Rest Day

It is nearly two months since my last post and what can I say? Time flies. 3 days a week you can find me at the 5am CrossFit Hampton Roads class. On Friday mornings I have been doing a Body by Science workout in my apartment's fitness center. And on weekends, quite tired of spending so much time in an urban setting, I have been taking the hounds out to explore the various parks and trails nearby. So my lack of posts is partially related to the fact I been burning the candle at both ends and at the end of the day I crash pretty hard.

Visiting the beach on a cold, windy day.

Weekends are technically my rest days, but rarely is there any rest involved. However today I've decided to just kick back and do nothing. It has been nearly 3 months since moving to Virginia and I am starting to get some semblance of a routine, so expect more activity on here.

Rainy Day Saturday

This morning I stopped by my CrossFit gym to watch Fight Gone Bad 6. Having just finished the intro courses as of yesterday, I could have joined in on the fun. Unfortunately I had a prior commitment... I will get to in a bit. The first wave started at 9:15am and I was quite impressed with both the WOD as well as the camaraderie. Main site CrossFit explains Fight Gone Bad:

In this workout you move from each of five stations after a minute. This is a five-minute round from which a one-minute break is allowed before repeating. We've used this in 3 and 5 round versions. The stations are:

1. Wall-ball: 20 pound ball, 10 ft target. (Reps)
2. Sumo deadlift high-pull: 75 pounds (Reps)
3. Box Jump: 20" box (Reps)
4. Push-press: 75 pounds (Reps)
5. Row: calories (Calories)

The clock does not reset or stop between exercises. On call of "rotate," the athlete/s must move to next station immediately for good score. One point is given for each rep, except on the rower where each calorie is one point.

My intro course covered all of those moves, and other than the box jump, I think my knee could have handled it. It was good to see so many people pushing themselves for a good cause.

Preparation.

Wall-balls begging to be thrown.

So... as I mentioned above, I had a prior commitment that pulled me away from this event. Last weekend I spoke with an interesting group of people, oyster gardeners. I was intrigued... with minimal cost and effort, I could raise my own oysters. Besides helping clean the water, I can grow hundreds if not thousands of these delicious bivalves. The class I went to explained how to build floating cages, sold oyster seed (called spat), and pretty much explained everything I needed to do. The type of cage I went with needs to be flipped every two weeks, which is totally doable for me. My friends have property about an hour away with long pier in a great area for this kind of thing. I know because there is a commercial oyster harvester not a half mile away from this place. I purchase 500 of these baby oysters and put them in one of the floats. In about a month they should be large enough to split them between the two floats that I built. If this goes well, in the spring I will make more floats, buy more spat, and reap the benefits.

Passing the Cyprus inspection.

Top view.

This pier has history. It is one of two training mistakes I made when training Shaman. The first was, when crate training, using his crate as punishment. This made his crate a negative place and causes quite an ordeal when he needs to go there. The pier... well let me say that as a dog owner, a naive one at the time, and being near water, I presumed all dogs would love the water. No, that is not the case. I tried to get Shaman to jump off the pier and swim. I had no idea if he could swim and wanted to know. I would sprint down the pier with him and I would jump off the end into the water. He would stop short and look at me like I was stupid (I was). I would call to him, hoping he would join, but he showed no interest. With the help of friends, we tried many things. And everything failed. He had no intentions of joining me. So here is where the mistake comes in. While still in the water, I asked one of my friends to push him in. If he could not swim I was right there to pick him up and help him. He went in, big splash, and power swam right back to the shore. He could swim! I was so very proud. He walked down the pier back to where he was pushed off and looked at me. I called to him, hoping he would jump, but no go. I had him pushed again. Same thing happened, he swam right to shore and this time did not go back on the pier. Ever since then, he avoids the pier. So walking down to check out the oyster cage, I am joined by Cyprus but not Shaman. When I say the pier incident was part of two training mistakes I had made, I should also say that fully regret ever doing those things. I hope Shaman forgives me.

In closing, I realize in the last two posts Shaman has had no photo presence, so here he is:

Proof that Shaman came near the pier!

And their dinner:

Chicken quarter, bison, and opah (fish).

CrossFit, My First Impressions

This past weekend I did my very first CrossFit workout. My older brother is a member of CrossFit Frederick and I joined him early Saturday for a holiday themed WOD at their facility. The WOD was as follows:

1. L-Pullup
2. Man-Makers
3. Box Jumps, 24"/20"
4. Ring Dips
5. Air Squats
6. 1 pood (35#) Kettlebell swings
7. Mountain Climbers (4 count)
8. Dumbbell Clean
9. Push-ups
10. Thrusters (45/30#)
11. Burpees
12. Glute-ham Sit-ups

Similar to the Twelve Days of Christmas song, we would do 12 sets with each set adding a new exercise and working our way back through the other exercises. So the first set was simply a single L-Pullup. The second set was 2 man-makers and a single L-Pullup. By the 10^th set I was beat, arms quivering and breathing fairly hard. The last two sets were killers and I was delusional trying to remember what to do next and keep proper form. It felt really good to finish and even today, two days later with every muscle aching, I am glad I pushed so hard.

I was thoroughly impressed with the gym. The instructors were very knowledgeable, were very good at being drill sergeants, and worked with me to make sure my form was correct. Having never tried many of the exercises, I really liked how they showed each exercise and how to scale it down before we got started. They also explained what muscles were worked by the different exercises between frequent interruptions by the group joking around. You could see the camaraderie among the members and see how they were there to have fun. Once the WOD began it was all business.

I can definitely see the appeal of CrossFit and if there was a gym close to me I would be a member without question. I am hoping to make morning CrossFit sessions a part of every visit with my brother. We followed our workout with a large breakfast of pastured eggs, bacon and scrapple I brought with me. My knee held up surprising well, so we followed breakfast with a long hike in the nearby mountain range with our dogs. Good times.