Tag Archives: Mile Time Trial

WODs for the Week

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:

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.

Running

1 Reply

No other physical activity destroys my spirit and makes me feel worse than running. None other.

I have SO many negative emotions that are attached to running. Because of these emotions, it doesn’t matter if we are doing sprints, 400s, miles, 5ks, or whatever. It doesn’t even matter to me if I actually do well! To me, it’s always horrible. I could PR on something and in my head, it’s still horrible and most likely, I really hated every second of it.

By now, I am SURE you are asking, “but why? why on Earth would you feel this way!?”. Come along, friends.

Let’s back up for a moment.

Picture if you will, the years 1992-1994, a 12-14 year old Bryan in 6th-8th grade. Picture me really fat and out of shape. My diet sucked, I watched a lot of TV and played a TON of video games. I wasn’t really active.

Imagine a cocksucker asshole gym teacher* that made us “run the mile” once a week or so. For most of the kids in my grade, this consisted of something like 7.5 relatively easy laps around the schoolyard. You’re a kid and have boundless energy. What’s a mile? Nothing more than a means for the cocksucker asshole gym teacher to tire a bunch of high energy kids out, really. I watch the Dog Whisperer. I know what’s up.

As you are probably guessing, it was not really easy for me. In fact, for me, it was anything but. It was lots of walking, pain, trouble breathing, people looking, staring, talking, making fun. All in all, it was a horrible experience that made me want to slit my wrists. Every. Single. Fucking. Time.

I would always be last or near last to finish, which meant that everyone had to watch as I attempted to jog my fat ass around the schoolyard. The longer I took, the longer they had to watch. Middle school kids aren’t very encouraging, nor was the cocksucker asshole gym teacher. In fact, he was quite an asshole and cocksucker to boot. Eventually, I learned how to feign sickness/dizziness so that I wouldn’t have to suffer this humiliation. I would rather kids think I was sick than make fun of me while I tried to accomplish this task.

Fast forward to this morning. A beautiful “winter” morning here in Cedar Park, Texas.

I got to CFCP this morning in relatively good spirits for the New Year’s Day WOD which was:

Bottom-to-bottom Tabata Squats – scored by lowest round count. Mine was 10. Feh.
1 Mile Time Trial in 10:24. We just did 4x on the 400m route.

It must be said up front that the people at CFCP are awesome. They are encouraging. The coaches are in no way anything at all like my cocksucker asshole gym teacher and the people that go there are in no way like the kids in my middle school gym class. Yes, I completely understand that all of this negativity is in my head. All of it. It’s brought on by me and can really only be done away with by me.

The idea for this WOD was to do the bottom-to-bottom squats, then the mile with no rest I between. Technically, you *could* rest if you really wanted to but the clock for the mile started as soon as the squats were done.

Anyway, so I start running and like 90% of the people in class just go on past me. I am used to this by now. Everything hurts. I can’t breathe. I feel slow, huge, and overall, just bad and loserish. On top of it, my headphones keep popping out of my ears and frustrating the shit out of me. I have to fight with myself to just keep going. I didn’t take any walk breaks, but my pace is terribly slow. In fact, I may as well be power walking with some AM/FM stereo headphones in the mall.

Eventually, people that started at the same time as me are LAPPING me. At this point, all of that negative chatter starts and I am again reminded that I’m the fat, slow kid. Depressing, really. As I come in for my final 200m, I can hear people encouraging me to finish strong which is great. I still feel terrible. Just awful inside.

Clearly I need an attitude change. I recognize this. Pulling that off though, is a whole other story. It’s a monumental feat for me to remain positive in these situations. Clearly, the things that happened to me during that dreadful time of my life are still affecting me. Sad, yes, true, very much so. I can say, pretty much without hesitation or thought, that those were the worst 3 years of my life.

I am really looking forward to this “I Do The Impossible” challenge starting. I really need something to get my positive energy and momentum going. Apparently, my coach “has a plan” for me and all I have to do is “comply”. I can’t wait to see this plan and get to it. While I am incredibly proud of my friends and the progress that they have made, I am sick of not being the one making progress. We shall see.

*I hate this man and would happily beat the ever living shit of him on site. No, I don’t care if he’s like 70 now. He had it coming.