I sincerely apologize for taking so freaking long to update this thing. I know your days (or, in the case of Lauren Krensky nights) probably felt empty without some hilarious musings penned by yours truly. Seriously, my bad. In the interest of time (I've gotta run to Mitch Bradford's show at the Blind Pig....kid's legit, check him out) I'll make this short, but I'll probably write about my latest session tomorrow night, so keep an eye out for that.
SESSION TEN
Well, my tenth session was freaking terrible. I had Jeff, and as you may or may not recall, it was on a Saturday morning at 10:00am. The night before I had a grand old time at Rick's American Cafe, and ended up going to bed around 4:30am. For those of you not familiar, Rick's is basically a dirty basement with sticky floors where 18-24 year olds (and me) go to freak dance on one another and drink way too much. Rick's is a hotbed for bacteria and bad decisions, and everyone seems to love it and be willing to wait in line for hours to get in. So ya, rough wake up after all that.
On the way there I pounded a five hour energy drink and hoped for the best. I arrived about five minutes late, but luckily Jeff was in the middle of another session. I raced through my warm-up, and then went over to where Jeff was.
I went through the same exercises I always do, but was expectedly terrible at them. Jeff noticed this immediately and looked me up and down like an airport security guard scrutinizing a minority. He quickly identified the stamp on my right hand. "Rick's last night, huh?" I nodded, ashamed. Jeff was not impressed by this. He proceeded to assign me 30 overhead presses, basically saying fuck you for going out last night.
After I finished he told me to rest for a hot second. I jogged over and grabbed some water. I was of course sweating profusely at this point, and could smell the alcohol cascading out of my pores. Like I said, many a bad decision has been made at Rick's.
After I came back over Jeff told me I was going to be doing my baseline test to see how far I'd come compared to my first session. I was fairly sure I was going to do significantly worse given my state, but I figured I'd give it my best shot.
The baseline test involves rowing 500m, 40 squats, 30 sit-ups, 20 pushups, and 10 pull-ups. I started out rowing and straight sprinted out of the gate. Generally a solid pace for me is about 1:50 but I did it in 1:30. Jeff was yelling at me the whole time saying I was going to burn myself out but I of course didn't listen. Sorry I'm not sorry.
After rowing was over my legs felt like jello. And I had 40 squats in front of me. Lame sauceeeeee. I started those and quickly realized they were going to be the hardest part of the test. I went pretty slow and had a few stops in the middle, but I made it through. Jeff screaming constantly about how much of a bitch I was definitely made it easier to power through.
After squats I burned through 30 situps. These were also difficult since I was tired as balls and pretty much never do sit-ups. After I finished, I did 20 push-ups with pretty shitty form (Jeff told me as much, but luckily didn't make me start over) then I ran to pull-ups.
For me at least 10 pull-ups is a pretty good amount, even doing the cross-fit kipping ones. I tried to get some momentum swinging and went as fast as I could. To my surprise I made it through without stopping, which I was pretty proud of.
"How'd I do?" I asked Jeff after I'd finished. I really had no idea what my time was going to be, but I knew he'd probably be pissed if it was worse than my baseline.
"4:44....not too bad, it's tough to drop a lot of time once you get under 5:00." I had started at 4:59 and that was doing jumping pull-ups, so I was pretty happy with 4:44. Not doing backflips or anything like that, but satisfied given the situation.
SINCE THEN...
I've gone to I think 4 classes since I finished session ten (check out ya bout at the 2:01 mark), and I gotta say I'm pretty much hooked. It's for sure gonna be tough to schedule it consistently with no trainer breathing down my neck, and the shame and embarrassment of being worse than girls is still pretty awful, but I feel like the pro's far outweigh the con's at this point. Plus I started a freaking blog about this shit, so I'd say I'm pretty pot committed.
STATUS CHECK
I'm coming up on a month doing CrossFit and I feel like this is as good a time as any to do a quick status check. First off, I'm really glad to have something like this to do outside of work....great distraction from the weekly grind, and it makes me feel like I accomplished something at the end of the day.
I also like that it's hard, and that I suck at it. That's kind of weird to say, but I feel like the chances of me plateauing are a little less since I have so much room for improvement. They do a great job of mixing things up and keeping us guessing, and I feel like that's gonna make it easier to stick with it. Make no mistake, getting beaten by Kansas shorts in strength exercises still sucks, but I feel like I'm slowly coming to grips with the fact that (gasp!) I can't be awesome at everything right away.
I feel kinda weird mentioning this, but I've lost about 10 lbs since I started. More importantly, I feel like I'm in a LOT better shape then I was a month ago. I leave each workout feeling like I got better and stronger (except sesh 10....I just felt like shit after that one) and I feel like at this point the sky is the limit. No Brad Pitt Fight Club abs yet (sorry ladies) but my clothes fit a little better, and I do have a little more confidence.
Above all, I love having a goal to strive for. My boy Jared turned me on to a book called The Art of Fielding. I'm about 60 pages in right now, and it's awesome. It's about a kid who goes to a D3 school for baseball (remind you of anyone????) and just busts his balls to turn himself into an absolute stud shortstop (.....maybe not so much). It made me nostalgic for the days back at DCD (Unity4Life) when we'd longtoss in the snow and take BP til our blisters made it so we couldn't hold the bat anymore. Nothing could ever replace that feeling of brotherhood, togetherness, and just generally caring more about that one thing (winning state) than anything else in the world. But at this point for me this is about as good as I'm gonna get.
Alright, that's all, gotta run, thanks a lot for reading and more to come soon I promise!
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