11-03-08: Met-Con: Rowing, HSPUs, K2Es, Box Jumps, K2Es, HSPUs and Rowing

CrossFit Garden City WoD for March 3rd, 2011
Warmup:
Dynamic Stretches

Training:
For time:

• Row 1000 500 meters
• 20 Handstand Pushups
• 35 Knees to Elbows
• 50 Box Jumps (24")
• 35 Knees to Elbows
• 20 Handstand Pushups
• Row 1000 250 meters

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It would be awesome to have more than one rowing machine...especially when that ONE starts spazzing out. (crossfit.com)

Scaled handstand push-ups. I was actually facing the other way, with the tops of my shoes on the bar (ie, much MORE scaled), but the idea's the same. (crossfit.com)

From L to R: Knees-2-Elbows, Toes-2-Bar (on rings!), and hanging knee raises. All of these inherently suck, by which I mean they are AWESOME for working your entire abdominal, back, arm and everything else possible. (crossfit.com)

Box jumps. (I can't think of anything informative OR snarky. Caption Fail.) (CrossFit Tribe)

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So, apparently Concept2 rowers can eventually start to bite the dust. Code 50 - failure to compute the drag factor. Happily, it just makes the erg reset itself... handy in the middle of the workout. Heavens forbid it should just muddle through and give you an (*) next to your workout totals, letting you know that the total numbers might be a bit wonky.  I was seriously so pissed off when it failed out at the 500m+ mark on the first row, I didn't even want to sub in something else. When it failed out in the final row around the 250m mark, I was just f'ing done.  Here's hoping a room with no budget for repairs or replacements can handle this...

Ok, so shortened rowing distances totally killed this workout (I can't really claim it was scaled, and spending a minute or two when it first died trying to figure it out didn't help), but the only other scaling I used was doing the handstand push-ups with my feet on the bar of the Smith Machine (I find more uses for that stinking doorstop), rather than up against the wall. I just wanted to experiment with it, and I can say that I'm not a huge fan, but there are more things to try (bar at a higher setting, which should scale towards full bodyweight handstand push-ups, etc.)

Other than the blinding rage, felt ok getting off the rower. Pushed through the first set of push-ups unbroken, mostly because I wasn't sure how to dismount from the bar, and didn't really feel like getting back up in a fatigued state! Knees to elbows were the usual torture, done hanging from the back of the Smith Machine. It's not a pull-up bar grip, but a metal bar about the size of a 2" x 4", so it tends to be a bit grip intensive. For the first time, I tried really hard to not touch down on the ground, or kick off the floor to assist the movement, which made it WAAAY harder. As usual, the first things to start failing were actually my wrists. Guess I need to do more behind-the-back wrist curls (snicker, snicker).

To my own great surprise, I slowly but surely plowed through the box-jumps in one huge unbroken set. Bear in mind each rep involved a jump, then a kind of slow, controlled step down (alternating landing legs), followed by a quick reset before the next jump. Basically, each one took me probably 3-4 times as long as someone just ripping through them. However, I went into them a bit gassed from the previous movements, and had as my mental yardstick that I was going to get at least 25 reps in a row... then just kept going. It was pretty awesome.

Then back to the knees-to-elbows. These were broken up into ever smaller chunks, eventually just two at a time as my wrists and forearms were screaming obscenities at me in languages I haven't heard from them yet. It was a bit scary.  Back into the assisted handstand push-ups, until my feet fell off the bar after 7 reps. I considered moving over to regular push-ups, or perhaps pike push-ups off the box, but in the end decided either of those options would obviously entail doing even MORE reps, and I didn't like that option. I got myself back onto the Smith machine and banged out 13 more reps, as fast as I could just to avoid falling off again!

After that, I got back on the rower, hoping the glitch from earlier would prove to have been a one time event. A little over 250m later, it happened again. I briefly toyed with doing double-unders (or at least working on them) to make up the time, but realized I had NO idea how many or how long to go, so I opted to consider the workout force-ably scaled by the equipment. Not the best of outcomes, but it could have been worse, I suppose. I wish I had known going into it though, I would have figured out a way to translate the distance onto the treadmill or something.

Total Time: @ 24:00