Sooo as you can see, my CF classes have been dwindling a bit lately! That’s okay.. with the late nights and craziness in the office, crossfit has actually become a welcome break. It’s embarrassing that I’ve really only been able to do every other day, if that. It’s so unlike me but it’s some sort of routine that I have to maintain. Whenever I have a shit day, regardless of the reasons, CF always seems to fix it. The ultimate mood fixer!

So.. Saturday WOD! We started out with a little dodgeball and a 400m run. Then we did the following WOD:

10-1 strict pull ups
1-10 ball slams (30/20)
100m run

BUT.. every min, you had to do 5 pushups.

I finished in 21:40. I was actually surprised that I wasn’t last on this one! This was definitely a tough one, since it was all cardio and body weight, but I did pretty well. It was worth it.

Box Squats.. squatting with the bar in a high bar spot, and then sitting down onto a box just below parallel. Fun!! My back squat PR is 245, and I ended up getting 215 on these. It felt like it was putting a lot of pressure on my knees when I stood back up, so I didn’t want to keep going up in weight and potentially hurt myself.

Then we did 5x50m resisted running. Good stuff! I came home and rolled my feet out as soon as I could to try and keep the pain/swelling from creeping up. They were a little sore the next day, but way better than they would’ve been had I not rolled/massaged them and stuck them in cold water. Gotta keep up with that treatment on my arches.

Clean and Jerk day!! I cleaned 150 (5 lbs under my PR) and it was actually pretty clean, I might add! Not too sloppy, but I wasn’t able to jerk it at 150lbs. 🙁 My Jerk PR is 140, so I was trying to get a higher number, but it just felt so heavy! I need to work on those..

3 cleans and 1 jerk 75%
3 cleans and 1 jerk

2 cleans and 1 jerk 80%
2 cleans and 1 jerk

1 clean and 2 jerk 85%
1 Clean and 2 jerk

1 clean and jerk 100%
1 clean and jerk

Then the WOD was 5 min Max clean and jerks.. at 135/95

I did 29, which is pretty much Grace (30 clean and jerks for time) which I’ve never done at the RX weight, so that’s pretty cool!

I WAS SO EXCITED ABOUT KALSU! Nobody ever says that.. ever.. BUT.. Kalsu was my VERY FIRST WOD at Crossfit Total Control, so this was a milestone for me!

Roughly one year ago, when I first walked into CFTC, hoping it was going to be a good replacement for my first CF home, I was faced with Kalsu. What is Kalsu??

Every minute on the minute..
do 5 burpees, and then in the remaining time, do as many thrusters as you can in that minute, until you reach 100 thrusters.

RX weight is 135/95

One year ago, I went from 65lbs to 55lbs, and 5 burpees a minute to 2 burpees a minute, and finished in 31 minutes. Hell. Russell, my coach, even remembers this day, that’s how awful it was for me. For a coach and gym owner to remember someone’s first day, that’s BAD.

This year… I did 65lbs the whole time, 5 burpees every minute, and I finished in just under 25 minutes. That’s a pretty big PR! I was so excited!! I was thrilled, excited, and ecstatic to see my progress, to have this little moment of joy. It was just awesome.

No matter how bad the day is… a day at my box is the best fix. <3 br="">

The last 2 weeks have been a blur, and hectic, and insane. Dave and I have had to face some changes made at the office, which made for some scrambling around, not to mention, having to clean up messes that were left behind by others. Organizing, fixing, redoing, and reworking things to the way they should have been all along. I guess it’s the price we pay for taking more ‘us time’ than we should’ve, especially where the business was involved. We both became so focused on our fun hobbies (golf for him and CrossFit for me) over the last year, that we allowed our key people to take over the day to day stuff instead. For the most part, everything ran smoothly, but there were things that we weren’t even aware of that were happening, and that’s the kind of shit that really bugged us to no end. So… Hello ‘in the office til 1am’ nights, and goodbye to our personal time!

In the end, we’re thrilled with the changes being made, and really, everything is fine and has totally worked out for the better. We’ve both been able to schedule in our own time here and there, but the business has become a HUGE focus again, where it really should’ve been all along. Ya know…. that old saying.. If you want something done right.. 🙂

I’ll try to put together a post outlining my workouts since May 29th-ish. Whatever they were since Murph, basically!

So it’s CrossFit tradition that you do Hero Murph on Memorial Day, and I was nervous at first, but then I embraced it. Running ain’t no thing! 😉 Well… I also decided to do 1/2 Murph again, so that I could compare my time to the miserable experience I had last year.

Last year, running was horrifying to me. Something I thought was just the worst thing ever, along with burpees, and I never wanted to do either one, at any cost. Last year, I also went to a gym that didn’t tell us ahead of time what the WODs were, so I’d be nervous as shit all day about it and walk into a shit storm, vs knowing the WOD and being like, oh yeah, cool. I’ll wear my running minimus shoes and bring my headphones. (Not that I would’ve done that last year, but I do that now..!) 🙂

In any case.. last year, Murph was awful. This was about 200 Days of CF ago…

First.. What is Murph?

1 mile run
100 pull ups
200 push ups
300 air squats
1 mile run

If you want to RX it, you have to wear a weighted vest. No chance! I carry around my own weighted vest on a full time basis, thanks. 😀

So.. I did 1/2 Murph, everything above cut in half.

800m run
50 pull ups (used the green and black bands this year, I did jumping pull ups last year. and while yes I recognize I could’ve used just the green band, I selflessly wanted to make this as similar to last year’s experience as possible, hah)
100 push ups
150 squats
800m run

Last year, I finished in 38:37.
This year I finished in 34:52.

I’ll TAKE IT!

