Jason Harper

I finally did it!  I have been after Karen for well over a year now, and I finally got her done!

For those that have not yet had fun with Karen, she is plain and simple:

150 Wall Balls for time 20 pound for guys, 14 for girls and our time cap is 10 minutes

My first attempt at Karen was about a year ago, time capped at 110 reps with a 14 pound med ball.  Second attempt was 10 months ago, time capped at 120 reps with a 20 pound ball.  My next attempt stopped 8 short, which was BRUTAL, 142 reps with the 20 pounder.  I had to sit on that score for 7 months before Karen popped up again on my schedule.  I was not about to not finish this this time.  I was so pumped for it, i was damn near giddy at go time.  Not only did I finish, but I finished in under 9 minutes!!  8:51 to be exact, and that was with a few no reps (as you can see in the pic, Dan was there to make sure this was legit.

To me, this is what CrossFit is all about.  It’s a game.  It’s fun.  It’s motivating.  And I can’t wait to try this again and see if I can break 8:30!!

 

 

 

I hit a minor milestone yesterday, I logged my 400th session on BeyondTheWhiteboard.com.

Here are the stats:

• 400 sessions
• 43 pounds of weight loss
• 91 benchmarks set
• 115 pounds added to Over Head Squat (started failing with a PVC pipe)
• 1 Murph completed Rx in under an hour
• 7 CrossFit Boxes attended

 

I have also moved from going 2-3 days a week to only taking Sunday’s off.

If you aren’t using Beyond The Whiteboard to track your progress, you are missing out.

 

For the past few months a group of us have been meeting at County Farm Park Tuesdays and Thursdays for an outside workout (7:15AM, come join us if you like!)  Today we had a nice warm up, modified Cindy using playground equipment, then we did our WOD.  3 agility runs, then 12 Burpees over an object of your choosing (I went cone) take 3 laps for time.

Things started off fine, but I forgot the most important rule of CrossFit, check your landing zone for poo.  About 3 burpees into the first round, I landed and immediately could tell that something was off.  Looked at my right hand and yep, that squish I felt was a nice little pile of dog poo.  The problem was what to do?  I have poo all over my hand and in between my fingers, but I’m like 2 minutes into this WOD.  So, I wiped off my hand as well as I could on the grass, adjusted my landing zone, and went back at it.  The WOD must go on, right?

I’m chalking this up to preparing for the unknown and unknowable.  I learned a valuable lesson, always check the ground before you burpee!

 

 

 

Maybe it’s because I haven’t really sprinted since I was in High School, but holy F*CK my legs are still sore from last week.  My groin area on both legs is still super sore.  I’ve been stretching them out every day, and that is incredibly uncomfortable, and doesn’t seem to be doing much other than torture myself for a few minutes.

The most difficult part, aside from walking or getting up out of bed, is squatting.  And in case you are new to CrossFit, there are usually a few squats in the workouts.  Like last week, we did back squats two days after the sprints (as seen above).  Finding the bottom of my squat has never been this uncomfortable.  I thought I’d be fine by today for sure, but not even close.  And today, there were a few squats, actually, over 60 in the warm up, then 100 back squats in the work out, oh and a 1 mile run and some push presses for good measure.  The run was uncomfortable, but manageable, the push presses were fine, but mother f*ck*r the bottom of those back squats felt like there was some little man down there, stabbing me with screwdrivers in my inner thighs, which forced me to shoot up early, and get yelled at by Koski to go deeper.

The insult to injury came, when the 30 minute clock ran out, and I still had 15 to go.  I got to stop, get in the group shot, then walk back to the bar and finish up while (most) everyone else was putting their gear away.  The plus side, is that misery does in fact love company.  Phil was right there with me, suffering the same fate from the sprints.  So we both finished in OT, and that made me feel just a little better.

 

Some workouts are obvious.  Carrying a sandbag for distance and time, that’s gonna suck.  Thrusters, they are going to suck.  Then there are workouts like we did today.  Seemed just like 15 minutes of fun:

Sprint 100 meters every minute for 15 minutes.

