Deth

Today was the day I wanted to push myself way out of my comfort zone to do the vault WOD. I knew I would be very unlikely to make the time goal and I was fine with that. My goal was to take advantage of the opportunity to work with movement’s I am just not comfortable with.

It involved a hell of a lot of dumbbell deadlifts. 144 to be exact and those are just not a deadlift variety that I find myself having a good time doing. They’re mentally tough for me for a couple of reasons.

First of all the toughness comes from the simple fact that my feet want to turn out, Especially my left one wants to turn out. I think it’s partially the way my hips are built. I can remember noticing it as a kid and thinking it was weird that other people didn’t. With the dumbbells to my side while doing deadlifts with them that can be a problem. I don’t slam the dumbbells down like a typical crossfitter does but even in the more controlled manor that I do it the dumbbell to the toe is not a pleasant thing. Using the 40s makes it worse because they’re bigger too.

The other mentally draining part for me about the dumbbell deadlifts is that they’re smaller than the bar so basically every rep is like a deficit deadlift. 12 at a time of those gets pretty tiring to me.

The nine dumbbells squats right after the twelve deadlifts was more taxing on my legs than I expected it would be. The squats were no problem at all but my legs just were finding it disagreeable.

For the pull ups I actually broke down and did kipping since for what ever reason I managed to learn to do it now that we don’t go into a Crossfit gym. Ninety five percent of the time I keep it to strict pull ups and lower the reps but today I wanted to do something different.

I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and push myself with movements I tend to pass on for other options that work out better for me. I knew from the time I decided to do that I wouldn’t be making the time goal and it was okay to do that today. As it turned out the WOD was much rougher on me than I expected and I ended up getting a crampy ass and eventually I called it at 21 minutes. I still had four rounds to go but that was well over the time goal and with so many more rounds of the deadlifts to go I thought I would allow myself to get too sloppy with the deadlifts and risk fucking up my back. I don’t want that to happen.

In a way I was disappointed with my performance in that WOD but I for one came out too hot in the beginning. I am also satisfied with it. Like my title says if you don’t occasionally fail you’re probably not pushing yourself hard enough. It’s just something that has to happen sometimes.

I am super thankful for the lack of micromanaging in our old Crossfit gym like I see others post about in their gyms. They gave me lots of freedom to make my own choices with weights and movements and sometimes fail. Obviously if it was a safety issue they would have done their job and stopped me but I’ve always been good at knowing when to pull weight off the bar or in today’s case just stop.

Music was some viking metal stream.