The challenge is to know when you're sneaking up on getting overtrained and what to do about it, so you don't suffer a setback - whether that comes in the form of illness, a protracted plateau or injury - and to do this without being overcautious and not thereby getting in enough training. There's no crystal ball to make this determination, and striking the right balance between overtraining and undertraining is very much an individual thing.

I'm a person of extremes and habit. When I first hopped on the CrossFit train, I didn't want to get off. If I missed a day, I'd do two a days to catch up. That didn't last long, but in the same vein, sometimes I'll program myself a week of workouts that looks great on paper, but turns out to be a bit much when coupled with the demands of life, and it's very hard for me to let go and dial back the workload midstream. On the flip side, when I need an couple days off and decide to kick back and watch a little TV instead of hitting the gym, my motivation to get back in there and abuse myself CF-style quickly wanes. That shouldn't be a suprise. The body seeks stasis, and the couch is a good deal more comfortable than the second round of Fran.

The general population obviously prefers the couch, but there are lots of CFers who err on the side of overtraining. We want to push as hard as we can, and that's a good thing. So, how do we figure out when to back off?

The science of overtraining is much better developed for endurance athletes - folks who pile on a training volume that dwarfs the output of, say, a Fight Gone Bad, even if it's performed with an intensity that doesn't come close to a sub-20-minute CrossFit WOD. The science for resistance training or hybrid CF-style training is relatively new, but here's a good article that discusses some of the science of resistance-exercise overtraining that I found researching the subject.

Symptoms of overtraining that seem to apply to CF athletes include (and this is based on my limited experience):

Decreased performance;
Sleep problems;
Decreased coordination (including technical faults in your lifts);
Elevated resting heart rate;
Moodiness;
Increased susceptibility to colds;
Lack of energy;
Decreased appetite;
Random pains (as opposed to workout-related soreness);
Decreased confidence and motivation in the gym; and
Occurrence of nagging little injuries - muscle strains, sprains, joint tenderness.

Which symptoms affect different people will vary, of course. Performance will suffer for just about anyone, but that can happen for plenty of reasons besides overtraining. I never have problems eating, but if I'm getting overtrained, I'll wake up at 3:30 a.m. every day, get irritable, catch colds, and develop random joint pains. How much the latter three symptoms are related to lack of sleep and how much to overtraining is sort of a moot point. As I said a couple of days ago, overtraining and underrecovery are two sides of the same coin.

I've gotten much better about identifying overtraining. I have an autoimmune disorder that gives me arthritic symptoms when I'm close to catching a cold, and while this has gotten much better since I went to a paleoish diet without as many inflammatory nightshades, I've learned to tune into my joints as an indicator of overtraining the way an old farmer might predict the weather with his rheumatism.

Not everyone is so fortunate as to have a built-in warning system. Of course, mine comes with a price. When the immune system goes haywire, I can get real sick. Last March, after fighting off a cold for over a week and having had a less-than-dedicated winter of training, I decided it was time to hit it again and do the MainPage WOD - Fight Gone Bad. This wasn't a case of overtraining, but it was one of underrecovery, and I paid for my stupidity in the form of a three-week bout with the flu. I've been much smarter this winter, backing off a little when my stress level is way up and some of the warning signs of overtraining are there, especially when my kids are clearly incubating opportunistic viruses for me. It's not so much that I take days off (although that has happened, too), but I tweak my programming to do things that I know don't stress my system too much. Wednesday, I decided against the Filthy 50 I had planned in favor of squats and a short metcon - an intense workout, no doubt - but one with much lower volume and of the type to which my body was more accustomed.

You'll need to develop your own experience with what workouts you can get away with while flirting with overtraining. Workouts that crush you with volume or intensity, like a chipper, a Fran or a Fight Gone Bad are clearly ones to avoid. Likewise, avoiding intense sessions with the types of exercises that brought you to the point of overtraining is obvious. However, a Cindy for you might be like a heavy squat day for me - something that you can do without over-stressing your system and still get in some decent training, even if your performance isn't at it's best.

The question remains, however, how do you know when you're getting overtrained. Getting sick or injured is really too late to figure it out. Beyond self-awareness, there are some tests you can do to see if you might be overtrained. I started trying two of these today, so I have no personal experience upon which to evaluate these yet, but I'll put them out there for you to try.

For volume-related overtraining, track your resting heart rate before you get out of bed in the morning. Elevated metabolic rates are associated with high-volume overtraining, at least among endurance athletes. If your heart rate goes up and stays up for several days in a row, even after a rest day, you might be getting overtrained.

For intensity-related overtraining, do a test to see how many dots you can put on a page in 10 seconds. Again do this first thing in the morning. This one comes from Dan John, who found that for his strength-focused training program, this test worked much better than the resting heart-rate test. The idea behind this is that as instense work overloads the central nervous system, fine-motor skills are the first to go. If you start putting fewer dots on the page, even after a rest day, again you might be getting overtrained.

I tried to establish a baseline for these this morning, but given that I took a 12-hour decongestant to help fight off a head cold and got only 6.5 hours of sleep, my numbers might not be indicative of baseline conditions. My results:

49 bpm
51 dots

I'll try to keep this up for the next few months and see what I learn.

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OK, that was lengthy. I'll keep the workout post short and sweet. Another great day in the sun, this time with some finely aged PRs matched and broken.

Warmup
Cross-country hopscotch
Triangle drill
Hip mobility drills

Skill work
MU progressions - 3 consecutive MUs
Back lever progressions

Heavy stuff
Back squat 45x5, 95x5, 135x5, 185x3, 235x2, 255x5, 265x5, 275x5 (new 5RM)

Metcon
50 in the clip

50 burpee C&Js, 95#

8:43

Core work
5:00 rolling planks

(Photo from early in the metcon. Form didn't look this good as it went on and even here it looks like I didn't give it a good shrug.)

Heavy thrusters suck

2009-03-19T18:25:00.006-04:00

Those are my words of wisdom for the day. There really isn't much more to say. I chose a metcon I hadn't done in a year and a half, and while I went heavier and faster today, it was still a gruesome struggle. On that note, perhaps I should start with the workout today.

Warmup
Agility drills (dot drill, triangle drill x3, W-drill x3)
Air squats
Shoulder mobility drills
Boz OHS Drill

Heavy Stuff
Shoulder press 45x5, 75x3, 95x2, 110x1, 110x5, 115x5, 120x5 (New 5RM)
Skipped the CFSB endurance sets in favor of:

Metcon
Fat Fran on a diet

15-12-9

135# Thruster
25# Pullup (should be 45#, but I left my brain at home)

11:17

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Not a great showing; not horrible either. I started out strong. Did the first 10 thrusters unbroken, which left me gasping for the pullups. Managed the first round in 2:30, but things went steeply downhill from there. The next 12 thrusters took three minutes.

There's just something about picking up a heavy barbell when you're gassed that is perfectly humbling. You grab the bar, you've got the wind to move around, maybe even the strength to do a rep or two, but your body wants nothing to do with lifting the weight. You start talking to yourself. Pains appear out of nowhere.

Body: My forearm aches.

Brain Your forearm?! What? You're doing thrusters. Pick up the bar.

I grab the bar and don't do anything with it.

Brain: Hello! Pick up the fucking bar.

I pick it up; I can barely manage three reps. I shorten my rest; I can only manage two reps. I try an extra rep - spectacular fail. I missed my last rep, too, and had to rest and try again. That was disheartening, but maybe it was a sign that my body knew what it was doing when it refused to pick up the bar.

At least the last round of pullups were unbroken. The lighter than Rx'd pullups were too easy, given the nature of the workout. Didn't figure that out early enough, however, because I was suffering metabolic meltdown after the first 15 thrusters. Guess I need to go back and try this again in a couple of months.

There are brutal metcons, and then there are brutal metcons with thrusters. In a class of their own are metcons with heavy thrusters. Overhead lifting may be a goat of mine, but those are from one of the circles of hell. I clearly need to do more thrusters - light, heavy, in-between. They are Evil, but the fires of hell will make me stronger.

