James can be reached at TwinFreaks CrossFit, where he is an owner and trainer. James coaches barbell lifting classes and CrossFit classes. Contact him by email at james@twinfreakscrossfit.com or by phone at 720-204-2631.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Pulling Sumo and Rowing, Rowing, and Rowing

Yes I missed a whole week of posts. It was a deload week, so I screwed off and lifted some light 5's.

Now that we're caught up, Sunday was press day.

45 x enough
105 x 3
120 x 3
135 x 3
155 x 1 felt very heavy
155 x 1 I held my breath the whole way out of the rack, and it now felt light so,
160 x 1 which is probably a PR and also felt light so,
(165) x 1 the press is known to be a hard lift to make progress in, and 2011 is also a year, so I was done here.

Monday, as always, is dead lift day. Sooner or later everyone plays with switching to a sumo dead lift. I've thought about it many times over many years, but now having had L5 shoot across the room, I have decided I have nothing to lose except my current very low 1rm. A week or two ago, AB had 280 on the bar, and that same little voice that sometimes tells me to lift with no warm up told me to try to pull it sumo. Oddly enough I did, and it worked. I haven't tried a sumo dead lift in several years, and at that time I struggled mightily to pull 225. I suspect squatting wide carries over to the sumo dl fairly well. I figured I might as well try it for a full cycle and see what happens.

Clean:
95 x 3
115 x 3
135 x 3 I was happy with my form on all these. I took my own often given advice and stopped here before my form broke down and my body only remembered how to do it ugly.

Sumo DL feet at about 35", toes out some but mostly forward which seems sort of natural:
215 x 3 I almost fell over backwards here; I'm also working on pulling with my shoulders behind the bar.
250 x 3
280 x 3
315 x 1
345 x 1 which is a post L4/L5 disaster pr, not bad for my first try.

I can probably gain quite a bit out of optimizing my stance, but I was surprised how well this worked just doing what felt right. As some sumo stylists had told me, I felt no strain in my back at all. The weirdest part was that the sticking point seems to be at the floor; as soon as the bar broke off the floor, it just kept going and got easier all the way up unlike my conventional dead that stalls off the floor but under the knees.

And then there is rowing. I had a very disappointing 2000m trial 12/24 finishing in just under 7:30. I sincerely believe that physically I can do much better, but the mental part of the game is killing me. When it starts to really hurt, somewhere around the halfway point, I start to disassociate and think about anything except rowing. That slows me down, and when I become conscious that I've disassociated, it gets even worse. I've started to meditate with a view to improving my focus and learning to sit through the pain of rowing. The preliminary results are encouraging. I got a big PR 500 today, breaking 90 seconds. I followed my strategy almost perfectly taking a three stroke start, dipping the split time into the 1:20s before settling in at 1:30 on the tenth stroke. At 300 meters I started falling apart, but I was able to gather myself by chanting "focus, focus, focus," which took me to my sprint range of 150m where I surged and finished at 1:29.4.

Fucking beautiful.

Now I just have to teach myself to do this on a merciless course four times longer.

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