I’m just over one week back into this after my unplanned rest. It feels great. Taking it slow and light, but not too slow or too light.
Those first few WoDs were pretty daunting, but now I feel like I’m close to hitting my stride again. I definitely noticed a loss of some strength on the barbell movements, and it will be a while until I get it all back. But on some things, like ball slams, I don’t seem to have missed a beat. It’s finding the little things like crushing the 30 pound ball slams that are making this transition back feel good.
And not to mention, I PR’d during the 13.2 wod on Friday. That was a damn good feeling when Whit pointed that out to me after the fact. A month and half off doesn’t mean starting over. It just means starting again.
So I had CrossFit ripped from my life for the past 6 weeks. Due to some unforeseen circumstances I was unable to work out at all during this time. It sucked. I missed my friends. I missed my box. I missed doing pull-ups and burpees. I honestly missed my soreness.
The people at HyperFit were great. Kept me motivated to return as soon as I was able, were very supportive.
But this event in my training highlighted a new challenge for me. Going back for that first WOD after an extended break was f’ing scary. I was filled with anxiety. I had dropped almost 10 pounds in the six weeks since I stopped, and I had convinced myself that was 10 pounds of pure muscle, and that I would be near starting over again. I worked myself into quite a depressing state in the end.
I’m not sure if it was a blessing or a curse that the first WOD I was able to jump in on was the 13.1 open. I had been gearing up for this for months, so I knew I had to get in for it, and what ever the results, it didn’t matter. I wanted to participate. I wanted to play in this WOD. But, I knew it was going to be hard. So, I put it in my mind that it was about showing up and pacing myself properly, and not about my score. And, I have the score to prove that I executed on that (91).
I also felt good enough to make it back in today for Jackie. Again, pacing myself (13 minutes). But it feels great again. And the fact that my 1000m row was 4:01, and I was actually able to bang out the 30 pull-ups with no band felt like huge wins for me. Different kind of wins, but huge for me nonetheless.
And last but not least, I have to say thank you to all my CrossFit friends who were a great support while I was out of commission. It was so hard to be out, but it was less hard thanks to you.
First, CrossFit is not for everyone. Period. As much as I go around blabbering to anyone who will listen about how awesome it is and how great the results are, it will not work for everyone.
Whether your workout routines mainly consist of couch sitting and beer drinking (like mine did) or you are a current track and field star, does not matter when you begin CrossFit. Not at all. What matters are two things: willingness & commitment.
You need to be willing to accept the fact that you are there to learn. That there are people out there who know things you don’t. That there are groups of people who really care about making you improve, and have put their lives behind that. You have to be willing to mentally join a team, with teammates and coaches, with rules, with good days and tough days (which are also good days, but usually involve a lot of push-ups).
CrossFit is the Sport of Fitness. There is a lot to be taken from that statement. It is a Sport first. CrossFit is amazingly fun, just like other sports. You compete, mostly with yourself if you are like me, and everyone who wants to be, is ranked on BeyondTheWhiteboard.com. There is equipment. Cool equipment, like kettlebells, which are like bowling balls with a handle, slam balls, wall balls, giant rubber bands, bars, weights, cameras, shoes, bandannas, and t-shirts and other fun things. There are rules, timers, winners, runners ups, history, records, personal records, local, regional and national competitions. It’s a sport first. And there are many detractors of the sport. People who are anti-CrossFit. People like Steve Maxwell. Read his thoughts here: http://maxwellsc.com/blog.cfm?blogID=90
CrossFit is the Sport of Fitness, so that means when you play the sport, you are playing fitness. CrossFit makes doing push-ups and squats, and burpees, and squats, and squats, and oh yea, squats, fun. Seriously. I used to workout because I had to, which translated into short bursts of a couple months of working out at most, then back to the couch and the beer. These guys have done something on the order of a Jedi mind trick to make me actually look forward to going in every day, and feel like I’m missing out on something on the days that I don’t make it in. So when you get into playing CrossFit, you are first playing, and second playing fitness. That comes with some direct benefits, such as having fun playing on a team building friendships and those things, as well as some serious gains in your performance at the sport. The goal of this sport is improvement. You win, when you do better than you did last time. And, as you are getting better at fitness, you are getting more fit. So for people like me, that means losing over 40 pounds of fat in 6 months. Being able to do pull-ups (both our kipping-style and the more traditional ‘strict’ pull-ups) for the first time in my life. It means being able to pick up a couple hundred pounds off the floor, or raise over 100 pounds over my head, touch my toes, run, jump, skip… But wait, there’s more….