Overtraining and under-recovery - Two sides of the same coin

2009-03-18T21:53:00.003-04:00

I really have no desire to become the poster child for my subject matter, but I wasn't going to let that stop me from squeezing in an evening workout, despite my lack of sleep and crazy work schedule. I really haven't had the time to pile up the volume in the gym to get overtrained. However, I have had enough stress and bad night's sleep recently that even with a more-than-reasonable workout volume, I have plenty of potential to be under-recovered.

There are those who say that there's no such thing as overtraining; there's just under-recovery. While that may be true in a literal sense (you're overtrained if you can't recover from your workout), I think there's some benefit to maintaining the semantic distinction. Just remember that the two are inextricably related.

I tend to thing of overtraining as a failure of programming and observation. You eat great, you sleep 10 hours a night, you take time to stretch and do soft-tissue work, but you simply pile on too much work to maintain performance over time. This happens to elite endurance athletes like cyclists, who get too far "out on the razor," leaning out in response to training and being able to positively rip up a mountain pass early in the season or at the beginning of a stage race, but then finding they lack the reserves to recover. They're eating all they can; they're getting daily massages; and they're sleeping as much as they can, but they peaked too soon and trained to hard early on to succeed later in the season or the race. They are a classic example of someone who is overtrained. For them, the fall from grace is swift and hard. They are so specialized and up against such severe physical challenges that they can't rely on a different energy system or a different group of muscles to help them compete. They, as they say, start to go backwards quickly.

In the CrossFit world, we don't load ourselves up with such specialized training, where the same muscles and energy systems get hit day-in and day-out. As a result, overtraining is not as obvious to us. The programming of CrossFit, in fact, is designed to maximize intensity while minimizing the potential for chronic overtraining. There's enough variety of exercise and workout duration that broad, intense stimulus can be delivered day-in and day-out with a less severe risk from overtraining. Still, working like a dog three days out of four will catch up to just about anyone eventually, no matter how disciplined you are with your recovery when you're not working out. That's the reason that the conventional wisdom for following the mainpage WOD is to do it on a 12-week cycle where every 4th week is performed at ½ intensity and every 12th week is taken off from training entirely (or similar variations on that theme).

Don’t underestimate the value of those ½-intensity sessions. These are prime opportunities to dial in form refinements that will lead to improved performance down the road. Alternately, the light weeks provide an opportunity to learn new skills that can’t yet be performed at an intensity that might inhibit recovery.

Bill Starr says that when people get overtrained, it’s almost always because they do too much work on their light days. They throw some isolation exercises in to get those beach muscles pumped up or they add a metcon to work up a sweat. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with incorporating a variety of activities into a program (heck, CF is grounded in such variety), doing additional work without rhyme or reason is the surest way to interfere with recovery and inhibit progress.

Missing workouts every week makes it easy for me to avoid overtraining. However, that doesn't get me off the hook. The things that keep me at work until after the gym closes produce their own form of systemic stress that can produce the symptoms of overtraining. In this case, however, it's related directly to under-recovery, rather than my workout programming. I don't have time to foam roll; I don't eat quite as well; and I wake up at 3:30 every day thinking about what I have to do today. Still, I have to make the same adjustments to my programming as if I found that I piled on too much work the previous few days. Therefore, I bagged catching up on the much-needed chipper I missed yesterday, in favor of something that while difficult, wouldn't beat me down so much that I caught the family head cold (at least that's my hope).

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Warmup
Row 1,000m 3:41.6 (D6, 28spm) - sped up my stroke rate and this felt much easier, like a warmup even
Hip mobility drills
Goblet squats

Heavy stuff
Front squat 45x5, 95x5, 135x3, 185x2, 205x1, 205x3, 215x3, 225x3, 235x2 + fail
Back squat 45x5, 225x17

Metcon
Tabata rowing 1,017m (D8)

Core work
2 rounds:

The 225x3 front squats felt strong, and I was really close to getting out of the hole on that last rep at 235. I probably should have fought it out a little more. My 3Rm is 230, which I did last fall on a day when I popped into the weight room in jeans and sneakers while my kids were in gymnastics. While it's fun to have that as a benchmark, it's also time for that mark to fall.

The high-rep back squats were surreal as always. I staggered forward after the 16th rep and ended up with my right foot a good 8 inches in front of my left. I tried to put it back to parallel, but I just kept picking up my foot and placing it down in the exact same spot, like a horse counting to three. It wasn't that I didn't have the strength left to adjust my feet. I quite simply had lost control of my extremities, like some elongated character in a Dali painting.

The tabata rowing was a first and a suprisingly good showing. I did add some extra meters on there, because I needed to do a soft-pull to get the timer to keep going for a full 10-second rest, but I'm sure I've still got a 1K row with stricter timing. I think the form work is paying off. Thanks to Tom Taylor, Erin Davidson, and Kempie for some helpful tips.

Spring is in the air

2009-03-15T16:23:00.006-04:00

Was on my way out to the Y to meet Johnny, but as soon as I stepped out the door I knew that plan would be a mistake. Around here, the first warm weather in March means the beginning of mud season - nothing so glorious as a proper spring. There are no flowers busting out (although the crocuses should show soon now); there are no girls in short skirts; and the yard and hiking trails are a veritable quagmire. Even my garage still had a coat of ice, but that had thinned (down from 4-inches in February) and softened enough that I could rip a floor mat free and set it out in the sun. A quick call was made to John to change plans to a driveway workout, where we could enjoy the first day of temps in the upper 50s since at least November.

It took a while to sweep things out and reassemble the equipment that had been scattered about from a winter of working out elsewhere, and with the sun beating down on us my kids hanging around, the day didn't have any sense of urgency. In the end, it took us almost 2.5 hours to get in our workout (not counting the requisite porch-sitting, post-workout malt beverage). As much as I love winter, it's hard to argue with days like this. The Spring air even brought out my inner city schoolgirl double-dutch skills, as I PR'd on double unders on my first attempt, after months of no progress whatsoever.

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Warmup
Jump rope 5:00 - 21 consecutive DUs (PR, previous best 13)
Star-pattern squat sequence 35x2 each
Shoulder mobility drills

Skill work
Push press 45x5, 95x5, 125x5

(looking better; John gave me a nice cue that helped with form, although I don't think I was generating as much power as possible)

Heavy stuff
Deadlift 125x5, 185x3, 235x2, 285x1, 305x1, 310x3, 325x3, 340x3 (new 3RM)
250 x 12-9-6 with 1:00 break between sets

Last rep of heavy sets and endurance sets were getting into uglyville, although the very last one was probably more laziness than lack of stamina. Here's the heavy set. Not beyond acceptable, but it's definitely time to drop weight and work sets of five for a while.

Metcon
AMRAP 10:

6 box jumps, 30"

9 C2B pullups

6 rounds plus two PCs

Got this metcon from Elizabeth Terris and her San Diego affiliate. It really puts a demand on explosiveness. I loved it. The chest-to-bar modification was consistent with that theme but it slowed things down considerably. I could probably generate a muh bigger metcon hit with standard pullups (or a better pullup bar, where I could string the C2Bs together reliably). Still, I felt it. Great to be back in the home gym.

Overtraining, part 1 - How much is too much?

2009-03-14T11:17:00.007-04:00

I've been meaning to write about for a while. In fact, I started writing a blog post over Christmas. My recent schedule of undertrained weekdays and full-bore weekends was the nudge I needed to start putting my unfinished thoughts out there. Today's workout, where I combined elements of two day's training, seemed as good a point as any to start the series.

I guess I should start with an explanation of what I'm talking about. Put simply, overtraining is what happens when you push yourself beyond your physiological capacity to recover. Give this a little thought, and you’ll realize that there are some fuzzy edges to this definition. If you do Diane today, you’ll probably do fine with shoulder presses tomorrow, but you might struggle with 400m sprints, because you won’t have fully recovered from the DLs and won’t perform optimally. Does this mean you’re overtrained? If you’ve got a track meet it does. If you’re hitting the next WOD, it’s just overload by design.

Physiologic overload is necessary to produce adaptation. In the simplest setting, you put more weight on the bar or perform a greater number of reps than you have previously to stimulate your muscles to get stronger. You rest, and then you do it again.

