August 2 Spartan Check-in

I had the entirely wrong attitude when Jeremy counted us off to start the 300 Workout on Saturday morning. I’d worked myself into an intensity tizzy. Bad move.

I excel at my CrossFit workouts when I pretend I’m eight years old:

“Hey! I bet you can’t do a hundred of those!”

“Let’s see if we can run all the way around the lake!”

“How fast can you run to the stop sign and back?”

“Ha! Try to lift THIS!”

But Saturday morning, I woke up at 4:00 a.m., half-dreaming about floor wipers and deadlifts. I didn’t feel like I was getting ready to play; it felt like a big test that I might fail. So I watched a re-run of Law & Order, then fell back into fitful sleep ’til 6:00, when I finally got up for my Weight Watchers meeting.

while I brushed my teeth, then in the car, and at the meeting, then in the CrossFit gym, I thought about the workout, stepping my way through each stage and worrying way too much about the 20-minute time limit. By the time we started our warm-up, the devil that sits on my shoulder was whispering, “You’re not going to finish. You’re not strong enough. What were you thinking, pretending you’re good enough to to the Spartan 300?”

Little bastard.

Turns out, all the worrying was for nothing. The workout was fine and even though I didn’t finish all the floor wipers with the 85-lb. bar, I’m still here to talk about it — no headline story of how I died of embarrassment or made a mockery of the CrossFit standards.

So… the not-great news:

I finished only 10 floor wipers with the heavy bar, then finished the rest with 35 lbs. Meh. I’ll do better next time.

My first 20 pushups were pretty good, but I wasn’t getting low enough after 20, so I switched to my knees. Disappointing, but I touched my chest to the floor on every one of the knee pushups, and now I know I have to work on getting lower when I do my Hundred Pushups workouts. Learning… yay!

The good news:

My jumping pullups felt like a little more pulling, a little less jumping than the last time.

I did all the box jumps with the plates on top of the box, so by the end of the month, I might actually be able to tackle the 24-inch box.

I finished before the cut-off with 18:56.

The awesome news:

Carey did my measurements twice because she thought we’d gotten my hip measurement wrong.

Hips in May: 39.5 inches
Hips in August: 34. 5 inches

Nice.

And… my waist is now 2 inches smaller, thank you very much, and my body fat percentage is down 3%. I’m ridiculously pleased to report that my body fat is now considered within the “healthy” range, and if I squint off into the distance about six months, I can see myself in the “athletic” category.

I was a little blue after the workout on Saturday, but I’ve rallied my attitude since then. Running on Sunday helped. The run itself was sorta blechy: it was really hot and we started later than we wanted to and at first, my attitude sucked. Every step was a misery, and I really wanted to stop. Didn’t care about being a Spartan. Didn’t care about doing the Half Marathon.

But right around the 1.5-mile mark, I started singing along to my iPod. My legs loosened up. I said hello to the turtles and a swan. And I was happy to be moving and trying and failing and learning.

What else is there, really?