Early last week, I had designs on sneaking off to the gym Friday night and using the open gym time to take another shot at the benchmark WOD “Fran.” Well 7 hours of walking and alternating carrying my 35 and 60 lb kids at the NC State Fair eliminated any desire for that, so I made the time on Saturday to get in and exercise.

I went to the 9am session, while Erin and her father took the kids to Lil Bit’s Toddler/Parent dance class. It worked out well. Grampa got to watch Lil Bit dance. Apparently,the teacher even invited Whirlwind to participate by letting him sub in as Lil Bit’s partner, so he didn’t have to sit around and watch a group of 3 year old girls dance. He got to actually take part.

In the meantime, I dashed out to the Saturday 9am session. Dave was leading the workout. He guided us through progressions with both PVC pipes and bare bars practicing various stages and elements of the snatch balance. I found it really helpful to go through this warm up just to refamilarize myself with the lift. Dave pointed out that I have a tendency to actually hold the bar too far behind my head on this lift. So it was very useful to be reminded of that before hauling any weights around.

The Strength Session was:
Snatch Balance:
6 lifts 1 rep each
I think my notes/spreadsheet have gotten out of whack somewhere because I could only find a single reference to the snatch from previous WODs and the listed weight of 140lbs sounded VERY high to me. so I didn’t go into this WOD with a clear goal in mind. It was going to be a “by feel” sort of day. When I got to the gym, I started off with 95 lbs and decided after the first lift that it was doable but ugly. I resolved immediately to maintain that weight until I got it right. I’ll be working that weight for a while. I did four lifts. My notes that correspond to each of the lifts are: “tentative,” “better/cautious,” “shallow” and “ok” respectively. For the 5th lift, I attempted 105 lbs. It was really ugly, but I did lift it. I went back to 95 lbs for the final lift. Needed to end with a hit. Not thrilled with the way it went, but I’ll continue to work on it.

METCON
In teams of 2
21-15-9

Row (calories)
Jerk (155-Rx/75-Rx)
Box Jumps (Rx 24/20)

I partnered with a young woman named Kris. She did her portion of the WOD Rx. I did not. I worked the jerk at 75lbs and shared the 20″ box for jumps. I experimented with a 95 lb bar before the METCON and realized that was too aggressive. I might have been overly cautious scaling back to 75, as I believe I did all sets of the jerk unbroken.

I certainly could have done the box jumps on the 24″ box, but I wanted to really concentrate on form and intensity this day. The 24″ box requires too much time resetting at the bottom of each jump right now. Using a 20″ allowed me to work speed while also allowing me to focus on getting off the floor fast and completely standing up the jumps on top of the box.  While I got through all of my sets unbroken, I added a couple of reps during the sets of 15 and 9 because there were just a couple of jumps where I only landed on the front half of my foot and fell off the box before completely standing upright. In the end Kris and I finished the WOD in 14:58. I always enjoy the partner WODs. Having a team mate definitely adds a bit of an extra element to the intensity factor of a workout. I certainly don’t want to let someone else down.