CFers as a group are driven. As such, we’re prone to believe that a little extra work after a WOD or an extra session in the gym is what we need. But mainpage Crossfit as Rx’d is powerful medicine. Many of the top athletes at the Games do nothing other than warmup, practice some light skill work, and hit the WOD as hard as they can every day. They get their rest, they eat well, and they come back and do it again. They are as dedicated to their recovery as they are to their workouts. It’s not as glamorous, but it is just as important, especially when you start pushing your limits.

Don’t underestimate that middle step in the process – rest. Adequate rest and nutrition is essential to getting the most out of your training. To paraphrase Rip in a way that I've said so many times, I could put it to music, we don’t get fit from training hard, we get fit by recovering from training hard.

I have some experience with overtraining. Last fall, I had a series of injuries trying to fit just about everything into my hybrid training program each day. I've gotten smarter about it, and I've been glad to have the benefit of the resarch that Jeff Martin put into the CrossFit Strength Bias program to get a sense what a reasonable hybrid workload looks like. I've been making reasonable progress on the program, but haven't been at it long enough to get everything dialed in right. This past week, I've put up some strong numbers, but I think that has to do with working too much to train properly. Essentially, I've had an involuntary deload period, like I might use before a competition to maximize performance at that competition.

My goal, however, is to maximize my performance in late May. I honestly don't know if my off week was good or bad for me. We all need rest once in a while. However, some pretty sharp coaches (Greg Glassman, Bill Starr, John Gilson) believe that the best gains are made when you're in a slightly overtrained state. You won't win any competitions that way unless you have a deload period, but by being continually overtrained, you force your body to adapt. The trick, of course, is figuring out how to balance that equation of necessary overload versus necessary rest. That I'll leave for another day.

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Warmup
Row 500m 1:52 (took it slow this cold morning)
Air squats, goblet squats, lunge & hip flexor stretches
Shoulder mobility drills
Burgener warmup

Heavy stuff
Back squat 45x5
Box squat 45x5, 135x3, 155x2, 175x1, 175x2x5, 180x2x5 (work sets done on the minute)
Shoulder press 45x5, 95x3, 105x3, 115x3, 125x3, 130x2, 90x10-7-4 (1:00 rest b/w sets for 10-7-4)

Skill work
Snatch 65x5, 95x2, 115x2

Metcon
5 rounds:

Snatch 115x3
Squat clean & thruster 115x3
Hang power clean 115x3
2:00 rest between rounds

?, 0:52, 1:12, 0;54, 0:47

Core work
30 abmat situps

This workout left me positively smoked. That's a good thing. Tomorrow's deadlifts probably won't go as well as last Sunday, but I think, I think that it was the right way to attack the weekend. I'll probably know by midweek. I'm my own guinea pig.

Traveling man

2009-03-12T07:12:00.011-04:00

Finally got around to posting up a banner picture. In retrospect, it was an obvious choice. This photo was taken more or less from the spot where I decided I needed to go back and check out that CrossFit website again. I was 7.5 miles into a 9 mile, 5,000 vertical-foot alpine tour on skis that took us up Mount Washington. We came up from the left just to the near side of the second-to-last summit visible, headed out of sight over the ridge for ~1,200-foot ski descent into the Great Gulf, climbed up to the summit (the descent into and climb out of the gulf are pictured here), skiing across the west face you see - including a 500-foot descent down the little gully in the center left (which ended in a melted-out ice/waterfall), and climbing to the summit of Mount Monroe (just above where I'm standing), before descending 2,000 feet back to where we started.

It remains one of my absolute best days ever. It started out rough, though. The 18-year old kid, and 45-year-old mountaineer I was travelling with positively dogged me on the first climb. Sure, I was carrying the extra safety gear (some of which got put to use by necessity), but the fact of the matter is that I was at my typical early-Spring lull in fitness and those guys just about disappeared over the hill on me. They yo-yo'd me a few times on this ascent and the trip to the summit, but by the time the day got to here, my natural stamina (accumulated from years of bike riding, I'm guessing) had me feeling the strongest of the lot. Still, it was painfully clear that I needed to broaden my fitness, so I looked up that strange website that another ski mountaineering friend had pointed me to a couple years previous. (At the time, the mainpage had some chipper of exercises of which I'd never heard, so I ignored it but saved the link.) This time, it was something understandable, if brutal - Angie. It took me over an hour, but I was hooked.

The rest is more or less history. CrossFit is what I do. I've missed several ski days to get in a workout. (I'm not sure this is the best prioritization, but it is what it is.) Today, I figured that if CrossFit is my thing, I should make like a real CrossFitter and get in a workout with out a gym, so this morning, I moved the furniture about in my hotel room and got after it.

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Warmup
CFCC dynamic mobility drills
Hip mobility drills
3 rounds:

10 pushups

10 supermans

10 situps

Metcon
AMRAP 20:

two hands touch ceiling at top

10 reverse burpees (hold FS handstand for a 3-count)

5 rounds + burpees and 3 reverse burpees

I like this combination of skill and metabolic conditioning. Next time, it will be 20 burpees though. Handstand holds got easier in rounds 2 and 3 and started fading toward the end of round 4, although I did manage a good 10-second hold as the timer was going off.

Extreme prejudice

2009-03-11T21:23:00.012-04:00

There's something about the barbell I simply love. Whether it's the explosiveneness of a heavy single clean & jerk, the slow grind of a 20-rep set of squats, or the agony of thrusters, I feel like no workout is complete without a session with that seven-foot-long machined piece of steel. I know better, of course. Murph, Kelly, Helen, or Fran with dumbbells don't lack for anything as a WOD. Still, the routine of warming up, heading to the barbell to lift something heavy, and then cranking up the metabolic engine is a routine I adore. It's not cherry picking. I beat the living tar out of myself this way on regular basis, hitting things that brutalize me, like push presses, high-rep deadlifts, good mornings, thrusters, etc. What can I say? I'm biased toward my strength bias.

Still, when I go to an affiliate, I like to get a taste of whatever random stuff they're feeding to their own athletes, but when I walked into CF Central CT today and saw the 30-minute mainpage WOD of pullups, dips and situps, my enthusiasm for the hopper model faded. All I could say was "That looks grim." I'm no fan of muscular stamina sufferfests, so I had to decide whether I would be cherry picking by skipping this one today. I could stand to work a 30-minute metcon, but that was going to be more a question of endurance of things I could do without a gym than a metabolic challenge of the sort that only a CF gym could deliver, so I decided to do what I could to keep a semblance of my strength bias program going. Thankfully, Tom was happy to accomodate, since he and a few of his athletes are doing the same thing these days and hardly anybody showed up for the 7am session on this rainy morning in an affiliate that had the power out.

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Warmup
CFCC Dynamic mobility drills and warmup
(toe raise walk, trw with knee pull, trw with ankle pull and knee out, trw with foot to butt, toy soldier walk)

3 rounds:

500m row 1:36 (nice rower - close to my PR without pushing my max)

Heavy stuff
Front squat 45x5, 135x5, 185x3, 200x1, 200x5, 210x5, 220x5 (new 5RM)
Back squat 220x20 (new 20 RM)

Metcon
1/2 Mary

AMRAP 10:

4 rounds + HSPUs and 2 pistols

Core work
6 Ft2Bar + forgetaboutit

I was listing something fierce after that workout. My back was toast from the squat and pistol combination and the pistols were brutally difficult to complete. The rest of that metcon was done in unbroken sets, but I was staggering my way up on some of those pistols. That's almost a full round slower than my PR, but after all the squats, I can't complain about my performance.

The heavy lifting went well, although I wasn't sure about jumping 10 pounds for the last set of front squats after fighting for the last rep of the second set, but I spent less time standing about on the last set and got through it pretty handily. The back squats were brutal, of course, starting with the 6th rep. When the reps get into the teens, the brain starts working against you. I didn't see Ghandi walking through the halls of CFCC, but thoughts like "You're not in a cage. Are you going to be able to bail safely if you fail with this weight on your back after all the squats you've done?" found ways to pop up and try to convince me to end the pain. After that, the pistols positively sucked - a serious struggle and a nasty goat that was overdue for a feeding, and they had me for breakfast. This was by no means the easy way out.

