Deth

Last night, I slept great. I did wake up to piss, then felt a twinge in my core when I twisted to flush the crapper, but it was just a brief cramp that went immediately away. Any signs of that were gone when I woke up this morning. I drank my coffee, and it never really showed up again, so I decided to give my deadlifts a shot. I’d originally been considering pushing them back a day.

It was about 8:30 this morning when I decided it was time. It was time to get changed and make the trek through the door to the home gym to get started with my deadlifts. I learned pretty quickly that I should be fine for pulling today. It was going to be a relatively heavy day, but I thought there should be no issues. The light warm up sets felt great and were quick reps. I did take an extra few seconds of rest between my sets, or at least tried to.

The final AMRAP set called for one-plus reps at two hundred and eighty pounds. I was really shocked at how easily the two reps I did were off the floor. As always, grip is my weakness with deadlifts, but it felt fine today. I only stopped at the double to keep things on the conservative side for this session. I was actually hoping I could get just one rep, to be honest.

I settled down after putting all my equipment away and relaxed a bit. Occasionally, I think putting everything away after lifting is the most annoying part, but it has to be done. I thought about what I wanted to do for a WOD today. Today’s programmed one didn’t spark joy for me, and I was thinking I wanted something a little longer and a little less intense.

I looked at the endurance WODs that they have for something that’s not super complicated with varying intervals. I understand why they’re done that way, but they’re just not super feasible for me.

I wound up doing one that was eight rounds of rowing for five hundred meters, then resting for two minutes. That’s just the kind of thing I wanted to do on this day. I took the rows at a more moderate pace. All I wanted to do was simply move and get my heart rate up without killing myself in the process. I wasn’t wanting that today. I love going all in with intensity, but every so often it feels good to go a little slower.

Even rowing at more moderate paces like today used to really kill me, but it doesn’t anymore. That’s what I kept thinking about while I was doing it. I used to get my heart racing and get winded after five pulls. Now, I used to have shit rowing form, so I killed myself to just move. Even though my timing is off currently, it still doesn’t take nearly as much out of me. The best two things that I did to improve my rowing were to row hundreds of thousands of meters a few years ago. All of those meters were done without my feet strapped in, so it taught me better form. To this day, I don’t strap my feet in. I used to overpull and move the rowers backward. Without my feet strapped in, I can’t do that, or I would wind up on my ass on the floor.

I don’t hold it against them, but our old Crossfit gym didn’t teach proper rowing form early on. Very few Crossfit did. At that time, the Crossfit way was to put the damper all the way up to ten and pull as fast as you could. I learned otherwise from watching YouTube and seeing the athletes from Crossfit Collective. For them, the row would be more of a warm-up while people from the other gyms were killing themselves and still finishing up their rows after Collective’s in local competitions. Later on, the owner of our gym was more into better rowing form. He was stuck on not having your heel come up for some reason, which is natural for me.

Music for the WOD was Nevermore