That’s it.  We did some OHS before hand, but pretty easy day.  By round 3 I could barely catch my breath, by round 8 I was doubled over, gasping, drooling and closing in on puking.  I was able to hold off the puke, but my right hammy will never be the same after finishing.

Total sneak attack WOD today!

I spent last week down in Sea Island, Georgia (http://www.seaisland.com/).  It was awesome, the resort was fabulous, and I got to play a round of golf at the Sea Side course at Sea Island (http://www.seaisland.com/golf/best-golf-courses) which according to their propaganda is the #4 ranked course in the country.  Now, I golf about once a year, so after I chopped my way around, we can assume that ranking came down at least a few.

In addition to golf, the resort had an amazing gym.  I had my doubts when the bellhop explained to me that they set it up so that if an NFL player came to visit, they could get a good workout.  I thought “yea right”.  Turns out, he was pretty right.  Ton’s of machines, but also a really nice area with free weights including bars and dumbbells and some room to work.  I was able to get in two days of solid work right there.  But that was not good enough for me.  I needed to get in some CrossFit tourism.  Enter CrossFit Grit.

 

First the good.  I made it over to the 4:30 wod, and there were a few folks hanging around the box.  Each one of them came over individually and introduced themselves.  Asked where I was from, what brought me there, etc.  They seemed to all take a very sincere interest in getting to know me.  I was really impressed.  CrossFit Las Vegas was super friendly, but this was over the top.  I could tell this was going to be a good drop in, at least from the people perspective.

The warm up was a little different than I was used to, totally on your own, although the instructor (I think he name was Nate, but that may have been the guy I spoke to on the phone, but I’m gonna call him Nate now) had to deciphered their warm up codes and demo for me… and then we did some front squats (5×2 at 80% one rep max) which was also on our own.  Nate was a little more hands off than I’m used to.  HyperFit usually does some demo work and instruction, but it was just front squats, so it was fine.  Nate did jump in and help quite a bit with another guy who needed some more hands on instruction, so that all worked out just fine.

Now the wod:

10 Rounds for time
15 AbMat Sit Ups
9 Air Squats
6 Hand Release Push Ups
Then:
400m “Cash Out”

So all good, aside from a little trepidation at the 400m in 90+ degrees and 108% humidity.  I finished in about 16 minutes.  3rd place in class (there were 3 people in class).  Everything was going just fine on drive back to the hotel.  Then I jumped in the shower.  It honestly felt like I was getting stung by 800 bees when the water hit my butt.

I jumped out of the shower, looked in the mirror, and saw two silver dollar sized patches of road rash back there.  The skin was all gone.  It hurt like hell. I wasn’t really sure what to do, but I assumed it needed to be clean, and washing it with soap was about as awesome as it sounds.

The next day I was giving a series of presentations, and therefore I was in my fancy clothes.  I had a car taking me to the airport right from the meetings, and I had set up a change of clothes, which I navigated in the back seat.  When I pulled off my dress shirt I could see that I had this weird stain on the back shirt tail.  I quickly realized that I had bled through my drawers to my shirt.  It was a semi circle 6 to 8″ in size.  And my reward for discovering it, was a flight from Jacksonville to Atlanta, then another one from Atlanta to Detroit.  So uncomfortable.  Those airplane seats never felt so thin.

Here I am 5 days later.  I have two matching scabs, each about the size of a half dollar.  Sitting in my desk chair is terribly uncomfortable.  This AbMat Ass, or AbMat Butt or AbMat Rash or what ever you want to call it, is not the type of souvenir I had planned on bringing home.

I’m really not sure how I’m supposed to prevent this from happening.  I was told a good cheat is to slide the mat down your butt so that you are sitting on the mat.  Not the right way to do an AbMat, but might help.  I also read doing the AbMats on a yoga mat would work, which I’m trying to figure out how to navigate that in the long run.  Just keep a yoag mat handy at all times?

And yes, I wrote most of this standing up ;)