The weekend warrior

2009-03-08T21:39:00.009-04:00

Two days in a row in the gym; it must be the weekend. Still no time to tarry. Deep thoughts will have to wait for another day. Had fun watching an intro-to-globo gym session while I did my workout. This 250#+ guy was being introduced to the various ways to use the furniture, er, pieces of equipment to work out. He was doing a 95# bench press, and his trainer was all over the bar. Enough with the inappropriate touching already. It was downright disturbing. It's bad enough he's got the guy doing seated "military" presses and three kinds of bench press. Let the guy lift the damn weight.

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Warmup
Agility drills (dot drill, triangle drill x3 x2, W-drill x3 x2)
Shoulder mobility drills (CFCC shoulder triplet and wall slides)
TGU 45x3 each, 60x2 each

Skill work
Push press 45x6, 95x5

Heavy stuff
Shoulder press 45x5, 95x3, 110x3, 120x3, 130x3, 90 x 13 + fail (could not lock out left arm)

Metcon
6 rounds (21-18-15-12-9-6)

16:59

Ring work
STC to dislocate pike to L-hang 3x3

Cut short my sets on the shoulder press, deciding to settle for matching my 3RM. I'm looking to be in PR territory all next week. We'll see how that goes. Shouldn't have pushed for that 14th rep, as I let my core go all wonky and could feel it in my L1-T13 afterwards. Not bad, since it was light weight and I wasn't grossly hinged, but it's still bad form.

Loving the agility drills as part of the warmup. Really get the blood flowing and my bad ankle could use the extra footwork drilling. Played around with some little parkour jumps between two bollards this afternoon. Something I used to be decent at (by happenstance, not as a traceur) and would like to be again.

Not the fastest metcon. I might have pushed harder to to make the lunges faster, but I was focusing on driving through the heel and getting a good ROM vertically with every step. Anyways, more time was lost managing muscular fatigue on the ring pushups. Not every metcon need be a blazing, heart-pounder. This was a stamina sessionb, but I need a short, intense wind-sucking metcon to get me really going.

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Morning update:

DOMS is kicking in. Felt the abs as soon as I climbed on the rings at the end fo the workout. Today, my ass is trying to convince me that DLs should wait until tomorrow.

Something had to give

2009-03-07T15:18:00.010-05:00

Summer and fall were easy. Work was reasonable, days were long, and if I wanted to spend more time with my family or was pressed to squeeze in a workout, I'd use a couple of hours of leave time and have at it. My time has gotten much tighter after Christmas and these last couple of weeks, work has exploded on me. I won a project that wants to eat me alive, and it's on a schedule that exactly parallels my preparation for the Games Qualifiers. I'm hoping that time spent now in the planning phase of the job will allow the rest of it to flow smoother and me to get back to my routine. For now, however, something had to take a back seat to the new job, and that something was, well, everything - less time for workouts, less time for family, less down-time for reading or surfing or blogging.

Actually, this is a fitness blog, and in that name fitness comes first, so if I don't have a workout to report, there won't be a blog that day. Conversely, if you don't see anything posted here or see only one post in 10 days like this latest stretch, it's simply because I'm slacking off (at least in the gym). On that note, enough talk, I actually got something done today.

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Warmup
Air squats
Bear complex 45 x 7
Hip mobility drills (an old floor bar routine from my days as a dancer)

Skillwork
Push press 95 x 7 x 2

Muscle-up progressions (Tuck's pull to toe-assisted transition and dip)

done from knees with rings at chest height, shoulder height, head height
3-3-3 up and -3-3 down (more of a jumping MU at head height)

Heavy stuff
Back squat 45x5, 135x5, 185x3, 225x2 (felt heavy), 245x1, 250x5 (ugly), 260x5 (not pretty), 270x5 (solid)

That matches my old 5RM, and I had more in me. Looking forward to my next heavy squat day. That 5RM has stood since last fall.

Core work
Barbell getup-situp 45x10

Metcon
Mini-Chest-to-Barbara
2 rounds:

4:01
4:52

Started a 3rd round, but after my first 12 pullups, I was positively cooked. I simply could not get the last inch of the chest-to-bar pullups. After missing 5 consecutive (with rest between), I pulled the plug on the workout. I've got more pullups tomorrow, and after the MU progressions, my pull was pretty worked. Tomorrow might be a good day to play with butterfly pullups instead of the C2Bs.

Did a little video analysis of my push press. It's getting better, but at speed I still revert to quad-dominance. More practice. More practice. Also caught a video of my second work set of squats. Third set was much better and would be fun to show off, but it's probably more useful for me to catch my errors on film than my successes.

Gone Skiing

2009-03-03T21:21:00.010-05:00

Haven't been in the gym for almost a week. Landed a big job last Thursday, and all semblance of normalcy has disappeared from my life and training. As an added bonus, it's a fast burn project with a completion date about a week after the Games qualifiers. Ah well, it sure gives me a reason to stay on top of my stuff. However, if this first week is any indication, my training is bound to suffer.

My family and seven of our friends rented a ski condo for the weekend. This is one of those things you plan months in advance and hope the weather works out. With ski conditions the best they'd been in years on Tuesday, we were hopeful, but Friday's rain and the weekend refreeze did us in. Still, the sun was shining Saturday and we could see Mount Washington clear as a bell from Sugarbush, about 80 miles away. Knowing what the day was going to be like, a bunch of us broke out the files and sharpening stones the night before and got our skis ready for the formica skiing surface. The order of the day was scary fast skiing on the sunny side of the mountain, not a great workout, but definitely some solid technique practice, since losing an edge at those speeds in those conditions would likely mean a trip to the emergency room. It was good fun, but one day of it was enough. The rest of the time was spent relaxing, eating well, eating not so well, and bulding a pile of bottles for the redemption center.

Had plans to make amends with some backcountry skiing in the foot of snow that fell overnight when I got home, but work and a sick family kept me closer to home yesterday. Today, I finally got back into the gym, courtesy of CF Central CT's convenient location near the office I was visiting today and tomorrow. They had a max DL day going, but some guys were following the CFSB, so they had no issue with me following my own programming and hitting the mini-metcon they also had programmed.

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Warmup
Jump rope 3:00, 7 consecutive DUs
Shoulder triplet mobility drill
TGU-Windmill drill 20K x 3
10 pullups
10-sec static hold
10 dips

Skillwork

2:00 handstand practice - a couple stable 5-second holds

Heavy Stuff

Deadlift 135x5, 185x3, 225x2, 275x1, 305x3, 320x3, 335x3 (new 3RM), 250x20 (PR)

Metcon

3 rounds:

20 box jumps, 20"

5:01

Deadlifts felt remarkably easy, considering the double PBs. I guess hitting DLs after 6 days off leaves a lot more in the tank than a day after 20 box squats. Metcon was weird with the strict burpees, especially after the deadlifts. Ended up being more about muscular fatigue (and missed box jumps) than by the lungs. Good to get back after it.

Good Clean Fun

2009-02-26T06:18:00.006-05:00

There's something about the olympic lifts that is just plain fun. A weight rests on the floor, you pull, and bang, it's suddenly racked or overhead. Of the oly lifts, the clean is easily my favorite. I'm better at it than the overhead lifts, and I get to put more weight on the bar.

I didn't have a lot of time at the gym last night and I came in feeling a little lackluster because of the late hour, but as soon as I hit that first pull from the ground, I knew I was in PR territory. When you're on a good day, it's not time to be shy about your loads. My old PR was 200, but in each case I was tired from hours of previous work. Tonight I decided I'd pull 215 (1.25 x BW).

I forgot the camera yet again. I promise to bring it next time out, so the blog isn't so dull. I especially wanted videos of my cleans, so I could check form. Like I said, next time.

Warmup
Jump rope 3:00, 5 consecutive DUs

(It's a rhythm thing. I can jump and spin the rope fast enough, but I can't seem to break through. Maybe I need to give this a good solid 15 minutes some day.)

