Thursday

It is the second week of the CrossFit Open workouts.  They are announced on Wednesday nights at 8 PM.  I happened to be on my iPad at that time and told myself not to look.  I looked anyway.

The workout is as many reps as possible in 10 minutes of:

  • 5 shoulder to overhead presses at 75 lbs
  • 10 deadlifts at 75 lbs
  • 15 box jumps at 20 inches

I immediately started listing the problems.  My PR for an overhead press?  About 75 lbs.  Was I going to be able to do it over and over?  Probably not.  The deadlifts at 75 lbs is super light for me so that was no problem but I can’t do real box jumps.  For some reason I can’t jump off both feet at once.  I can step up or I can jump with one foot but not both.  Since these are judged workouts I figured that wouldn’t count.  So, 2 of the three exercises are a bust for me.  Great.

Luckily for me it turned out that they were allowing step ups onto the box as long as the move started with both feet on the ground and ended with both feet on the box.  I ended up doing split jerks to get the weight overhead.  That’s where you have the weight at your shoulders and sort of jump up and land with one foot ahead of the other while pressing the weight overhead.  It uses your whole body to get the weight moving.  I had one no rep where I couldn’t get my arms straightened and I dropped it once but I did much better than I expected.  I managed to get 4 rounds and then all the lifts again and 4 box jumps for a score of 139 reps.  I have no idea if that is good or not since we were the first to do it and we have no comparisons.  One person did 154 because she’s strong on overhead lifts and could do them faster.  The other person did 137.

Tuesday

Today we did push presses and back squats.  After the last workout with all the 75 lb lifts I knew I had to up my weight on the push press.  It is a shoulder to overhead press but without the split jerk that I was doing in competition.  I ended up doing 80 lbs which is a new PR.  We did 5 sets of 3 presses.

For the back squats (weight behind your head and then squat 5 times) I ended up doing 135 lbs which was a new PR too.

The workout was one that didn’t seem so bad when I read it but then they explained what they actually meant and it got much tougher.

We had to start doing pushups.  Every minute on the minute we had to get up and do three overhead squats.  That means putting the bar overhead and squatting.  Then go back to doing pushups.  Keep repeating this until you do 150 pushups.

The key to this was the first minute.  I got 38 pushups in before we had to stop.  I was doing them on my knees so I could go pretty fast.  (By the end of this workout, everyone was doing them on their knees.)  After the squats I only got 10 done before it was time for the next set of squats.  I was just using the 33 lb with no weights too on my trainer’s advice.  The problem wasn’t squatting.  It was holding the weight overhead while your arms were numb from the pushups.   Even with that light weight I managed to hit myself in the head with the bar while putting it down once.  I’m going to give myself brain damage working out.

I finished in 8:19.