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.