Reflections

“Freeballin”

4 Rds for time of:

10 Wall Balls

Run 100 meters with Med Ball

10 Med Ball Cleans

Run 100 meters with Med Ball

10 Med Ball Jump Overs, over and back is one repetition

Post times to comments.

IWC Challenge ended a few weeks ago, but the real challenge is continuing on into the future and making a lasting change.  We have read different perspectives from the winners, and here is one more from Lara.  (Who is one of many new people added to the Athlete Profile sections btw:)

The IWC challenge was a period of mindfulness and learning, but i really didn’t have a plan. It was truly all over the place. For me it really started a little before. Just as we were talking bout starting the challenge, I went on a crossfit cert and Diso suddenly announced that he was going to run a marathon, that he was not training for it, and he believe he was prepared and that i should join him. Typically, without really thinking about it i simply said ok. It seemed that he believed I could do it, so it would be dumb for me not to believe in myself, so i should simply do it. I only really committed the week of, and at this point there was a lot of hype about the challenge starting right after. To be honest i was terrified of the marathon. Its timing was awful, just before sectionals, and I had already committed to the frogman challenge (which similarly Zeb just suggested i do and next thing i knew I’d signed up). All this magic was supposed to happen with the effort of increasing work capacity, well this crossfit mania week needed all the magic that a proper diet, proper recovery and honestly just self care could get it. I was finally training for a purpose and my decisions about training, resting and nutrition meant something, and there it was, my first week of really tapering and foam rolling and prepping myself for a week of competition.

The lesson i learnt is that muscle pain is not a fair indicator of need for recovery. I was sore for perhaps one day after the marathon, but my work-output was effected for a good 3 weeks. I know that running such a distance takes a toll on the body, but it was the strangest thing to experience to such a degree. So I had to acknowledge that even when rest days did not feel necessary, that i was impacting my ability to perform and they need to be taken seriously. I find it easy to do, do, do, but not doing meant not doing.

At this time I also really started taking the postwod without fail. The label says take twice daily, so i took it twice, sometimes three times, I probably even took it four times. That was a disaster!!!. I had mentally decided postwod was good, so chose to ignore the fact that I am allergic to whey protein. I started feeling so ill, inflamed and my skin reacted really badly. I’m not sure how far into the challenge this was, but i got so frustrated with the nutrition aspect, it was so hard to focus on eating all paleo and then i felt so sick that i just wanted to lie in bed and never see the light of day, so i said screw it and just ate all the chocolate and yoghurt and puddings i could get my hands on. Needless to say, that did not feel any better, lasted a few days, and then i had to wind myself off the sugar loading again.

So back to a proper diet, i decided it was too mentally taxing to be so strict in a household where one roommate has a cereal diet (no joke, we have an entire cupboard designated to her cereal boxes and there are more than 10 different ones at any given time), and the other roommate just cannot resist the icecream. So when i did cheat, I cheated really badly, so i incorporated my own little cheat foods. And suddenly a trendy gluten free foods phase started. It didn’t take long before i was suddenly feeling awful because the food was just as sugary and terrible as the real sugar loaded candy stuff, just didn’t taste as bad and i could feel better about having it. So that had to stop. Nutritionally what worked best for me was when i finally decided to stop buying fruit. Once i no longer had that as a readily available snack that just initiated the craving for sugar i found that i was cheating a lot less and quite suddenly my body just got stronger.

The other big thing that changed all started with the sectionals. I felt my weaknesses become so exposed, and it was not longer acceptable to have weaknesses, i had to address rather than avoid the things i was bad at. And so when i was hanging around bally with my pointless free time when clients cancel, i started really practicing the things i could not do well. The other aspect of the sectionals was that when being judged, every rep had to count, poor performance meant no rep. So suddenly i started making a point of that, actually redoing reps in amraps if i felt they were shoddy. And I’d say these were the biggest influences on my increased work capacity.

The impact the marathon had on my body certainly attributed to my increased work capacity, i was very sluggish on the first christine, so i may not have done as well in the end without that handy-cap, but nevertheless the IWC challenge forced me to incorporate more awareness into my training and continue to build myself.

Thank you everyone at Paradiso for making it happen, and especially Zeb for taking away reps when i did not complete the movement properly. i will especially remember you standing next to me on the ring dips on a random workout when i was the only one who came and we had way too many to do. If i did not reach a full locked out position it simply didn’t count, i kept struggling and not matter how long it took me you simply expected me to complete it without the help of band. That expectation that i could do what was expected of me has motivated me to want to do whatever could be asked of me RXd.