Tough Mudder training is going strong. And you have to be strong to get through our Tough Mudder training! If you have ever done a Tough Mudder event, or any obstacle race really, you would know that you rely heavily on your team. Everyone has their individual strengths to help out others and weakness needing the help of the rest of the team - me for example - pulling up! Put I could push and run all day long.
Training this weekend, you very much needed your team members to get you through it! Part one - run down the hill (it was a long hill) but you didn't really need the team to get through that one. Part two 100 pull ups - partner assisted when you couldn't pull anymore. While one partner was pull-up'ing the other was doing triceps dips...yay tag team! Partners then moved onto 100 toes to bar and burpees, and finally 100 partner plank push ups.
The third and final part - piggy backing back up that nice long, slowly inclining hill. Taking it bit by bit, getting out what your could before you swapped with your partner. Half way up the hill we stopped for a casual 100 body weight squats before running the final half of the hill.
Very much a team orientated workout, brings out the best in everyone and a great sense of pride and accomplishment. Always love sharing the pain with my team mates!
There have been plenty of fitness challenges going around at the moment. The Squat Challenge, Plank Challenge, Sit Up Challenge, Push Up Challenge, Bikini Body Challenge. I did even see a Nap Challenge. I have done a couple, but as with anything, I get bored quickly, so two 30 day challenges was enough for me.
Until this one came along. A friend pointed out to me the July 31 Day Handstand Challenge which was organised by Niche Crossfit. The idea was to post a photo of your handstand every day for 31 days showing your improvement and your creativity, the winner at the end of the month then selecting a charity to donate all the entry money to. Keen!
Though with my current wrist situation handstands are out. Elbow stands however, are in! After getting the approval from the organisers for my modification, we signed up. We are seven days in and seven hand stands (elbow stands in my case) down.
Personally, I haven't seen too much improvement with my ability to balance yet, but I feel that having to do it on my elbows is putting me at a little bit of a disadvantage because the wall is further away from where my centre of gravity should be ideally. I need to stop being so reliant on the wall and try and hold my position on my own. But for me it is more about being involved due to my current limitation.
It has been a great initiative set up by Niche Crossfit and has brought people world over together to handstand and raise money for charity. I am thankful for a good challenge!
This is a meme that has been created by a social media gifted friend after our first gymnastics adventure. She went in with two goals...hands stands and kipping pull ups. Me, still very much limited by my wrist I took whatever was thrown at me that I could do without putting my hand flat on the ground, which was really not much. But I was there more for my own entertainment.
The idea behind our adult gymnastics adventures? To get use to being upside down, to develop upper body and core strength to help us with Crossfit, work on flexibility and plyometric strength...really just to be better at everything we try. But also, for fun and to laugh hard at ourselves when we fall on our faces.
Week one and as expected I was limited to forward rolls, elbow stands, head stands, trampoline and back saults. The other two I was with tried their hands at hand stands, forward rolls into hand stands, handstand walks and pull ups.
Needless to say we all have a very long way to go, but for a rainy Saturday afternoon we had a great laugh.
I posted a couple of days about being thankful for being a strong swimmer when I went to watch the RX guys take on the swimming WOD at the recent Primal Throwdown. I also mentioned that it's been a while since I was in the pool, but never the less, I decided to have a shot at the WOD anyway!
And I chose to do so on probably the worst possible day. I was teaching boxing earlier that morning and after a massive clap of thunder, I hear the tell tale whistle from to poolie, getting everyone out before the lightning strikes. Luckily when I finished boxing the pool was back open, but the wind and rain were hanging around.
The set up at the gym I'm at wasn't ideal for what I was about to attempt, but normally people don't jump off the rower and dive straight into the pool....I do weird well. So I got through the WOD in 8min 10 seconds. But some errors were definitely made!!