Last year.. I was dying after it was done. This year, not saying I wasn’t spent, but I definitely wasn’t dying. A year’s worth of conditioning. I’m a different person now!

Then:

This year:

Christine and me during our first 800m run 🙂

Our incredible Crossfit Family after Memorial Day Murph!

Saturday WOD.. Dodgeball! I had no idea we’d be playing dodge ball, but it was pretty cool! Spent about 15-20 min at it, and I got destroyed.. these stupid little foam balls, these guys could completely launch them with this crazy power! I can’t throw things that light with that kinda power. I’d throw my shoulder out. haha

In any case, I got hit like 5 times. The WOD after was good though!

We did Jackie.
1000m row (finished in 4:25 but I wasn’t rushing)
50 thrusters (45lbs for everyone)
30 pull ups (green band for me)

I finished in 14:54. Weewww!

Alright, so since I got my 25 DUs in a row LAST Sunday (as in, 10 days ago or whatever, May 12th Sunday) I have had intermittent yet excruciating pain just on the inside of my shins where the bones meet my calf muscles. Diagram!

See where my circle and X are? That’s where it fucking hurts. I have determined that it’s the way that I land on the ball of my foot/toes when I do DU type jumping. This also started to happen when I’ve gone running (the second I take my first step to run, I feel it). Fortunately, when I’m running, it loosens up enough and subsides throughout the run, until I’m done, and then they wind up again and are just on fire.

Box jumps aggravated it, but the real aggravator (not a real word apparently, but you know what I mean?) was when we did the 400m skip around the block on Bring a Friend Day (May 14th).

DUs again that week didn’t help, and then running this past weekend along with more DU practice didn’t help either.

So.. this brings us to today. We did a 400m run for a warm up and it was instantaneous. The pain shot through my shins/calves (not shin splints!) from the first step I took. They loosened up a little and I was able to complete my run, but the WOD was the real kicker. Even through the rest of the warm up, I was walking very tenderly. It was definitely hurting with every step. Keeping my foot flexed seemed to make it worse.

Our WOD today was a 20 min EMOM
calorie row for 1 min
lateral bounds for 1 min
(rotate every minute for 20 min)

I got through my first and second sets of the lateral bounds, which is literally just jumping over a 20″ height over and over, and counting your reps, and the pain was almost unbearable. The rowing helped it to subside, but actually, the rowing probably contributed to it just as much, as my feet are flexed to the max when I row.

I tried doing a couple different modifications, but the pain didnt go away, so I said fuck it and finished the workout with the RX movement. Here’s what they look like, except we used a PVC pipe on top of a 20″ box, and not the parallets.

I soon realized it was the landing and not so much the jumping that was causing the pain. When we finished, I tried doing everything to stretch out those muscles, but the only thing that seemed to work initially was kneeling down as hard as I could (sounds stupid) to force my calves to stretch as much as possible. I then took a lacrosse ball and rolled it over the sore spots (see first diagram) to try and work out those muscles. Now THAT hurt like hell.

When I got home, I rolled my capris up and stuck my feet in our non-heated pool, letting the water go up to my knees. The cold water felt so good on them, and by the time I got out, I was feeling soo much better. Literally, within 5-10 min after that, the pain was gone.

Right now, there’s no pain, but I can tell that those muscles are tender. If I were to jump rope again, or skip, or do anything where I was pulling my feet up like that and landing on my toes, it’ll come right back. Each step I take is with care. So frustrating because every time I think I’m doing better, I’ll do the movement that aggravates it and it’ll come right back as searing pain. 🙁

OH. I finished my WOD with 198 reps/calories total. Wish I had done more, but considering the muscle pain, I’m just glad I was able to Rx it and finish.

I CHOSE to come to this one… brutal as it may sound. And I loved it.

It was the CrossFit Regionals WOD #6, and we had to do the following:

30 min time cap (Thanks Russ) The original time was 15 min

100 DUs or 300 singles
50 HSPUs
40 T2B
30 Shoulder to Overhead 100lbs for the girls (I RXed the weight!)
90 ft walking lunges with the same 100lb bar in the front rack.

I finished in 20:24!

I did 300 singles, so I could get through them. Turns out, the DUs hurt the shit out of my calves, because of how I jump. Excruciating calf to shin pain that I’m finding is just not worth it. It’s happened every time I’ve done DUs since last Sunday.

My HSPUs I did my old easy peasy way, just lowering myself down enough to touch my head to my stack of plates. 😀 (btw, I finally learned to do HSPUs the right way, coming all the way down and popping/kipping my feet up, it was AWESOME, but for 50 of them, there was no way! I could do maybe 5 the ‘right’ way.)

My 40 T2B, well, I can do T2B, but not many of them. I was so excited that I did them for the Open WOD, but for this one.. I did maybe 10 actual T2B and then resorted to my dinky knees up in the air mod. Frustrating. Russ didn’t want me doing toes to rings, which I could’ve done all 50 with my feet touching the rings, so I did my shitty K2E instead.

30 Shoulder to Overhead just wasn’t a big deal for me. I knocked those out 5-6 at a time. and the lunges, as hard as they were, I just had to get through them. BAM. Done.  🙂

My butt will definitely be sore from the 100lbs of weighted lunges though, looking forward to that!

Floor Press
5-5-5-5-5-5

A floor press, I learned, is like a bench press but without the bench. I maxed out at 135, 20lbs under my max bench of 155lbs.

21-15-9
Dynamic Push ups (I did these!!)
C2B Pullups (green band)
50 Du Each round (I did DUs the first two rounds, slowly, and horribly, because I was BEAT, and then singles the last round) 🙁

I finished in 18:36 I believe. Shit was hard.