Hip mobility drills
Burgener warmup (cleans)

Heavy metal
Hang squat clean 45x5, 95x3, 115x3
Clean 135x3, 155x2, 175x2, 185, 195, 200, 205, 210 (PR)

I took two halfhearted attempts at 215, but after a tough catch at 210, my shoulder hurt a tiny bit and I chickened out. It was purely mental. The first attempt was two pulls, but I didn't give it enough to have a good hope of getting under it, and I skipped the 3rd pull. The 2nd attempt was a deadlift. Oly lifts are technical and fast, and they go wrong just as quickly. Add a couple of pounds or lose a tiny bit of mental or physical strength and they go south in a hurry.

This was my first go at heavy squat cleans in over two months. I'd done heavy hang power cleans, some tall cleans, some DB squat cleans and an Elizabeth since then, but the bar was way easier to move yesterday. I love CrossFit. With a good mix of general strength and mobility work and a little skill practice, you still improve at things that you aren't directly working. Like I said, that was fun. I'll hit these again in a couple of weeks.

Had a metcon planned for ages - 50 in the Clip, which is 50 95# burpee C&Js, but after the push presses yesterday and with more overhead work tomorrow, I had to come up with something else.

Metcon
AMRAP 10 minutes:

5 Squat cleans, 135#
10 pushups
15 box jumps, 20"

5 rounds even

This could use more pushups, more weight on the cleans, and maybe fewer box jumps. It was a quad burner like this, but the metcon hit wasn't as much as I'd hoped.

AMAP 24 hours

2009-02-24T20:12:00.015-05:00

The clock is always ticking these days, it seems. Whether it's work, workouts, family, or that stupid commute, I never seem to have enough time. Finding time for proper recovery, whether it's eating, sleeping, or SMR is almost a joke. My wife doesn't consider it quality time when we're talking while I'm on the foam roller. Might be the involuntary gasps of pain I sprinkle into the conversation. (I can see how this would be disconcerting.

Margaret: "I signed Cassidy up for dance today."

Me (in anguish): "Oh my god, that sucks."

It sort of spoils the free flow of ideas.)

So when work had me down in CT for the last couple of days, I figured I should take advantage of what little time I did have to check-out CrossFit Central Connecticut. I've got a job site around the corner from them and keep meaning to stop in, but I've never managed to drop in for a class. Of course, when I arrived in CT, the combination of two hours in the car, a poor night's sleep, and the weekend's sets of 15-20 squats and DLs on consecutive days left me in a less-than ideal physical state.

Things took a turn for the better, however, as soon as I arrived. The sign greeting me as I entered the lobby of our CT office building said "Chair Massages, Monday 10-2." Salma Hayek could have been there to greet me with a hug and a kiss, and I wouldn't have been any happier. So, 15 minutes before the dry run of our big Tuesday presentation, I snuck out for a quick physical therapy session. I didn't have great hopes for the chair massage, figuring on a gentle, user-friendly once-over. However, I was pleasantly suprised by the masseuse's willingness to inflict pain. Elbows were driven into spinal erectors, traps were pinched mercilessly, and fingers pried there way under my scapula. Before long, the lacrosse ball I use for SMR seemed like a cottonball. It was just what the doctor ordered.

A bad night's sleep later, where I woke up before 5am to go over my part of the presentation, I got myself out to CFCC with a bit too much caffeine in my system. Tuesday is my long metcon day, so it was only natural to throw myself at the programming mercies of Tom Taylor, the owner of CFCC. Add some nervousness regarding my afternoon presentation, and it was clearly the right choice to start my day off with the mental flossing of a brutal workout. Still, I got there and wanted no part of it.

Maybe it was accumulated nerves between work stuff, not knowing what WOD lay in wait for me, and the normal jitters associated with visiting an new affiliate. I've mostly worked out on my own and spend an inordinate amount of time talking CrossFit with like-minded people in the virtual CrossFit world, so when I make a rare affiliate visit (this is my third), I want to put in a good showing. I walked in, said hello to Tom, and scanned the wall of white boards for the one that would tell me what flavor of suffering I'd get to enjoy.

Before I get to that, let's quickly review the CrossFit recipe: "Constantly varied (if not random), functional movements, performed at high intensity (and practiced with virtuosity)." (That first aside is Coach G's - the second is my own addition as the takehome message from my Level 1 Cert.) The whiteboard showed a recent mainpage WOD:

4 rounds:

Row 500m
115# Push press, 21-18-15-12

Totally random, my ass. The hopper knows. It sought out my weaknesses and issued me a swift kick where it counts, or actually, it issued a butt with the horns of my two worst goats - push presses and mid-length metcons. Like I said, I wanted no part of it.

Thankfully, nobody else showed up for the 7am class. I don't get much coaching, and I was happy to have an experienced coach see if they couldn't cue me to a better push press. As I warmed up the movement, Tom had no magic bullets, but after some time with me, he did see deeper into my issues with the PP than I caught in my video self-analysis. I'm fighting both quad dominance and shoulder inflexibility, while trying to learn a new motor pattern. It works OK up to about 95#, but beyond that my form issues shine through. I dip, leaning forward too much as I push my weight onto my heels, I tip back to get my head out of the way of the bar, rocking me forward onto the balls of my feet, and I drive. The solution isn't magical. It's just more practice at light weights, like I've been doing. Thankfully, having Tom's focal points, and a new shoulder mobility drill to take home, I expect the battle will be won in the next month or so.

The actual workout looked like this:

Warmup
Row 500m 147ish
Lunges with sampson and psoas stretch
10 C2b pullups
10 pushups
Shoulder triplet
(10 each of
PVC press with emphasis on pushing elbows forward,
behind the head press with emphasis on active shoulders,
dislocates with emphasis on a tight full-hand grip.

Push press 45x10ish, 95x10ish, 115x10ish

115 was inconsistent, so I scaled weight on the WOD.

Metcon
4 rounds:

16:12

That rep scheme is mean. It doesn't drop off fast enough. I held form together pretty well for the first two rounds, but things started slipping later on, as I tried to work faster through the shorter rounds, despite being gassed. For the record, if you're unclear on the notion, rowing on the front end of any metcon is quite simply nasty. Tom gave me some pointers on that, but he was shy about coaching me through it, because I'm an experienced CrossFitter. If you're reading, I appreciated it, Tom. I was just too busy and too gassed to offer much thanks midworkout.

Tom was also kind enough to point out that a bunch of the reps toward the end wouldn't count at the qualifiers, but I knew that already. After 50 or 60 reps, I was really struggling to get to lockout, even at 95#s. Spending another 5 minutes standing around trying to get the reps right when I was already cooked wasn't going to help yesterday, but now it's practice, practice the push press.

The slippery slope

2009-02-22T06:44:00.012-05:00

As I said yesterday, I've been on a mission to Just Eat. I'd been making good food choices for the most part, although sometimes indulging in some Breyer's at the end of the day. Last weekend was Valentines Day, and Margaret and I went down to my folk's house so we could get some babysitting for one of our three yearly dates. Living in the Stix and having grown up the next town over from Newport, RI also makes the night out a little nicer, as there are plenty of really nice restaurants.

I tried to be good, ordering a cheese platter to share as an appetizer, and a steak with roasted vegetables for an entree. Of course, the cheese platter came with french bread, candied dates, and other treats, but at least they were in small proportions. Add some strawberries and dark chocolate and a few drinks and a bowl of ice cream each night of the weekend and by Monday, I was in full-on carb-craving mode.

The funny thing is, I've never had that much of a sweet tooth. Sure, I could polish off some gummy bears real quick if they were around, but the things that show up on a daily basis in the home and office - cookies, doughnuts, milk chocolate, etc. - don't hold that much appeal. However, after cleaning up my diet and then having a weekend of treats, the next couple of days were tough. I'd have my customary snacks - almonds, olives, or cheese - and I just wouldn't be satisfied. It wasn't until I had some dried fruit that a snack would feel complete. An evening ice cream a couple more times, and I was in the same place the next day.

Nicole Carrol was right. Carbs are like crack. Have a little, you want more, and after my slightly carby days, suddenly the cookies, chocolates, gummy candies, and assorted treats belonging to my not-yet-paleo family started to look mighty tempting. This was the signal to me that I better spend a few days eating on the strict. Last night, when the ice cream craving came, I threw it off with some green beans with garlic and olive oil. Not exactly the same thing, but when I added a glass of milk and some almonds, things worked out OK. Of course, the house is now almost barren of healthy foods. So it's off to the grocery to spend far too much money, but if I want to eat clean while on this mission to Eat More, I'm going to have to buy what looks like far too much food. I'm betting I'll eat it.

