Destroyed but not Defeated

Monday, January 9th, 2012

I wanted to move today both to assess how fucked I am and to preserve some sanity.  I knew I neither could nor should do the Workout of the Day with burpee pull-ups, but I thought it might be a decent idea to feel out the front squat.  I took some time to figure out I could get into a good rack position, and then with C.H. and M.T. I began working towards a maximal triple.  I did 275 x 3 which felt fine, so I decided to try 305 x 3.  I pitched forward immediately on the first descent, and as I felt an angry twinge of pain in the abdomen, I decided to dump the bar and call it a day.

I don't know if I've admitted any weaknesses in my blog before, but abdominal pain is one of very few things that scares me enough to make me stop what I'm doing.  I've had an inguinal hernia already, and while that is an extremely ugly injury, mine at least was remarkably painless.  I have heard, though, that other hernias are excruciating, and I have no desire to further my expertise.

I knew that I needed to find out what erging would do to my shoulder, and I was entirely lacking in confidence.  Random things, getting dressed for instance, cause sharp pain in my shoulder, and I didn't see how I would be able to pull on the erg handle without something bad happening.

I considered doing a long slow distance row, but if I am going to race this year I'll need to be able to pull hard, and I didn't think it would make sense to do anything less than to pull as hard as I could.

I thought about doing a 500 meter sprint of course, and I quickly talked myself out of that.

I thought about doing a 250 meter sprint, and I quickly talked myself out of that.

In the end I decided to revisit one of my favorite things in the erging universe, the three stroke max.  The idea is to put the damper on ten, take three strokes, and see how many watts you can generate.

I tried once and got something forgettable, low 600's I think.

I tried again and got 660, which is not bad for me but is lower than my pr from just about a year ago,722.

I was not feeling any pain on any of these, so I decided to do one more.



I know now what six seconds of flow feels like.  I can't quite put it into writing.  My best try is like this: though I never came off the erg's seat, at the end of the third stroke I was off the erg's seat.  I was looking at the ceiling and marvelling at how comfortable I was perfectly balanced on the rail.  Normally I absolutely hate coming off the seat.  It ruins whatever I was attempting to do, and it usually hurts as well since it's the result of some spastic motion that hurls me to the rail instead of me just suddenly being on the rail.  There was nothing brutal about this one: the erg was there, and then the erg wasn't there.

It was peaceful there looking at the ceiling, but I knew I had to sit up and look at the monitor.  It couldn't be good and yet it might not be horrible.

In the CrossFit Journal article that started my fascination with the 3rm last year, it's said that the Canadian Olympic team considers 1100 watts good.

I'm clearly not an Olympian yet.

I'm Destroyed but not Defeated.

I think my arm will stay attached for the 86 or so seconds it will take me to sprint 500 meters January 21st, and if it does come off, well, that will be pretty fucking cool too.