Brock gets Rocked

[Brock Jones]

So I've decided to start a log here. I'm browsing the forums all the time anyway, so I might as well do *something* productive while I'm here.

30 years old / Male / 5'6" / 146 pounds

I've been doing CF fairly religiously for almost a year now at CrossFit Eastside (w/fs) in Redmond, WA. In that time, I lost about 30 pounds and have started to slowly gain mass (intentionally). I'm currently up about 10 pounds off of my low.

[Brock Jones]

Wednesday: 4/9/2008

We did an interesting "musical chairs" type workout last night. The gym was haphazardly scattered with various torture implements including kettlebells, plyo boxes, rowers, climbing ropes, bikes, med balls, d-balls, push-press, etc. Every round started with a group 400-meter run (everyone tethered together by holding onto a length of webbing). Once the group got to the door, everyone would race to a station and start working for 1 minute for max reps/calories. There weren't quite enough stations for *everybody*, so if you didn't find a station quickly, you'd have to wait out the round.

I ended up doing:

• 24kg kettlebell swings - 29 reps
• 20lb medicine ball cleans - 27 reps
• Row - 21 calories (ouch)
• 42" box jumps - 16 jumps (ouch)
• 75lb push-press - 32 reps
• ab-mat situps - 30 reps (abs in pain from L-pullups the night before)

After that, we messed around for a bit with the sleds. My calves were already on the verge of cramping from the box-jumps/push-press, but I got conned into trying a 200-meter sled push. The sled was loaded with 40kg of weight and I took off. At almost exactly the halfway mark, my right calf suddenly cramped. This is significant only because I've never - in all my life - had a muscle cramp. Holy crap do those hurt. I rolled around on the grass for several minutes drooling and muttering in pain before it finally started to unlock. Needless to say, I didn't finish the sled push.

I'll be going in tonight, but I'm going to try and avoid anything that even remotely affects my calf because it's super-sore today.

[Brock Jones]

Last night I decided to take it easy on my sore-*** calf, which I'll admit became a little easier when it became apparent that everybody else was doing Fran... I don't hate Fran or anything - I just really want to be at 100% if I'm going to give it a shot and I definitely wasn't there.

Instead, I did a light warm-up and then a bunch of upper body work.

• 21-15-9 pull-ups & ring dips (I was going to MU to each set of dips, but after the first set of pull-ups I was struggling to get even one MU)
• 4x8 70kg bench press (funny how much harder these are after dips)

Not exactly a scorcher of a day, but I think I may be needing a couple lower-intensity days to let my body recover a bit. My right leg has felt 'weird' for most of a week now. There's a strange 'full' feeling at the bottom/medial side of my quad, my groin was really bothering me doing left-handed overhead dumbell squats on Tuesday, and then my calf cramped on Wednesday. In my mind, these are all fully independent, but I suppose it's possible that they're related somehow.

[Brock Jones]

It was squat night last night.

6x3 Power Cleans @ 62kg
3x5 Back Squat @ 95kg
5x5 Overhead Press & 59kg

I tried stepping up to 70kg on the cleans -- managed to get a couple in, but they were ugly and getting uglier with each rep, so I backed off on the weight and tried to focus on form and being aggressive. I have a tendency to chicken-out on the second pull when the weight gets heavier - which is astoundingly unproductive.

The squats felt good. I still had a little bit of knee dive, but not nearly as much as I've had in the past. I think I'm finally starting to grok squats - particularly at the bottom. I used to be scared of going all the way to the bottom of the squat and really letting the hamstrings take the load. Lately, I've felt really solid at the bottom, which makes coming back up a lot easier. I was working at the rack with Sean, Russell, and Aaron - who were all doing 3x5 at 150kg or better, so I was definitely the tinkerbell of the rack. I'd at least like to have my work sets be bigger than their second warmup sets :P

Overhead presses were good, but I'm a sissy. I should have gone to at least 60kg, but I did 59kg (still a 2kg jump from last time) instead. 59kg went up pretty easily, so I did 5 sets of 5 instead of the prescribed 3 sets.

[Brock Jones]

Tonight was a good-ol' chipper

• 4 rounds of:
  • 8 Calories on the rower
  • 8 dumbell thrusters (35lb dumbells)
• 40 jumping pullups
• 20 75lb push-press
• 20 box jumps (20" box)
• 10 80kg deadlifts
• 10 ring dips
• 20 24kg kettlebell swings
• 40 situps
• 800 meter row

By the time the kettlebell swings hit, I was pretty much ready to die. The 800 meter row at the end felt like it took an eternity. I finished in right about 17 minutes (forgot to write down my time!). Some of the crazy folk were under 13 minutes, which I consider to be fairly impressive.