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Had some fun with the warmup and gymnastics skills today. The agility drills yesterday were fun, too. (Those will be part of the regular mix as far as monostructural warmup activities go.) Today, the gymnastics practice I've been doing started to pay-off with some old skills coming back to me. Fun stuff. (Did I mention that already?) Good thing, too, because the rest of the workout meant business.

Warmup/Skill work
Jump rope 5:00 - max of 9 consecutive DUs
Shoulder rolls

Handstand practice

Hand walks 18, 29, 26 feet

TGU-Windmill drill 35 x 4 each
RRs 35 x 8 each (alternating)

Heavy stuff
Deadlift 45x5, 135x5, 185x3, 225x2, 275x1, 300x3, 315x3, 330x3 (new 3RM), 250x16

Metcon
7 rounds:

10 ring dips

7:23

Funny how it goes sometimes. Those warmup DL sets felt brutally heavy, but I managed to pull the three sets of three with pretty good form and tackled my first ever set of 15+ DLs and still finished strong with the metcon. I might have been able to keep going on the long set of DLs, but it didn't seem it at the time. Those DLs hurt from the 7th rep on. Next time, I'll hang in there for all 20 (I hope). The high-rep set is a great training tool. There's no excuse about pacing yourself, like I've used in Diane. I have to just hold onto that bar, gather myself, and pull another rep.

We're firmly into CFSB mode now. I like what it demands of me, but I'm going to have to be really strict with my recovery, if I want to make it work over the long haul.

I had some planks planned as a finisher, but when I got home we took the kids outside for an hour, and once the cold got into me I knew I better spend the rest of the day resting, eating, and otherwise recovering.

The Bonfire of My Vanity

2009-02-21T15:10:00.010-05:00

I've hesitated to post a profile pic for my CrossFit blog, because I still don't have anything in the way of action shots. All I've got is this vanity shot. Sure, it reflects the results of a decent work ethic and a clean diet, but I've got an issue with ab shots. Despite being the glory shots of the fitness industry, abs aren't remotely indicative of fitness. It might be worth leaning out for a competition to perform at your best in an event where being lighter is an advantage, but walking around with a six-pack every day is only somewhat more advantageous than drinking one.

Face it. No matter how focused we are on performance, we all want to look good naked. I've spent more than my share of time telling folks on the CrossFit message boards to stop worrying about their appearance and focus on something that is quantifiable and that makes a real difference in their lives, like how much you can pick up off the ground while keeping your back stable or how long you can move heavy stuff around before you need a rest. Still, when I get a little soft around the middle (and I mean a little), I instictively wonder whether I'm doing something wrong. Maybe it's all those years of a nightly beer or three, when softness did correlate to being out of shape. Maybe I've seen one too many hollywood hunks with their shirt off.

Or maybe it's sheer vanity. At 40 years old, I finally gave up my three-sandwiches-a-day routine and adopted a low carb diet. The result was that I leaned out like crazy. At 5'10", I dropped from 182 to 172 in no time without losing much in the way of strength. I felt good, and I looked better than I ever had. I've always been thin, skinny even. In 6th grade, my nickname was "The Cambodian." The difference now is that I was lean and strong, and I liked it. I kept training a hybrid CF style to gain strength, but I wasn't making much progress on my lifts. I felt like I was eating plenty, averaging over 3,000 calories a day with plenty of protein, but I was slowly losing weight - not much, maybe a pound a month. It was clear that looking fit did not equat to being fit, or at least not to getting fit.

When I broke under 170# a couple of weeks ago, I realized that, if I really wanted to get stronger, I quite simply needed to put on weight - period - abs be damned. I needed to eat more and accept a little belly fat in the bargain, because when you're lifting heavy as part of your workout routine, that little bit of softness across the middle is Future Muscle. Have you ever noticed how kids grow? They do it in spurts. They get a little pot belly going, then before you know it, they're an inch or two taller and the pot belly is gone. In essence their bodies are stroring energy for future growth and then a hormonal signal stimulates that growth in a relatively short period of time.

The same process happens to those of us who strength train. Our bodies adapt to exercise in two ways, by rewiring the nervous system to more efficiently use the muscle we have and by building new muscle. That new muscle needs to come from somewhere. The body isn't going to invest energy creating more muscle mass to sustain, if it doesn't sense that we have an energy surplus with which to build that muscle. Under most circumstances, it takes approximately two weeks of caloric excess for the body to respond by raising the levels of insulin-like growth factor (ILGF). When we're lifting heavy, that ILGF signals the body that it's time to use the energy excess for building muscle. There are ways of manipulating diet that are supposed to increase ILGF levels, but the most surefire way to be ready to build muscle in response to our workouts is simple: Eat More.

I've temporarily given up the intermittent-fasting (IF) routine that was working so well for me. (I took up IF because it is supposed to offer similar longevity gains to caloric restriction, while still allowing me to feast enough to put on weight. However, when 3,000 calories a day isn't enough, blocking out 15-16 hours to Not Eat didn't seem like the best way to put on weight. I've put on four pounds since embarking on my more-food-is-better program. Perhaps, when I've dialed in my new and expanded diet and my body has adapted to getting more calories, I'll reintegrate IF. Until then, I will eat whenever possible.

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Warmup

OHS 18 x 10

Agility drills:

Hip mobility drills

Remedial skill work
Push press 45x15, 65x10, 95x5

Heavy stuff
Back squat 45x5, 95x5, 135x3
Box squat 135x1, 165x2x5, 170x2x5
Back squat 210x20

First ever set of 20. Good stuff. Definitely took some focus and considerable effort, but more weight is definitely possible. Box squats were starting to feel like a workout at this weight. Both of these will get bumped in weight next week.

Not a metcon

30 medicine ball clean and throw, 8-10 feet, 25#

5:10ish

The idea was that if either person dropped the ball, the rep didn't count. However, the work rate simply wasn't fast enough to be a metcon. We did this outside in the snow, so the only thing that really got a workout was our fingers' ability to withstand the cold.

Core work

Ab wheel 2x5

L-sit 2:00 in 7 sets (took 8.5 minutes, including rest)

It's Supposed to Hurt

2009-02-20T06:38:00.014-05:00

"Are you alright?"

I get the question occasionally at the end of a brutal metcon, as I make myself comfortable on the floor of the Y. The looks that you get doing CrossFit workouts are priceless. Nobody knows quite why you would punish yourself that way on a daily basis, but they know that you're obviously training hard. Then, there are those whose world view is simply too challenged to accept the fact that intense CF workouts are a good thing. While I was doing a bunch of DB swings in a short metcon the other day (a great time to talk, I might add), I was engaged in conversation the other day by a women taking a break from her tricep kickbacks to say, "I'm a paramedic, and that's a good way to hurt your back."

"Not if you do it with good form," I grunted.

She wasn't done. As I was finishing up, she decided that my concern for my fellow man might be a better avenue to my conversion to her enlightened path. Referring to my workout partner, she flatly stated that "He's going to hurt his back doing that." The best diplomacy I could manage was "You don't know what you're talking about," and the conversation went nowhere. Clearly, she wasn't about to accept the radical notion that back injuries are prevented by making backs stronger. She obviously thought her routine of 20 minutes of cardio followed by moving some light weights around was a better path to fitness. She wasn't interested in challenging herself. We know better. We know fitness only comes through hard work.

It's easy for us as CrossFitters to accept the basic principle that exercise consists in challenging our bodies to do things to which it's not accustomed, that we need to push ourselves past our current limits to get stronger. But getting stronger does not mean things will get easier for us. The truth of the matter is that improving at CrossFit fundamentally means you have to be willing to suffer more. In fact, the better you get the more it hurts. We see superstar athletes and assume they have it easy when they succeed, but there's no denying the suffering of elite CrossFitters when they finish first in a workout. This is something I understand when thinking about a workout, but the concept isn't quite as clear when I'm in the midst of a gruelling metcon and my instincts are screaming at me to stop and breathe. Today's metcon was a reminder of that. I did roughly as well at it as the last time out - not bad, but no apparent improvement and I did stop and breathe and grab a drink in the middle. If I want to do better, I simply have to be willing to accept more pain. This is not a reassuring thought.

