New Toys

Jen got me a GPS watch for Christmas. It comes with a heart rate monitor and loads of other neat stuff. It's been fun to take it out on the trails and then come back and upload the data. I've never had that kind of visibility into my workouts before.

Today I decided to use it for a crossfit workout. The workout is called Barbara, which consists of the following:

5 rounds for time:
20 pullups
30 pushups
40 situps
50 squats
3 minutes rest

Below is a plot of my heart rate over the duration of the workout. I started the clock right when I started and stopped it right when I was finished, so the plot starts and stops at those instants. The workout took me 41 minutes and 31 seconds.

My heart rate for Barbara

You can clearly see the four rest periods. The sharpest peaks are at the end of the pullups; I can bang out twenty of those nonstop using the butterfly method (a way to recycle more of your energy from one pullup to the next, generally accepted in crossfit workouts). The other peaks are during the squats, as I can string together long sets of those as well. The lulls are during the pushups and situps. I have to stop several times per round for those exercises.

Fighting Through "Fight Gone Bad IV"

I've finally got some time to catch up on a few posts I've been meaning to make. This one is about something called "Fight Gone Bad", an event in which I participated back in September.

Fight Gone Bad is a international fundraising event. On one day Crossfit athletes from around the world compete in one brutal workout to raise money for Althetes For A Cure and The Wounded Warrior Project. You can find more information about it on the FGB4 website.

In order to enter you simply find a participating affiliate (a Crossfit gym), sign up on the website, and then ask your family and friends (an whoever else you can wrangle) to donate money. You then show up at the gym on the designated date (September 26th) prepared to endure 17 minutes of torture, along with the thousands of other athletes around the world who all do the same workout within 24 hours of one another.

I became interested in doing this because my friend Troy is opening a new Crossfit gym (Prometheus Crossfit), and hosted FGB4 in conjunction with his grand opening. What could be better than punishing yourself with good friends for a good cause? So I signed up, not really knowing what I was getting myself into.

The "punishment" comes in the form of a truly brutal workout. I won't go into details, except to say that if you don't think you can hurt in 17 minutes, you should try it (or any of the other benchmark Crossfit workouts for that matter), it will likely be the hardest workout you have ever done. An explaination of the workout and the scoring system is here.

Jen and I drove up on Saturday and helped Troy and his family set up some last minute things. Once everyone arrived, my Crossfit coach Martin led us through a warmup and we divided up into heats. I ended up in the first heat.

Troy's son pulls away in the warmup

I had never done the FGB workout before, but I estimated I could score about 300 points. After talking to some veterans I began to suspect that this was a bit optimistic, but I decided to go for it anyway.

Round one felt great, I hit all of my targets. Round two was rough. By round three everyone was falling apart. What had been so easy in the first round was simply impossible in the third. We nonetheless kept pushing as the seconds ticked by, straining to lift that bar, throw that medicine ball, jump onto that box, pull that rower just one more time. When we thought we could do no more we eked out one, two, three more points.

Me trying for one more push press

At the end of the proscribed seventeen minutes we collapsed onto the ground. I was straining for breath and could not focus my eyes. I learned later that I had scored 263 points. Not what I was shooting for, but a great score for my first attempt, and I knew that I had given it everything.

Carnage after FGB4

Free massages from Massage Envy afterwards!

All in all it was a great time. I'm really happy for Troy and his new gym, and it was really fun work out out for a good cause. Our team raised over $4000, and collectively FGBIV raised over $1.08 million! Pretty amazing. I'm already looking forward to next year.

The Prometheus Crossfit FGB4 team

First Muscle Up!

Holy cow, I did my first muscle-up last night! A muscle-up is an exercise where you start hanging from gymnasts' rings, you do a pull-up to a dip and end up with your arms locked out and your torso above the rings, and it's a heck of a lot harder than you'd think it would be. It's pretty standard faire for gynmasts, but a significant accomplishment for us mere mortals. It's a big milestone for crossfitters. I'm stoked!

Kicking things off...

This blog documents (or will document) my forray into ultra running. It officially kicks off, if things go as planned, with the Skyline 50K in Castro Valley, CA on August 2.

This is all an experiment for me. I ran on and off in my twenties, did some 10Ks, some marathons (3 to be exact). I had some successes that I am proud of. But it seemed like running and I were always in conflict. My marathon PR is 3:17, my 10K PR is 39:35, and training for those times was, for me, a serious commitment. It was physically and emotionally draining, though at the time I viewed that as the sacrifice necessary to be a better runner.

In retrospect I was probably doing some things wrong: I didn't know how to fuel properly, in training or in races. I didn't know a lot about current training techniques. In any case running inevitably became more of a burden than a hobby. The emotional draw began to impact other aspects of my life too.

This time I'm doing things differently, focusing far more on strength and interval training via crossfit and crossfit endurance. I don't know what the result is going to be- like I said, this is an experiment- but so far I am happy doing it.

It would be cool to see those PRs fall as I work towards ultra distance, but I'm going to try to not worry about it too much. Enjoying running is the most important thing to me right now.