The benefit of playing CrossFit goes far beyond the direct benefits of playing the sport. As you play, you get more fit. Fit for the movements associated with CrossFit, but those movements are chosen because of their usefulness in everyday life. The better I have gotten at playing CrossFit, the better I’ve gotten at playing with my 2.5 year old daughter. I’m more flexible, I can pick her up and hold her longer. She loves sitting on my back as I do push-ups and make horsey sounds. It makes me better at standing in an awkward position over the bed and dresser hanging the new blinds that I was too cheap to pay for installation on. I’m better at climbing the stairs with a backpack. I’m better at skiing. I’m better at sleeping. I’m better at thinking about what I eat…I’m in training after all! I’m better at managing my time so that I can get my WODs in. I’m better at lugging crap through an airport in a hurry, and fitting in the seat when I get there. I’m 35 and I’m significantly more fit, physically and mentally, than I ever have been in my life. Playing CrossFit did for me in 6 months, what my $2500 Bowflex Ultimate II and a $1500 SmoothFitness Elliptical machine failed to do in 6 years. It got me motivated to get my butt out of bed, every day, and work out.
Is playing CrossFit for you? Honestly, probably not. But if you read this far, it’s worth checking out for yourself. There are many ways to do so. Most CrossFit gyms offer a free intro session. Just google CrossFit in your town, and you’ll probably find something close. I’ve never heard of anyone getting pressure from the gyms to join, it’s their friends who play CrossFit tend to supply the pressure to sign up :)
If you are in Ann Arbor, check out HyperfitUSA. These guys changed my life.
If you look to the official CrossFit source, CrossFit is defined as: Constantly Varied, FunctionalMovements, performed at High Intensity. Here are three short (~30 seconds each) videos which describe them:
Constantly Varied:
Functional Movement:
High Intensity:
One final thought. As mentioned, CrossFit is a sport. You play it. And just like football, basketball, tether-ball, jarts or any other sport, when you play it, you might get hurt. If you are smart about it, listen to the instructors, and above all listen to your own body, you’ll probably be just fine. But always remember, ab mat ass is very real, and never to be taken lightly.
If you want to be successful at CrossFit, instructor Mike put it best. “Show up consistently, and do what ever the hell we tell you to do.” It is that simple.
So today we did 10 dead lifts & 10 Burpees over the bar, 5 rounds for time. Rx was 225. I thought about it, and decided 185 sounded right.
Nope.
After rep 5 I realized this was waaaay too ambitious.
I finished round 1, pulled off the 25s, and finished with 135 on there. And it took everything I had to get that done after the energy hole I dug myself into during round 1.
It’s good to test, and I’m glad I did, but I’m more glad I scaled back.
It would have been better to test this weight more before hand, and settle back at 155 and stick with that for the wod. So lesson learned today in spending more time scaling upfront, vs. scaling mid wod.
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.
I had the lovely experience of making it down to CrossFit Las Vegas today. And I am just ecstatic that I did. Hand Stand Push-Ups (HSPU) were part of the WOD. These are one of the exercises that just amaze me when I see other people do them, and prior to today, I had not had (nor created) an occasion to try them on my own.
So when the instructor went over the WOD, I was filled with a wide mix of emotions ranging from “Oh crap” to “Oh shit”. One of the many things that sets CrossFit apart are the instructors. And Vili at CrossFit Las Vegas is no exception. He could see that I was a bit concerned with the HSPUs and he sprung into action, never once making me feel like I should sit it out or not try it. He just grabbed a few ab mats and walked me through it step by step, and let me try it. And I was able to flop myself up and over and before I knew it… I was banging out my HSPUs like the best of ‘em. Ok, maybe not that great, and with 2 – 3 ab mats, but you get my point.
So HSPU’s aside, here’s the run down on CrossFit Las Vegas (CFLV):
Have your affiliate owner shoot them an email and it’s only $10 for the class!
If you don’t do any of the above, don’t worry, you can just show up for a class, you just need to fill out an extra form when you get there and the regular drop in fee is $20
Getting down there from the Strip is kinda pricey. The cab ride was $20 each way from Bellagio.