Warmup
Jump rope 6:00 (never got my DU rhythm going, after my rope exploded and needed repair)
Shoulder mobility (dislocates, wall slides)

Heavy stuff
Shoulder press 45x5, 95x3, 115x1, 115x5, 120x4x2
Push press 3 x (95, 100, 105, 110, 115)* 115x3, 45x8, 95x3, 95x3, 75x5

* Density style - reps on the minute until form breaks down. By 115, it was clear my form was awful. I've got a fairly fundamental fault here of driving off the ball of foot that needs corrrection, which means practice, practice, practice. Even 95# may be too heavy for this practice, as that's where things seemed to start to slip.

I've lost quite a bit on the shoulder press since this summer. It's on the list to work on a weekly basis, thanks to the CFSB article. Now, I'm sure that's a good idea.

Metcon
5 rounds:

5 burpee box jumps, 20"

5 DB snatch, each arm, 55#

6:19

This was 16 seconds slower than the last time I did this. However, I did squat snatches in the first round, which really put the hurt on. My work capacity for this is probably improved from last time. However (and this is the kicker), I didn't push this as hard as I should have. I was again asked if I was alright, but laying there I knew that I shouldn't be able to get up and so convincingly say that I was.

Core work
3 rounds:

10 KTE

10 hip & back extensions

5 cable cross-chops each side, 60#

The gym mercifully closed before I could get in the last round of hip extensions and cross-chops. I was done anyways and ready for my rest day.

The muddled middle

2009-02-18T06:33:00.014-05:00

Ever go into a workout all fired-up and ready to set a PR and have it all go horribly wrong? You've got a goal in your head, say a 5-minute Fran, a 300 FGB, or a 20-round Cindy. Setting a goal like that can be motivating and help you pace your workout right, but it can also turn into a trap. You get halfway through the second round of FGB and that 300 is getting further away or you get to the 12th round of Cindy and see that your one round-per-minute pace is off by 30 seconds. You know then and there that you're not going to make your goal today.

How do you respond? Do you dig deep and try to charge for that goal, flaming out gloriously? Do you break into analysis mode and figure out a new pace and a new goal? Do you hang your head for a second and muddle through dejectedly falling further behind? How you respond to this point in the workout says more about the quality of your training than your sub-3:00 Grace, your BW snatch, or the muscle-up that you just can't seem to master. That mid-workout point is the place where you really need to dig deep and take the measure of yourself. Tony Budding calls the mid-workout crisis the place where times are made and broken. Anybody can kick it in for the last round or last couple of minutes to finish strong, but to maximize your output when you're in the depth of the WOD, wishing you would hurry up and die so the pain might go away and having no hope for release anytime soon that the true firebreathers are made.

I have a Bad Habit of fading in the 8-12 minute range on AMRAP 20 metcons. It's a reason that I put long metcons in general at the top of my list of goats. The tricky thing is that the mid-workout crash comes from a different direction with different workouts. In Cindy and Murph, it's the pushups that ultimately catch up to me, leaving me balancing intensity against impending muscular failure. In FGB, the metcon hit causes my technique to go to hell until my shoulders are screaming at me to stop in that second set of PPs. In Elizabeth, the heavy hit of the squat cleans just saps my confidence in my ability to complete another rep. The worst, however, are those workouts with running and something simple like burpees. There's nothing really keeping you from doing the next rep, even if it's going to be slow, but still you stop and stare at your shoes, unable to convince yourself to perform the next rep. It's a naked failure of will and is supremely humbling.

Regardless of the specific physical challenge that forms the critical point halfway through the workouts, I need to learn how to push through that point - risking failure right there to find out what I can do. As Coach says, the best race car-drivers crash their cars testing their limits. Even when muscular failure is at hand and doing one more rep might add minutes to my time, I'll never know my capabilities if I don't test my limits. The score today doesn't matter. The score only matters on game day. This is training. The point of training is to get stronger. I can pace myself to maximize performance at the Qualifiers, but right now I need to push through the sticking points, even if it leaves me wrecked before the workout is done. Tonight, I tackled a recent mainpage WOD, one of those naked tests of will, and these thoughts were front-and-center in my mind.

Warmup
Row 500m - 151.4 (felt super slow and weak and had to fight back the excuses already)
Hip mobility drills
Burgener warmup

Skill work
Tall clean 45x3, 95x3, 115x3x2, 125x3 (little sloppy on the last set)

Metcon

3 rounds:

19:16

Core work
Waiter's walks 3 x 75 feet each arm, 55#

That was just the type of test I needed. I got off to a slow start when the first treadmill I grabbed wouldn't get up to speed, and then when it finally hit the 10mph mark, it stopped working altogether. By the time I got another treadmill up and going, I'd lost 30 seconds to a minute. As a result, the second round didn't feel as bad as I'd expected it to. That 3rd row, however, was the moment of truth. I ended up skipping a stroke to breath (I absolutely hate that), but somehow I kept the pace up well enough to finish that round in under 1:48. However, that really brought the wrath of the metcon devil down on me. I had to take a few seconds just to stand up and get off the rower. I don't know that this was a failure of will, so much as it was a failure of equilibrium. After that I staggered my way through the rest of the workout with some slow, but mostly steady zombie burpees and a painfully slow run. The post-workout laydown wasn't the same painful wallow as after Fran, but it was a while before I stood up and took stock of things again.

Crossfit in the world

2009-02-16T21:15:00.007-05:00

For all the time I spend in the gym these days, you'd think I had no interest in sports or the outdoors. I've gotten so serious about my training that I've probably skied half as frequently since I started CrossFit than I did beforehand. The funny thing is that by my second day on skis this winter, I was already a better skier than I was after a dozen days on skis last winter. That difference can be attributed directly to my training. The magic is in the movements. The movement pattern for squats - chest up, ass back, weight balanced for powerful hip extension - are not so different from skiing. The center of gravity is moved forward on the foot when skiing, since the ground is tilted forward, but the general movement is the same. All that time working squats once, twice, often three times a week this year paid off in spades when I took my skis out to the first big mountain of the winter, allowing me to easily keep up with my much more skilled ski partners.

Still, the pressure of the Games Qualifiers has me wedded to my 3-on, 2-off program like a young grandpa-to-be with a 12-gauge, and I've missed some of the best skiing in years as a result. It's strange considering it was a backcountry ski buddy who turned me onto Crossfit four years ago and it was a desire to have more in the tank to enjoy those marathon ski-mountaineering days that happen in the spring, when my customary winter of relative inactivity had left me at my weakest. When you're out of shape, that second or third climb of the day can really sap your energy, and while trudging on may still be an option, the point of the getting out in the world is to enjoy yourself, and if you're not on top of your game, this isn't as much fun as it should be.

Therefore, despite the nagging list of goats waiting for me and the relatively mediocre conditions, I'm getting out on the slopes tonight. It won't be a glorious spring day on a big mountain, but riding under the local high-speed quad without a line and just skiing Fast is quite simply fun (and is a pretty decent sub for high-rep front squats to boot).

Will these adventures prepare me for the Games Qualifiers. I don't know, and I guess I don't really care. I train for life; I don't live to train (at least not every day). So, as hard as I'll push and as diligent I'll be about attacking my weaknesses and making a respectable showing come May, I'll be taking opportune ski days, enjoying the odd carb-laden gourmet meal, and taking my workouts into the wider world beyond the gym - maybe do that snowshoe Helen I've been talking about. Soon enough, winter will fade and ski-day workouts will be replaced with runs up Mount Monadnock; tire flipping, dragging, throwing, hitting marathons in the backyard; and mountain bike rides. There are only 412 useful things to do with a barbell. Why limit myself?

Herding the goats

2009-02-15T21:06:00.028-05:00

Preparing for the Games means I have to evaluate myself objectively as a Crossfitter. How well do I perform across broad time and modal domains? I've been at this long enough to know What I'm Good At and What I Suck At. The difference now is that if I don't want to fall on my face in May, I have to program those exercises/workouts that I would least want to see come out of the hopper at the Qualifiers, those things that KStar and Boz at Crossfit San Fransisco would call my goats. Knowing that, I sat down with my workout log and compiled a proper list of Goats, and sure enough, I've got a fucking herd, and they're nasty little buggers.