For starters, the row killed me. And I didn't realise until I was almost through the 50 calories that I had it set on 10...idiot!! Error number two - rope choice. Normally I like to use a speed rope, which I don't personally own and in the past have borrowed a friends who is currently in Vegas. So instead stole one off a much taller friend, key word being tall. The rope as too long. I tried a couple before I was wet and tired and got some out and through I would be fine, but had my normal rope there just in case. Thank god! After about 20, I was sick of the speed rope hitting my toes and changed over to my normal rope.
Final rookie mistake, and whether this was because it was cold outside -throwing a thin rope at numb feet when your tired and stop jumping as high, or just the fact that I wasn't wearing shoes but oh my lord my toes!!! Both ropes kept either hitting right at the edge of my toe nails or onto the tops on my feet and it flippin hurt!!!! So I admit I took a mid WOD pause and ran to grab my shoes and quickly chucked them on...my cold numb painful toes just couldn't take it any more.
As expected the swim was the least of my worries, despite having not plunged into the water in a very long time, its not something you forget that quickly.
It's safe to say I have learnt from my mistakes and give me a couple of weeks (maybe a session or two back in the pool) and I will have another crack at it!
Today was the final day of the Primal Throwdown, Perth's biggest and probably most well known Crossfit competition. It was finals today, with the top 30 athletes in each category taking on the third day of competition and another 3-4 WOD's....big weekend for some!
We got to see some of the states best try their luck at Pull Ups (beginner), Chest to Bar Pull Ups (intermediate) and Weighted Chest to Bar Pull Ups (Rx), Deadlifts, Squat Cleans and Thrusters as the final knockout round before the top 10 of each category was announced to take on the Air Bike and Snatches to determine the winners.
Looking at the WOD's from yesterday, the competition seemed very much do-able, even through I have really only been in the 'true' Crossfit world for a couple of months, the training I have done in the past year has been somewhat similar. The beginners workouts looked easy, the intermediate - challenging but definitely achievable. That was until finals day. This was when the shit got real. Had I have entered the comp and done intermediates, which would have probably been a good call for the first day, I would have been in massive struggle town today!!
But watching these guys, of all levels, bust their arses to finish first, beat the person next to them, finish the workout or just get out another pull up was inspirational and makes me want to get more and more into this sport and try my hand at this type of individual competition. Just gotta sort my wrist out.
Watching people commit 100% to the event and give it there all tells me that this is the kind of thing I should be doing, as this is how I tend to go at anything I try...go hard or go home. Having the chance to watch this event has got me going even more, makes me want to sort out my injuries well and truly and get back into giving my all.
Today I got my butt well and truly kicked...and was not really prepared for, or expecting it. I was entered into the Spartan Hurricane WOD this morning which had very much crept up on me this week. I got home after a massive day at 10pm last night and had nothing at all ready to go for getting up at 5am on my Saturday morning to go for a 4 hour workout...off to a great start.
The Hurricane WOD was organised by the Spartan Obstacle Race race director as a preparation event leading into the tough 14km, 30+ obstacle race one month later. Not really sure what I was getting myself into, and having a friend who was an ambassador for the event, I signed up a good month ago. When my wrist was not looking so bad off and I thought I would be out of the splint and able to do push ups. I also though, yeah I'm fit...how hard could it be??
At 6.30am it was less then 2 degrees out on the oval we were huddling on. There was ice on the grass and 70 people standing around trying to decrease their exposed body surface area in anyway possible. It was beyond cold and my fingers were numb, I thought. We got started with a bit of a jog, and couple of dynamic movements and then split into our groups to start our first of six 30 minute workouts.
Round 1: 3 minutes of varying level isometric push up hold (which was a squat hold for me), 500m of 10 running strides/5 pushups and finally 500m bear crawl. If I thought my fingers were numb before, it was nothing on how they felt by the end of this round. They were fat, freezing, uncontrollable and painful!
Round 2: Fartlek Running. 30 seconds sprint followed by varying rest intervals to work on your speed endurance. It was nice not to put the hands on the icy grass in this round so by the end of this one, fingers had finally started to thaw.