Tell the cab driver it’s at W Warm Springs Road and Dean Martin Drive. It’s just south of W Warm Springs on the East side of Dean Martin Drive. In a little one story strip building that has several businesses in there. They are in suite 508 which is on the south end of their building, you’ll see the logo and other CrossFit style decals when you find it.
I just grabbed a random cab from my hotel to get there, and once I told the guy where I was going he got all excited and we talked fitness the whole way…when he started showing me pictures of himself working out on his phone, it got kinda odd, but he was nice enough and came back to pick me up no problem :) You’ll definitely need to call for a cab to get back. So get your cabby’s number. Here’s my guy’s if you need one: 702-332-5116, his name is Gary.
CFLV is a bit more chilled on the start time than my home box. I showed up at 5:40AM for the 6AM WOD and I ended up sitting in the cab for a bit until folks arrived, about 5:50AM.
The WOD had a flexible start time of about 6:05AM, and that was driven by when the regular athletes trickled in. Seemed very friendly and comfortable.
The warm ups were done as a group, and had a nice mix of stretching with bands and movements and single unders, which I enjoyed because I really need to work on my jump rope skills.
My classmates were very friendly and welcoming and focused on the WOD. I thought it was a very well run group, especially for 6AM in Las Vegas.
We did a strength routine of Clean and Jerks that we had 20 minutes to complete on our own and do 5 sets of 3 at 75-85% of PR. This was a struggle for me as I had a little trouble pacing myself. I prefer a timer and set intervals, but that’s probably just because that’s what I’m used to. So I ended up doing 6+ sets ‘cause I kinda burned through it.
We then did the WOD that included the HSPU, dumbbell lunges and Hallow Rocks. So two out of the three were new to me. Which is another benefit of CrossFit Tourism, you get to try new things. And speaking of the Hallow Rocks, holy cow, way more intense than they look!
Last, but certainly not least, I got to give a ton of credit to Vili. What a great coach!! He gave very clear and simple instructions, helped everyone with a perfect mix of instruction and motivation. He’s got a great attitude, and added a ton to the overall experience.
I highly recommend dropping in at CrossFit Las Vegas if you are in town. Check out their schedule and keep an eye out for Vili’s classes.
Here are a few pix from my trip:
Can you tell it was 5:55AM?
This is a big pile of Atlas Balls:
This is one of my very first Handstand Push-Ups! I’m probably way more excited about this than I should be:
Amen CFLV:
Getting up early for WODs means you get to take cooler pix from your hotel room:
I’m in Las Vegas today, and I had made plans to make it over to CrossFit Las Vegas for the 8:30 AM WOD, BUT, they were thwarted by an 8AM meeting. When I discovered this at 7AM today, I immediately put the back up plan into place and did my Hotel WOD.
Even though I’m a little disappointed I didn’t make it over to the local box, I still got a great work out in, and a nice boost from BeyondTheWhiteboard.com when I plugged in my results, and got a PR. It’s the little things. That makes my third PR this week. 237 reps for the hotel wod, #215 for dead lifts and #100 for overhead squats.
Being flexible, and staying committed to getting in and logging the results of a good work out are another key component to achieving the long run results I’m seeing from CrossFit. Plus, my bottum is kinda sore, so as I’m sitting in the conference today, I have a nice little reminder that I succeeded this morning…which feels damn good :)
I found myself on the road this week, and while I tried to find a good local box, it just didn’t work out. I was in Cincinnati and Queen City CrossFit was in a great location, but they have smaller classes, and they could not guarantee space for a drop in. That’s why it’s always good practice to email ahead of your visit.
So I then found myself looking for a good WOD to do in my hotel room. I also wanted something quick so I could also take advantage of a little extra sleep. So I came up with the following CrossFit Hotel Room WOD, and it took about 16 minutes. It was fast, but I felt pretty worked out by the end. If you wish to log it on BeyondTheWhiteboard.com, I have it set up here.
The only equipment you need is you, it would be helpful to have a timer as well. If you have an iPhone, I HIGHLY recommend Timers Pro This app works great for intervals with rest or TABATA. I just mod the TABATA to 15 seconds work and 15 seconds rest to time my warm up. This app makes it easy since it lets you save multiple set ups.
I’d rather have gone into the local box, but this was a great alternative that made for a good start to the day.
You must be logged in to post a comment.