Prison Break

I went to the 6:30 PM class on Monday night for this WOD. Normally I attend Tuesday and Thursday mornings, but my quarterly performance review was first thing Tuesday and I thought it best to show up on time. My boss is punctual. The effect of this, however, is that I knew what Coach Clarke had programmed for the day. I like my morning workout because I prefer not knowing in advance what I’m going to do. I like to show up, my gear bag packed with both running and weight lifting shoes, and tackle whatever lies ahead. In this case, I knew for hours that I would be doing bench presses and pull-ups for one hundred reps. That gave me a serious case of the butterflies.

I decided to Rx this weight and see how it would go. I knew from experience that 135lb was light for max bench-pressing, but doing 100 reps will take the starch out of your gym shorts pretty quickly. I promised myself that no matter how long it took, I was going to hang in there and finish what I started. I chalked up and did some presses with the bar to get my shoulders warmed up. I love the feeling of the barbell. It’s not easy to explain that to someone whom the iron bug hasn’t bitten, but I know that you Gentle Reader can appreciate what I mean. It’s perfect.

There is that tense moment when it’s time to turn on the clock. All eyes watch as Coach walks over to it.

“Everyone ready?”

Gulp. “Yeah, ready!”

And with that, it’s on. I pump out ten smooth bench presses. Without a break, I do ten pull-ups and then reward myself by marking the two sets on the whiteboard. Little things like that begin to mean a lot. Two more rounds go by and my train is pulling into the station a little slower each time. The exercise I feared the most – the pull-ups – are in fact the easier of the two. I was worried about tearing calluses and brought my sport tape but my hands are holding up. By the fourth round, I have to rest midway through the presses and shake out my arms. Luc wrote in his blog that failure is abrupt. Absolutely! Four clean presses and then failure on the fifth. Just like that. I learned to listen for the warning sign. Just a little wobble in my right shoulder and I knew the next rep would fail. I stopped, shook my arms out, and then pumped out a few more. My tactic is dead simple. Work to ten reps no matter what before moving to the other exercise. Ten rounds of ten reps. Easy to remember when you’re head is in delirium.

By the seventh round, I am pressing in groups of three, or even two reps. Each time a small break to shake out the arms is all I need to press out a couple more. It’s very tough going. Psychologically, the bar can defeat you if you focus too much on its weight. I instead focus on my goal – pressing it up! My hands hurt now and the pull-ups are uncomfortable. What is most unpleasant is that my back still hurts from the WOD on Saturday and as I drop to the bottom of each pullup, it stretches my lats until I feel exquisite pain from it. Hauling myself up (with a kip) actually feels better.

During the last round, it happens. I just can’t lift that weight up and it hovers there above me looking more and more like an anvil from a Saturday morning cartoon. Slowly it wins over me and it sinks to my chest as I fight to keep it from crashing into me. I’m pinned there like a butterfly. I can’t lift it up off me so I roll it down to my waist and then sit up. I gently take it off and place it on the mat. Bastard. I finish my last set of pull-ups, also broken into sets of five, and walk over to the whiteboard and write my time of 24:27. Booya!