Finished my first non-fiction book today. I chose Hard Work Pays Off by Mat Fraser. Seemed like a fitting start to doing 75 Hard. It was a good mixture of personal anecdotes, training advice, workout ideas, and recipes.
I learned a lot about Fraser in the book, but would’ve enjoyed more stories! I will go back to look at some of the workouts and recipes.
It felt good to be back at the gym. It has been several weeks since I was able to go due to illnesses in the family. It was great to be back! I was named Athlete of the Month and several people congratulated me on that honor. The class was pretty full too.
We did a snatch warm up. And then got into a 10 minute EMOM with two snatches each minute working up to a challenging weight. I started with a 65lb Snatch and then went up to 70. I did it for a second round and then 75 for two rounds. Then up to 80. I failed at both attempts so I went back down to 75 and finished out the time with that. I think I failed at 2 other lifts in the remaining time. I asked Coach Jeff to watch me and he gave me some pointers which helped.
After the Snatches we had a shortish MetCon. 4 rounds for time of 15 swings and 15 burpees. I did the 35lb kettlebell and finished in just over 8 minutes. It was fairly consistent at 2 minutes per round. The burpees were definitely slow going!
It felt great to be back at the gym.
After some discussion we decided to do CrossFit workout Lynne. It is an interesting choice but will be a good one to retest throughout the year. It is a bench and pullup workout. In the cold barn we setup and started warming up. Lynne is supposed to be bodyweight bench. We agreed that none of us could do that and settled on 95# being a good weight to start with.
Lynne is 5 rounds of max effort benchpress and pullups. It is written with no time caps or other real details. We setup the rounds and progression and hit it. We did time it to get a sense of how long it would take. We were fairly generous with rest too. I started on the bench and then did pullups and then rest.
Round 1 was 15 bench 6 pullups
Round 2 was 15 bench 6 pullups
Round 3 was 12 bench and 6 pullups
Round 4 was 13 bench and 7 pullups
Round 5 was 14 bench and 7 pullups.
Round 5 was to complete failure. The rest were until I felt like I couldn’t do any more. Cory and Meg went to failure on an earlier round and kept going.
It was a good shoulder workout that was felt pretty quickly. I think we took quite a bit of rest and I was feeling muscle fatigue.
My total reps were 101. With 69 bench and 32 pullups in 24 minutes.
The whole time we were working Caleb came up with his own little circuit of assault bike, box jumps, and situps! I’m not sure he ever used the kettlebell.
At my other sister’s and using their setup. I did the lifting portion from Solcana and took the MetCon from the main site. The gymnastic work was a EMOM of hollow and arch rocks followed by some handstand work.
Then I did 10×3 front squat at 60% which was 105#. I did them from the rack and they were just hard enough that the last set hurt a little bit, but not too much.
Then the MetCon… this was posted about a week ago and I thought it was something that would be a good body weight workout. It could also be a good one to test out later. It was 3 rounds of 50m lunges and then do the number of burpees that it took to complete the 50 meters. I stepped off about 25 meters on my sisters driveway and then lunged out and back so I could do the burpees inside. It was in the mid-40’s so it wasn’t too cold. I ended up doing about 120 of each through the 3 rounds. I wanted to quit during the burpees but kept going! It ended up taking 21:47 to do it all. The first set of lunges took about 90 seconds so you can see the burpees really slowed me down! I was quite glad to be finished with it!
We had a fairly big class this morning. I was 11th to sign up, but some didn’t make it out. I’m sure the snow storm had some impact on that!
After some stretching we did a gymnastic warmup that included hollow rocks, wall walks, and wall holds. The hollow rocks are hard for me and I’m sure that improving the hollow position would help in a lot of my gymnastic movements.
After the warm-up we did front squats. The goal was to get to a heavy 4 for the day and then do 3 sets of 1-3 reps at that heavy weight. I worked up to 135, which felt pretty good for the day. I then did a set of 3, set of 2, and a set of 3 at that weight. I was focusing on trying not to collapse at the bottom. In some of the earlier sets I was getting to parallel and then collapsing to get all the way to the bottom which wasn’t necessary.
The MetCon was 5 rounds for time of 200m row and 12 overhead squats. I chose the squats at 65# which by the end was feeling quite heavy! I started with 2 sets of 6 squats on the first round and then the rest of the rounds did 3 sets of 4. I think 45# would have felt really light and 65 was a good challenge – I was the last one done. I had a couple of no reps where I dropped the bar mixed in. But I was glad to get it done! I finished the work in 14 minutes.
My legs were sore!