Tag Archives: Row

Intervals and some other stuff…

Since I have been doing intervals on off days, I have been making up stuff to do on the C2. Today, I wanted to do something for a longer period of time, but still have some HI stuff in there, so I decided to get on the rower and do the following:

1st Minute, comfy pace, then every minute on the minute, all out for 20s, then comfy pace again for the remaining 40s. I did this until the clock hit 11 minutes and got 2442m. Not bad!

After that, Chad was doing OPT’s site WOD, so I joined in the first part (until I had to leave) which was:

  • 8 – 6 – 6 – 4: snatch grip dead lift with 3s negative
  • 6 – 6 – 4 – 4: ring dip with 4s negative

These were supersets and there was 2 min rest between each.

1000’s

Ewww.

I don’t know why I decided to “do some thousands” on the C2 yesterday, but that hurt. I didn’t go for max effort, just consistency. I ended up doing the following:

  • 1000m, ~4 min exactly, 3 min rest
  • 1000m, ~4 min exactly, 15 min rest… needed to take care of Brenna, she was fussy
  • 1000m, ~4 min exactly, 3 min rest
  • 1000m, ~4 min exactly, 3 min rest

After that, I decided to do the CFCP posted WOD with Victoria, scaled b/c I was shot from the rowing. The WOD was:

Every minute on the minute (adding 1 every minute), do a push up, into a squat clean, into a thruster.

WOT?

Whoever make that one up (DAVE) must have been pretty mad.

Anyway, I used 75# and made it thought 5 full rounds, the 4 of my 6th. I wasn’t really trying very hard, but still, that was terrible.

Diane and Run/Row

Tuesday, 3/22/2011

15 minutes to find max dead lift. Then,

“Diane”

21 – 15 – 9

  • Dead lift @ 225#
  • Hand stand push up (green + black bands)

Time: 6:58

I really thought I would be able to PR on the deadlift. I got 425# up with relative easy. I then tried 450# and started to feel my back hurting. Again, I had to stop short and I did not want to injure myself. Sucks.

“Diane” was ok. I debated heavily whether or not I wanted to Rx on the dead lifts as my lower back was feeling really sore. After resting for a bit I decided to just do it and pace it out. It worked out fine. The HSPU’s were too easy with the green / black bands.

 

Thursday, 3/24/2011

20 min AMRAP – 2 person team; 1 person rows until the other completes 800m run.

My buddy Chris teamed  up with me on this one. In totally, we got 4 rounds and I think 4134m rowed. Running a mile + rowing a 2k in 20 minutes is not bad at all!

WODs So Far This Week

Monday 2/21/2011

Again, this will be short. I haven’t been sleeping well, have some stuff to do, and need to get these down for future searching.

20 minute AMRAP (“Yak”)

  • 15 back squats @ 95#
  • 8 step ups (4 each leg) with 95# barbell
  • 10 burpees

I got 5 rounds plus 4 step ups. The step ups with a 95# bar on my back were somewhat scary and really just sucked the life and motivation out of me.

 

Tuesday 2/22/2011

5x 500m Time Trial – Each time must be within 10s of the last run. If not, penalty is a 1 minute hand stand hold.

Times were: 1:50, 1:48.6, 1:51.3, 1:52.8, 1:50.9

I think I gamed this one a little too much out of fear of getting a penalty, like I am 5 and getting a demerit. Instead, I focused on keeping a consistent pace on the rower, which, by my times, looks like I accomplished.

 

Wednesday 2/23/2011

3x

  • 400m run
  • 50 double unders
  • 25 sumo deadlift high pulls

Time: 19:46

The last run may have been a power walk. My mental goal for this one was to do it in under 20 minutes. It was starting to look bleak after minute 16, but somehow, I got it done. My double unders are coming along quite a bit. Now, it’s just a question of having the lungs to keep going. Most of the times I stopped it was because I couldn’t breathe anymore. I was just gassed. The SDHPs were really tough. I had to constantly remember to pop the hips.