[Brock Jones]

My driver's license says that I'm 5'6... It has said this since I was 16. There are very few circumstances (that occur outside of a courthouse) that would cause me to admit that 5'6 is an outright lie. Doing Karen is one of those circumstances. I'm 5'5, I weigh 146 pounds, I have short arms and a big head. It's almost as if I was engineered *specifically* to suck at wall-ball.

Enough with the *****ing. Tonight was my first attempt at Karen as Rx'ed. I did a scaled version once upon a time back when I started, but I scaled both the weight and the number of reps, as it nearly broke me.

Karen : 150 wall-ball shots for time
Time: 10:23

I really wanted to break 10 minutes - but I really started falling apart at the end. My form for wall-ball sucks. Between my short arms and my fat head, I have a hard time bringing the ball down to a good 'resting' position while squatting. The result is that I end up holding the ball in the air in front of my face every rep - which is a *huge* waste of energy.

Ugh... Karen blows. End of story.

[Brock Jones]

Tonight I got to do a workout that I've been looking forward to for a while. It's one that's always intrigued me because there's whiteboard space at the gym devoted to it, but only one name up there. It's pretty straighforward: a 1 mile run + 21 bodyweight bench press. The catch is that it's not for time. In order to get your name up there, you have to complete it in under 10 minutes. Tonight Drew and I wanted to give it a shot and we both nailed it. We came in from the run neck-and-neck at a little under 6:30 and shot through the bench presses. I finished in 8:19. Drew finished about 10 seconds before me, but I was happy just to have done it.

After that, we did an 800m run + 15 BW bench press and then a 400m run + 9 BW bench press. All-in-all, it was definitely a good workout, but not a killer. I don't know about Drew, but taking it a bit easy was definitely nice after Karen yesterday.

Next time I do the mile run + BW bench press, I think I can shave quite a bit of time off. I was being a little conservative on the run, because I didn't want to be totally gassed for the bench press. Once I finished the run, though - I found that I recovered really fast and there really wasn't too much impact on the bench. I think I could shave at least another 30-45 seconds by being more aggressive on both parts...

[Brock Jones]

Worked out at noon today between various errands and appointments. I've got a lingering (mild) shoulder injury from Karen that feels like a small pull in my anterior deltoid, so I had a requirement of no pressing movements today. With that in mind, Aaron set us up with:

• 1 mile on the bike (level 20 - max hill climb - naturally)
• 1600 meter row
• 1 mile run

As usual - the bike and the row were mentally demoralizing an physically draining. The run didn't feel too bad, although my legs were definitely fatigued by the time the run started. I ended up finishing in 21:19 - which is honestly faster than I had anticipated, so I'm satisfied.

[Brock Jones]

Monday = Squat day

• 97kg x 3x5 Squat
• 60kg x 3x5 Overhead Press (yay - new plate day!)
• 64kg x 6x3 Power Cleans

Squats felt good overall, but my chest fell slightly on a couple reps, causing my butt to shoot up a bit out of the bottom. I need to work on keeping better torso rigidity.

My right shoulder was basically immobile all weekend with a small/deep muscle pull (Dr. Google seems to think it might have been a mild strain of my coracoacromial ligament(w/fs).) My shoulder feels about 85-90%, but I was still a little nervous about it when I started warming up for the overhead presses. There was a *tiny* bit of discomfort lowering heavier weight, but no major pain and I was able to hit all my reps, so bonus! Hopefully I won't be writhing in pain and regret tomorrow.

As usual, warming up for cleans felt pretty good, but my working weight of 64kg wasn't explosive enough. I have a mental block on cleans - particularly when the weight gets interesting - that I really need to figure out.

[Brock Jones]

Shoulder was still bothering me last night and the workout was Fight Gone Bad. I probably could have handled the push-presses, but there's just no way I'm going to do any more wall-ball shots until this shoulder thing fully heals.

So instead, I did 1 minute intervals on the C2. I didn't keep track of the totals, but I did 9 intervals on a 1 minute on/1 minute off pace. My slowest interval ended up about 260-270 meters, I think. I'd guess that my total was around or just over 2500 meters.

It really sucked. 1 minute is pretty much exactly the length of time I can sprint on an erg. Man I suck at rowing.