Thursday

Strength moves today were snatch balances and front squats. We also did Russian twists. You sit on the ground and hold your feet up in the air while holding a 25 lb weight. Then twist to each side and touch the weight to the ground. We did 60.

The workout was 3 rounds of:

  • 15 wall balls – squat, pick up medicine ball, and stand while throwing it high against the wall
  • 11 ring dips
  • 3 rope climbs or 15 pull ups – I did the pull ups.

    • I did it in 8:33.

    Saturday

    I got my own fancy schmancy jump rope to try to learn to do double unders. That is when you jump once but get the rope under you two times. Why do I care about that? They show up in CrossFit workouts often. If you can’t do double unders you need to do 5 times as many single jumps. So if you need 50 double unders in a workout, you would need 250 single jumps. I’ve done them a few times but not consistently. The problem is that the only place I have to jump rope is in my driveway and that started up my shin splints. I have to find another option.

    Sunday

    Usually we get to pick our own workout on Sundays but not today. Saturday was the local marathon and lots of people ran it. One of my workout partners (the tiny one who has to sit on my feet with a dumb bell) ran the full marathon. After I got past the obvious “Why are you here this morning?” question, she said, “You know what I was proudest of when I finished? When I crossed the finish line I saw my mom and yelled, I didn’t have any Powerade at any of the aid stations! I didn’t lose any [Whole Life Challenge] points!” She said that she was running by two of the trainers. One took a sip of Powerade without realizing what it was. He spit it out but she was yelling, “Minus one point!” at him for a while anyway. Those guys did the half marathon but stopped every few miles to
    work out – you know, ‘cuz a half marathon isn’t enough. They did double unders and handstand pushups and burpees and still finished in 2:10. Crazy.

    So for a warmup we did a half mile run. It was a group run so we had to stay together and go as slow as the slowest person. I figured that had to be me so I went out and went fairly easy. When we got to the turn around point there were people lagging behind. I was too fast. That has never happened in the history of the universe.

    Then we did a partner workout. It was 26 minutes long in honor of the marathon. The first person did a 100 m sprint, then bear crawled about 40 yards (run with your hands and feet on the ground), and then did 5 body rows. While they are doing that the other person is doing a wall sit until they are done. My partner and I did 15 rounds. The wall sits ended up being about 1.5 minutes each time. I actually didn’t mind them so much but the bear crawls were a killer. The trainer (one of the half marathon/workout guys) was calling out landmarks that runners would have passed if each minute was a mile. I thought I was going to cry when he said that (only) 4 minutes had passed. But it went better the farther along we went.

    Tuesday

    We started with pull ups and dips. They were supposed to be done with weighted vests on but since I can’t do them with just my own body weight, I just worked on that. They had people holding our feet on the dips so we could get better range of motion if we didn’t have the strength to do the whole thing ourselves. That helped.

    The workout was as many rounds as possible in 7 minutes of:

  • 11 burpees over the bar – do a burpee, then jump (step, to be honest) over your weight bar and then do the next burpee
  • 11 power snatches – bar from ground to overhead. I did 38 lbs.

    • Each workout has a suggested weight to do if you are a beast. The woman’s weight for the snatch was 65 lbs. I can do 65 lbs. I actually said, “I think I may try the Rx.” Thank god I rethought that. Sure I can do 65 lbs. I can do it a few times. I can’t do it 11 times after burpees. I was dying on 38 lbs. I only got 3 rounds finished. That’s a workout that is a lot tougher than it reads!

    I’ve been playing with some more Whole Life Challenge approved recipes. I’ll be posting some yummy stuff later today.