Getting there…

As the title would suggest, I am getting there. I am talking, of course, about my back injury that happened now close to 2 weeks ago.

I went and saw a doctor a few days ago who ordered an x-ray. The x-rays came back looking normal which means that there’s no herniation, disc, or vertebrae problems. Thank goodness. Apparently it’s all muscle. I must have really done a number.

Through lots of chiropractic visits (THANK YOU, Dr. Meers!) and the PT help from the Tillmans, I am starting to feel way better. What was keeping me from walking, sleeping, smiling, and laughing a week ago is now really not that much more than some really bad muscle soreness.

I am not jumping back into things by any means, however. I am taking things really slow and trying to remain active. I’ve got another physical therapy appointment tonight, so we will see how that goes. I am pretty much leaving it up to Mike Tillman to let me know when he feels it’s OK for me to go back to normal workouts.

Last night, the WOD was “D.T.”. It’s by far one of my favorites and I wanted so badly to be able to jump in and do it along with everyone else in the class. I knew that it wouldn’t be a good idea. Plus, I am pretty sure that they wouldn’t have let me do it either. That’s the great thing about having coaches and trainers that care.

Instead, I did some slower paced rowing. I did 2 2000m rows trying to keep a 2:15-2:30/500m pace going. From over a hear of hearing “PULL HARD!”, “LEGS, HIPS, ARMS!”, and “KEEP IT UNDER 2:00!!”, it was pretty hard to back off and get it up to 2:30. My times were within about 10s of each other (9:09 & 8:55) but really, I wasn’t gunning for any particular time. I was just trying to get my blood pumping with some sustained activity.

Unplanned Suckage

This past week has been very stressful. All sorts of stuff is going on between my work life and my home life. By the time I had gotten off of work yesterday, I really just wanted to go to sleep. V had been sleeping all day and was getting ready to go help coach the 530pm class over at CFCP. She asked me if I wanted to come with her. Initially, I said no, that I just wanted to relax. Shortly after though, I changed my mind. I knew I needed to do something other than mill about the house all stressed out and agitated.

There were only two of us in the class (myself and Rochelle). Fio was planning on doing some weighted stuff, but after hearing us both bitch about being sore, he opted for a met-con. As much as I love weights, I think I need to get more met-cons in.

To warm up, we worked on rowing. We did some exercise called “6 strokes to heaven” or something like that. Basically, you get the thing spun up with 3 little pulls, then you pull max effort 6 times, do a quarter pull, the 5 times, quarter pull… all the way down to 1. So, you end up pulling 21 times maximally. We did this two times. I went 218m the first time and 222m the second.

We rested for a bit then did the same exercise starting at 10. I gassed out around 8, but kept on going. For a total of 55 pulls, I went 490m. 930m total for a warm up.

I really like this strategy because it really helps to mentally deal with rowing 500m and how much that really just sucks. It’s the same concept as doing a 21-15-9 and breaking your reps into 7’s or 3’s. I tried it out during met-con that we did which was 4 rounds of:

  • 400m run (I did a 500m row b/c I was wearing my converse and HATE running in them)
  • 21 double unders
  • 14 GHD sit ups

My time was 20:16.

The good.

Hmm. My first three rounds of double unders were better than I had done in a really long time. I was getting strings of 3-5 before I would have to stop to catch my breath or reset.

The bad.

Rows and GHDs. Man they killed me. The rows became a game of just keep going and pulling. I wasn’t even pulling hard by the 2nd round. I just had no more get-up-and-go. The GHDs were particularly challenging, but Fio helped me break them up to be a bit more manageable.

Overall.

My energy level sucked throughout this WOD. I felt like the air was water and I couldn’t breath. My head also wasn’t really in it due to all of the day’s stresses. Still though, I am glad that I got the workout in. I guess you can’t kill every WOD.

Row, row, row…

V and I did a quick endurance WOD today. Unless I can get one in tomorrow morning (unlikely, but we shall see), I don’t think I’m going to make my two for the week.

