It is so important to be willing to fail. Last weekend the benchmark WOD was Diane. This WOD is a 21-15-9 of Deadlifts and Handstand Push-Ups. The thought of doing 45 Handstand Push-Ups is pretty scary. And it should be. I’ve only done them once before, it was just a few sets of 5 or so. But rather than mod them to the box for this, I told myself f-it. If I hit the time cap, so be it. I want to see if I can do them with my feet up in the air, and instead of modding to a box, I compromised to modding with 2 ab mats under my head. Still a pretty big mod, but I’ve been feeling damn good about this all week.
Approaching that wall, and deciding that I’m going to flip over scares the crap out of me. It is by far the worst part. And that last set of 9, when I have to break it into sets of 3, and repeat that flip over and over just sucks, but is awesome at the same time.
Check out the Global Fat Scale produced by the BBC. If you put in your height, weight, gender, age and country it will rank your BMI globally and report back the country you most closely match up to for people your age and gender. I found it a bit fun that when I started CrossFit I was most like someone from Samoa. Not that I have ever been there, but they do have a rep for producing rather large people.
Each of the blue dots above are a time I took a weight measurement over the first 6 months of CrossFit. I’ve been watching the countries change this whole time, and it’s been fun to track the movement from the western countries, through a bit of Eastern Europe, and into Africa where I find myself sitting in the lovely Djibouti.
The site also provides an overview of your BMI world ranking. And some fun things to think about as you are putting in the work. Like I now have a lower BMI than 85% of guys my age in the US, but it’s still higher than 45% of guys my age in the world.
Doesn’t mean a whole lot, just another fun data point to think about.
My normal WOD is at 7:30 AM. Which is pretty much the worst time to work out. Not only am I getting up early (6:25AM), but I’m still pretty damn late for work (9:15AM). Occasionally I have a meeting or other matter that requires I be in the office before 9:15, and on those days I have to get up at 4:55AM to make the 6AM WOD. Today was one of those days.
Now, setting the alarm for a time that could easily be a bed time is pretty brutal, but there’s a little gem of motivation in there. If I make the 6AM WOD that usually means I get to have a chat with my buddy Lee. Normally I only get to see him on Saturdays, so this is a special little treat. But on top of that, Lee seems to like to push himself harder than I do and he is also very encouraging about it. So when I work out with him, I end up pushing myself a bit more than I normally would, and I’m always a happy I did.
Today we did back squats for the strength portion of the workout, and I was thinking about targeting 130/135 for the max in the sets of 5 every three minutes for 5 rounds, but Lee got us up to 145. Funny thing is, I was thinking that my 1 rep max PR was 140. I was wrong. When I went to log this into Beyond the Whiteboard, I noticed my 1 rep max PR was 160. So I looked at the date, and went to check out the pictures, and sure enough, that just happened to be a day I ended up at the 6AM WOD, and boom, there’s Lee and me at the squat rack. I forgot that he got me up to 160 a couple weeks ago.
It’s a yet another example of the power of this whole CrossFit thing. This is more than working out. It’s a team sport. You can get motivation from yourself and you can pass it on to your teammates and you can all advance together. It is rewarding as hell. That’s the power of Lee.
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