I have been behind on the blogging a bit. Life’s been busy and I have been taking down time wherever I can get it. The baby’s almost here and work has been kickin’ my butt lately. This will be short.

Tuesday, 2/15/2011

I could not believe how sore I was from “Operation Get Some”. I was barely able to walk when I got into the gym that night. I started warming up and I felt a bit of loosening start to occur. As part of the warm up that night, Fio had us do some shoot throughs. On one of them, a felt one of those “you’re about to really tweak your hamstring” twinges, so I took a little break, got a lacrosse ball, a pull up band and did some more stretching. I stretched through Fio’s skill session on the clean and jerk. Then, I decided to give the WOD a try once I didn’t feel like I was going to pull my hamstring anymore. The WOD was:

“Gwen”

15 – 12 – 9 clean and jerk. Pick a weight to be used for the entire WOD. Touch and go at the ground, no re-gripping. If you stop/re-grip at the ground, that’s a penalty and you have to start over. No dumping the weight. If you dump the weight, you have to start over.

Mean.

If I were not feeling sore and tight, I think I would have attempted 135#, but I didn’t really want to temp the fates. I did a few PC’s with 75# and it was super light. I decided to go with 95#. Although the weight was somewhat light, this was still really challenging.

Wednesday, 2/16/2011

I was the only one that showed up for class on this day! It was nice. Fio and I got to spend a little quality time. It happens so rarely. This WOD was nasty, particularly as we all know my feelings on running. It was:

4x

• 185# dead lift (Rx was 275#, but I was not really interested in doing that with my back yadda yadda)
• 800m run (FML)

The deads were OK but I still started to feel a good bit of fatigue in my lower back, so I am happy I kept the weight sort of light. The runs were agony, but Fio came along on all of them which, I felt, really helped me to keep some semblance of a pace and not let up. All in all, this took me 21:48.

Friday, 2/18/2011

• 3 min pull ups (41)
• 2 min rest
• 3 min push ups (60)
• 2 min rest
• 3 min dumbbell thrusters (20)
• 2 min rest
• 3 min double  unders (70)
• 2 min rest
• 3 min 100m sprints (5)
• 2 min rest

This one was fun! The dumbbell thrusters were BY FAR the hardest part of this workout. They were just miserable. I really thought that I would make up reps on the double unders, but man, by the time I got to them, my shoulders were protesting hard. My total for this one was 196.

Sunday 2/20/2011

There are only 2 weeks left in the “I Do The Impossible” challenge and I think I am doing well the “loose body fat” goal. My pants are looser and I can see the progress on my belt, so that’s awesome. One of my goals was to get a sub-9 minute mile. My last few time trials were all in the ~10 minute area, so I thought that a 9 minute mile was a pretty good stretch.

I remember the conversation that I had with Dave about this. It went something like this:

Me: I want to set some goal around running. I hate it and kinda suck at it and we’ve never really been friends.

Dave: Ok, what do you think is a good mile time?

Me: Well, my last few times, it’s been about 10 minutes. I’d be happy with sub-10.

Dave: I think you can do sub-9.

Me: Well, if you think so, but I don’t know.

So we set the goal to be sub-9 and, yes, I had some SERIOUS doubts about that.

Back to the point. Being that we are 6 weeks in, I decided that I wanted to see where I was at with this goal. I used mapmyrun.com to see what the distance around my block was and it was, to my surprise, exactly .33 miles. I got some clothes on, got m phone and went out on the front porch. I warmed up a bit, got the timer app up, then just went.

I went like an angry mob with guns, knives, pitchforks, and rabid dogs was chasing me. I was SO afraid of missing this goal that I ran like my life depended on it. It hurt and I wanted to slow down and quit numerous times. What kept me from doing that was knowing that if I saw 9:01 on that timer, I would feel awful. I wanted to see 8:59 on there at the very least. Funny how much of a difference 2 seconds can make as part of a mental state. As far as I was concerned, a time of 9:01 was the same as 20 minutes. Didn’t count… might as well have walked.

At one point I remembered that scene from Fight Club when Ed Norton is running out of the policy station and he says “I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped batter acid. Then I ran some more…”.

When I got back to my front porch after the third lap around, I nearly fell up the stairs, and completely forgot where I had stashed my phone. After a few seconds, I found it, collapse on the outside futon, and hit stop. When I looked at the time, I was confused. Also, I couldn’t really breath… but I was so confused and happy (let’s call it conappy) that I wasn’t sure if I can run enough laps… maybe I measured wrong… this couldn’t be true.

Yes… 7:28.

This has NEVER. EVER. EVER happened to me in my life. I am amazed.