My list of goats (in no particular order) looks like this:

Metcons of 15 minutes or more
High rep deadlifts and olympic lifts
Muscular stamina in general
Pressing exercises (Shoulder press, bench press, HSPU, pushups)
Jerks and push presses (my dip-drive is a disaster, when things get heavy or hurried)
Snatch
Double unders
Muscle-ups
GHD situps (and regular situps aren't exactly a strength)
Rowing beyond 2,000m (I've never done it, and it's because I know just how much it will hurt)
Running 5K or more (ridiculous since I used to be a runner with a sub-5-minute mile, but my 5K is currently 24+)
Burpees (just because they're burpees and they suck)

Quite a list there. I've got plenty of things to program, high rep DLs, presses, long runs and rows, Annie, Angie, Diane, Elizabeth, Grace. The list goes on. It's like a who's who of CF Girls. The problem is for some of these goats, I haven't a clue how to shepherd them in from the fields. Muscular stamina and cardiovascular endurance and even pressing strength can be developed through hard work, but I need some serious help with double unders, jerks, and muscle-ups. They need practice-practice-practice before I can even work to develop capacity. Those three skills are still on the front end of the technique-consistency-intensity recipe. Those goats need feeding, and they need it now, or I'm liable to be caught with my pants down in May.

This means that unlike the firebreathers getting ready for the Games by piling on PR after PR on major lifts and the Girls,
I need to be focused on the fundamentals. This means I get to stare down a goat every day. Today, the goal is building endurance for heavy deadlifts while maintaining proper form, using a density-training protocol. I went heavy last week and stopped just shy of matching two PRs, because my form was going to shit. My first weakness in the DL is one of inadequate spinal stability. That weakness affects my high-rep DLs, my olympic lifts, and is a mean, old goat ready to gore me and leave me injured if I don't keep an eye on it. As an added bonus, I get to play with double unders, too.

Warmup
Jump rope 2:00
Alt. single/DU 1:00 - 25 DUs
Max consecutive DUs - 4 (1:00 was not enough time for max test)
DUs (in sets of consecutive DUs) 1:00 - 16
Star-pattern squat sequence 35x2 each
TGU-windmill drill 35x3 each
RRs 35x8 (alternating)

Heavy stuff
Deadlift 135x5, 185x5, 5x (225, 230, 235, 240, 245, 250)*

* Density style - every two minutes on the minute until form goes soft.

Form went early on this one. Saturday's good mornings were still being felt (and how).

Metcon
20-14-8

70# DB swing**
plyo pushup (one hand on medicine ball - switch halfway)
C2bar pullups

9:50

** Subbed 30-21-12 55# DB swings to preserve my back.

Did an extra second set of pushups during the last round, because I wasn't happy with ROM. Missed four C2Bs and had to redo those.

Even more fun was discovering as I was finishing up my first round of plyo pushups that the old guy doing crunches on the cable machine (where my pullup bar is) had one more set to do. I quickly jumped on the temporarily free power rack to do my C2Bs. Unfortunately, I'd never done a C2B pullup on it, so when I pulled, my chest hit the bar as my head simultaneously struck the ceiling. I've got a lovely pimple in the middle of my forehead now. Classic.

Core work
Max toes to bar - 12 (PR is 17)
Rolling plank 5:00 (1:00 on front, right side, front, left side, front)

And yes, that was a brutal finisher.

C'mon, all the cool kids are doing it

2009-02-15T10:18:00.014-05:00

Inspired by my friend Melissa Byers' excellent blog and the blogs of firebreathers like Jason "Rhabdo" Kaplan and Shana Alverson tracking their training for the Crossfit Games, I've decided to join the fun and put together a chronicle of my own training for the Northeast Regional Qualifiers. The difference with my blog is that I have no realistic expectation of qualifying for the CF Games. I signed up for the qualifiers, both to back-up my encouragement of some athletes from the CF message boards who I was encouraging to sign up themselves, and because Sean "Dammit" Manseau of Pioneer Valley Crossfit goaded me into not letting him be the only old guy at the Northeast qualifiers.

The fact of the matter is I'm a thoroughly average CFer. By the time the NE Qualifiers come around in late May, I'll have been at it with some pretty good consistency for two years. I took up CF to aid in conditioning for backcountry skiing and to ward off a midlife crisis associated with feeling old as I turned 40. Now, at 41, I'm pretty close to the best shape of my life, but by Crossfit standards, I'm nothing special. I have my strengths, but even those aren't exceptional:

CFT 795
200# C&J
Fran 4:46
Helen 9:16
FGB 281 (not really a strength, but it illustrates where I'm at)
Kelly 25:19
Murph 36:43

While those stats may be adequate to bring to the Qualifiers, I've got a host of weaknesses to address. Personal bests like

Grace 6:58
Diane 14:54
Angie 23:11 (although that was with ring pullups)

won't get the job done. I also have some pretty fundamental problems that need addressing. There are exercises where my technique is sorely lacking (e.g., snatch, muscle up), several more where I cannot consistently apply proper technique, (e.g., clean, push press, and push jerk), and some which defy my attempts to bring intensity to bear (e.g., deadlifts, handstand pushups). The Crossfit formula for development of exercise is to first master the technique, then develop consistency, and lastly to apply intensity. While the snatch probably won't appear at the Qualifiers and the muscle up and handstand pushup might not, the rest of my weaknesses almost certainly will appear. Thus, my preparation for the Qualifiers is going to be as much remedial physical education as hardcore training.

You may ask, "Then why the hell are you signed-up for the qualifiers?" I signed up for the same reason that I train. In the words of Jon Gilson, "I train to train." I have no illusions of becoming an outstanding athlete at this stage of life. I have no major worries about my body breaking down if I don't push harder in my training. I certainly don't expect to impress the assembly of discriminating eyes at the Qualifiers. However, by training for the Qualifiers, I am forcing myself to focus my training. I can't afford to chase PRs on workouts that I already do well; I can't afford to pace myself comfortably through metcons that last longer than 10 minutes (another major weakness of mine); I can't work muscular strength at the expense of muscular stamina, and I can't afford to push through workouts like Grace with substandard technique. In short, I have forced myself to program my workouts intelligently to address my weaknesses; I must push through my workouts with intensity; and I must invest myself fully in my nutrition and recovery.

There is no settling for strong enough, fast enough, enough stamina, etc. Once I look in the mirror and decide that I look good for a 40-year-old guy and let that be enough, I start to slip. The numbers don't lie. I'm not good enough. Improving my weaknesses won't be what makes me good enough. I may not get several muscle ups; I may not develop a super-strong deadlift; but I can train intelligently and diligently and leave everything I have on the ground at the Qualifiers, and that will be good enough. I may finish DFL, but that puts me miles ahead of DNS. Signing up for the Qualifiers is as much an investment in mental training as physical. It's time to see what I can do when put to the test.

Since this is a training log, I guess I should post a workout. Here's yesterday's effort:

Warmup
Goblet squats
Hip mobility drills

Skill work
Handstand practice
managed three 0:05-second free-standing handstands
1:00 wall handstand hold
walk on hands 4, 9, 9, 10 & 6 feet

Heavy stuff
Back squat 45x5, 135x5, 185x3, 225x2, 245x1, 255x5, 260x5, 265x5
Good morning 45x8, 95x8, 135x5, 155x8, 160x8, 165x8

Core work
10 STCs (on rings)

Metcon
5 rounds:
Row 250m
8 Hang C&Js, 40# DBs
11:59

That metcon was positively brutal on my grip. I desperately wanted to go to a lower weight on the dumbbells and simply hanging on to the rower in the last round was Hard. Pushing through that was definitely good for me and my willingness to endure discomfort.

The squats were solid, but were definitely hard work. My 5RM is 270, but I'm just getting back to a proper LBS from a hybrid LB position/HB torso squat that I'd been working on this past fall. The LBS is definitely the right tool to help me build strength through the posterior chain, but that's a topic for another post.

Thanks for reading.