photo by Steve Penland

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Cindy Rx

Today is twelve weeks and one day since my hamstring surgery, and I think it's time for a good old-fashioned WOD post. You know, the posts filled with tales of epic efforts, colossal clumsiness, and frantic flailing.

In other words, the fun ones.

I've been going to CrossFit about four times a week since I got sprung from the recliner in mid-October.  I have a Personal Training session with Coach Jason every few weeks and he gives me three workouts customized to my current state of "leglessnes."  I do each workout two or three times, and then we meet again and I get new workouts (and once in a while, I'm lucky enough that the regular WOD is upper-body only and I can actually join the class that day.  Those are great days.)    I've already done each of my newest workouts three times, though, and the short holiday week is precluding another PT session to update the plan.  So today I was wanting to do something different, something new, something that might give me a benchmark of where I am at this stage in my recovery.

Enter "Cindy."

Cindy is one of the CrossFit "Girls" WOD's, which are benchmark workouts that all CrossFitters do the same way (they're named after girls, not a ladies-only thing).  They are a way to track your progress and  to compare yourself to yourself...or to compare yourself to others, if you're into that sort of thing. I've done a few benchmark "Girl" WOD's--Nancy and Annie and Jackie and Fran come to mind--but I've never come close to doing one of them "Rx"--that's CrossFit lingo for doing a WOD as it's written, and not modifying anything to make it easier ("scaling."  Yes, it's a whole new language.  Try to keep up). Anyway, scaling has pretty much been my middle name since I started CrossFit.  But when I was pondering what to do today, I remembered Cindy--and I realized, with surprise, that I could actually do this one Rx now.

 Cindy consists of doing as many sets of 5 pullups, 10 pushups, and 15 air squats as possible in 20 minutes.  I've been doing pushups and pullups every day after my workouts so I can actually do a reasonable number of them now.  I just recently became able to do "real" (below parallel) CrossFit squats again, and I've actually done 100 of them, slowly and carefully and in sets of 15-30, a couple of times this past week.  So Cindy was looking like something I might actually be able to do.

I ran the plan by Coach Tyler, who was coaching the class this afternoon.  I didn't want to do Cindy down in the Personal Training room where I usually do my custom workouts because the pullup bar in there is too high for me to reach without a box and I really didn't want to be climbing up on a box for every set of pullups.  But I didn't want to interfere with the class by working out in the main room either...but fortunately the pre-Thanksgiving class was small and there was plenty of room for me to do my thing.

So, as the class prepared to do squat cleans (just watching them makes my hamstring hurt), I set my watch timer to 20 minutes, put on the grips that I use to keep my palms from ripping, and prepped my whiteboard.  I wrote 6 sets of "5's" for the pullups, "10's" for the pushups, and "15's" for the squats.  I hoped to be able to do five rounds, but figured I'd write down an extra one in case I underestimated myself.  Then I'd just erase a line through each number as I completed the exercises--saving the time it would take to uncap a marker and write a number each time.  It's all about the planning...

The first few sets were uneventful. I was able to do the sets of 10 pushups unbroken, and the squats, although excruciatingly slow and careful so as to avoid any unplanned hamstring stretch, were fine.  I did the pullups "strict"--without the body-swing "kip" that makes pullups easier by adding momentum.  It's not that I have anything against kipping...I've just never really been able to do it.  I've been practicing all my pullups "strict" these last 6 weeks to avoid injuring my hamstring with random kip-like flailing, so I figured that's how I'd do them in Cindy.  And I did...for three sets.  I've done three strict pullups in a row a couple times, and two in a row many times, but that wasn't happening today.  Today I was pretty much limited to sets of, well...one.  And after the first 15 pullups, it became clear that no more "strict" pullups were happening today, at least not without a nice long break...maybe 10 minutes or so.  Which was clearly not a good plan since I only had about 13 minutes left.

So for set four, I tried kipping pullups.  Or at least, my mostly-ineffectual flailing-crappie version of kipping.  It wasn't pretty (fortunately everyone else was knee-deep in squat cleans and thus missed my depiction of a dying fish attempting to to a pullup), but it gave me just enough extra momentum that I could continue on with the one-at-a-time pullups.

And so I did, for three more sets.  By this time I was having to break the pushups into sets of five, and my hamstring was suggesting that perhaps we'd done enough squats now.  When my timer rang at the end of 20 minutes, though, I was delighted to have done 7 rounds and 23 additional reps...in other words, 40 pullups, 80 pushups, and 113 air squats.  I was also delighted that, for the first time since August 25, I ended a workout flat on my back on the floor trying to catch my breath. OK, I'm sure part of the breathlessness was due to lack of fitness rather than extent of effort...but I'll take it.

 Rx Cindy and Post-WOD Roadkill Pose...it doesn't get much better than that.


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