Round 3: A 90 second circuit including ergo, plank taps, scorpion crawl, plank side stepping with push ups, commando crawls and roll ups. All body weight exercises that were tough with a capital T.
Round 4: Obstacle race prep. the idea was to fatigue the CV system first and then make your legs work. So it was a 20m shuttle run with increasing increments every minute. I was the last one in with one other lady and we managed to get out 11x20m runs in 1 minute. Stuffed by the end. Time to work on the legs - lunges, wall climbs, running crawling and partner band pulls....legs sufficiently gased!
Round 5: Power Bags. Clean and pressing, situp and passes, walking lunges, running with the bags...all stuff I've done before. Was very much in my world with this one and made it through no problems at all.
Round 6: ZUU. Finally made it to the last one! I have not had much experience with ZUU before, and after this not sure how quickly I will be rushing back. Not because I didn't like, it but because it was flipping hard!!! It uses movements that are based on primal movement patterns such as Froggers, Gorilla's, Chameleons and almost any other animal you can think of. By far the hardest of any of the previous rounds...yay for having it last!!! My quads have never been as much on fire as there were throughout that final thirty minutes.
By the end of the 4 hours, totally stuffed. Very dirty, sore and tired....all signs of a great day and a great arse kicking. Hardest thing I've done in a while!
In preparation for the Three Vs Three Showdown, my usual high quantities of cardio and interval training were put on the back burner while I was very quickly trying to turn myself into a somewhat strong crossfitter, concentrating solely on strength and technique...not something my body was use to.
But with the time pressure now off my strength gains, I can get back to running and burpees which is just in time for the new Tough Mudder season. The team I go through this 20km obstacle course with take the race very seriously. There is month of preparation that goes into it, starting off with two high intensity interval sessions per week for around 4 months leading up to the day.
Week one of Tough Mudder training began the week before the showdown. So the three of us didn't train with the team that day...it would ruin our gains as our Hulk would put it! But with the showdown now done and dusted, it's back to Tough Mudder for me. And honestly, this first week has been a bit of a shock to the system. It's not like I have done zero cardio in the past few months, but thinking about it, the 6 weeks before the 5 weeks prep for Crossfit I was pretending to be a half marathon runner - so everything was based around running long distances.
So I would say it has been a good 12 weeks since I did solid High Intensity Interval Training like this. It was tough! But awesome. I have definitely missed this kind of training and the associated feelings of your lungs being on fire and not sure whether your going to be able to get yourself up after another chest to ground burpee.
Yeah, it's good to be back!
This is the lock screen on my phone at the moment. So I see it more times in a single day then I can count. Most of the time, it is exactly what I need to see, and can apply to any situation.
There is a lot of change going on in my life at the moment, and most of it is a change for good. I have been given a new career opportunity which can potentially bring my love of helping people and my passion of health and fitness together to be what I consider to be the ideal work environment for me. That could be legendary.
The Crossfit comp is done so its time for a training change up also. Time to work out what is next - what do I want to do, how and when do I want. One big set back though...my wrist. If you've followed me in the past you would know that I was in a wrist splint for 6 weeks after a boxing injury. I came out of the splint 3 weeks before the comp and was expected the stiffness that comes with being immobilised for such a long period of time to last for around 2 weeks. Following that I would know where it was sitting. And it's not sitting pretty I'm said to say.
So at the moment, life is on pause. Until I get the results from my MRI on the weekend the career change is on standby, planning my next training goal is on standby. If my arms are out of action for a couple of months...Oxfam 100km walk it is, if not, back into the Crossfit world. Will I be starting the new job in 2 weeks or 2 months?
But then I see my reminder - Be Legendary. There are set backs and massive obstacles in my path at the moment, but I am on the path I want to be on. Combining what I love, there is no choice but to be legendary! How are you going to Be Legendary today?