Anyway, today’s pleasure was 2-8 minute intervals with 2 minutes of rest.

Suck.

My distances for the 2 intervals was:

  1. 1870
  2. 1820

Total: 3690 (or 2.29 miles; whoa! wait… I row faster than I run? what?)

As much as this sucked, this really helped me get my stroke down (unfortunately, it didn’t get me off any faster haha). I think the next time we have some 500m’s in a WOD I will kill them.

Squatty Fran

I checked the WOD yesterday around lunch time and didn’t really have any ill feeling towards it. Really, I just thought to myself “that’s a lot like Fran… we don’t have to get the weight overhead, but it’s more, and there’s a 1000m row… we’ll see how this goes”.

So, here’s what we did last night:

  • 1000m row
  • 21 – 15 – 9 {Front Squat (135lb Rx), Pull Up}
    This took me 16:22. I think I took more breaks that I really needed. I felt like I was dragging through most of this workout. I am sure that it’s got a lot to do with how little sleep I got the night before. I hate the feeling of my energy just bottoming out a few minutes into any physical activity whether it’s Crossfit, Kung Fu, or whatever. I also felt that I was battling the soreness of the past two workouts, which just wouldn’t go away. I ended up doing my pull ups in sets of one and two at a time.
    Waaaa.
    This was followed up by 3 sets of {30 crunches, 30 bicycles}. Not for time, just do it. And I did. I have been emailing with the Black Box Crossfit in NYC. As we are heavy into planning everything involving our wedding, receptions, and honeymoon, I thought that it’d be nice to get some WODs in while in NYC. I got confirmation from them yesterday that we will be good to drop in and they have some special pricing options for just such occasions.
    Speaking of wedding and relationship stuff, today’s our 2 year anniversary! I know 2 years isn’t a terribly long time and that you old timers that read this are saying something like “stupid kid, 2 years is nothing!”. Well, you are right, but it’s a milestone for me as no relationship I have been in has made it past the 2 year mark.

We have been doing a lot of wedding planning lately and while stressful, I feel that I am finally beginning to see past the time, effort, stress, and money suck of planning all of this so that I can actually focus on marrying a beautiful, awesome woman.

Dead Row Ups

I haven’t written about it on this blog, but this past weekend we both had stomach viruses. Victoria got it from the kids in her class and had it REALLY bad. So bad in fact that she had to go to the ER really early on Friday morning.

After the ER visit, she felt a lot better. It was inevitable, though, that I would get it… which I did the following day. Mine was not nearly as severe as hers but it is lasting longer. I haven’t yet gotten to the stage where I can eat my normal diet all day every day. Things like meat and vegetable are still sort of nasty sounding at times.

Anyway. I felt better enough to go workout last night. Since I wasn’t feeling completely better I made a little deal with myself that I would take it slow, do what I could, and generally just not push as hard as I normally would.

The workout was 5 horrible rounds of:

  • 500m row
  • 30 sit ups
  • 15 dead lifts (Rx’d @ 195lbs)

I think I finished this in 25:06 (it might have been 25:04, but I don’t remember). If you read my blog, you know that like to do some math when we do long workouts like this so here goes.

Total Work Done

  • 2500m rowed (that’s a little over 2 miles, I think)
  • 150 sit ups
  • 14,625lbs dead lifted (that’s 7.3125 tons)

Victoria cracked a joke when I said I would take the sit ups slow. She said something along the lines of implying I was already doing that. Funny. Well, I took them slower than I normally go. During the warm up sit ups (2 sets of 15), I literally felt like I was going to hurl every time I sat up. I think this was a good choice.

I tried to keep a good ~2min pace on the rows. I think at one point I was in the ~2:30 area, but quickly got it back down after some heckling from the coaches.

The dead lifts were challenging as well and I tried to take them in small sub sets. They also made me feel like I was going to hurl. Hopefully today won’t be as bad and I can push a little harder.