CrossFit Games Prep Minus 30 Days

I privately thought it might be a little ambitious to both workout and write something about said workout for each day up until the Games start. I took a few days off at the end of last week for a variety of reasons, some of them good, some of them silly, none of them worth mentioning. At last glance, I was fighting off the Blerch and apparently he was heavier and stronger than I thought. Still need to get that T-shirt.

I picked backup on Sunday morning with a ton of back squats followed by 150 double unders for time. I desperately hope that there are no workouts in the 5 weeks that include double unders. At one point, I thought I was capable at the movement but that apparently was either self delusion or a stronger time in my history. I’m having trouble stringing 5-10 of them together which is pretty poor. I’ve been working on them a lot and they are getting better. I’m sure this means every workout will have them.

Yesterday, I did the main page workout which was actually fun but painful, a common occurrence in CrossFit. It was 15 minutes starting with 1 minute of squats, 2 minutes of double unders (AGAIN!), 3 minutes of pushups, 4 minutes of back extensions and 5 minutes of pullups. I thought double unders were hard until I did them after a solid minute of squats. I haven’t done back extensions in probably a year which means I’ll be laying in the middle of the floor a lot today. My reps for the exercises were 52,74,64,74,65 for a grand total in 15 minutes of 329.

For the CrossFit uninitiated, I’m above average in strength and fitness when compared to the general population. Lots of people think I’m in great shape (I tend to disagree since I do CrossFit which constantly exposes how terrible my fitness really is by regularly giving me things like double unders to do). Actually, I was pretty proud of my 329. I went to log it on the site and four comments right above mine is one Jason Khalipa. Google him and that will save me the trouble but the short version is he actually competes in the Games every year. Not the Open like I’m doing, he qualifies for the Games. He’s one of the Elite they talk about. He’s a big dude, can snatch like 250 pounds or something ridiculous so you’d think I’d have an advantage on a body weight WOD like this one. He reps were 50, 152, 75, 107, 100 for a total of 484.

I actually did more squats than him (probably my first mistake since then I could barely get off the ground for the double unders) and then he just blew me away in every thing else with maybe the exception of the pushups. He’s truly Elite. But one of the beauties of this program is that anyone can do it. We just did the same workout, this Elite athlete and I, and we both were challenged to our max by it. The egalitarianism is one of the best qualities of CrossFit. On top of that, right there in the same comments on the same web page is an entry by one of the elites of the sport. It’s a community, one that trains together in many aspects and grows together as well. If I ran into Jason on the street and mentioned that he and I did the workout at about the same time, he’d probably laugh and discuss how hard it was. Imagine that happening in any other sport.

On the social front, we went to the symphony on Friday night and it was fantastic. They opened with Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes by Britten and it was truly mesmerizing. The second piece took some getting used to as it was 32 minutes of German folk songs by Mahler. I don’t have the experience to say that German is a pretty language but I’m pretty sure it isn’t. The soloist, Matthias Goerne, was incredibly emotive and it was fun to listen to the songs. After intermission was the Brahms Fourth symphony and it was spell binding. The DSO is really doing some great work under van Zweden.

Sunday I built a standing desk out of Rubbermaid closet shelving and an oak dowel from Home Depot. Pretty happy with the results.