From the Back Nine
So I’m parked out here on the patio. I must say it is a beautiful day here on the 17th hole at Southern Dunes. Sunny, about 98% humidity, not exactly weather for a WOD unless you’re completely certifiable.
Despite all good intentions to work out the week before heading off to Florida, the knee started acting cranky again and I didn’t work out except for a trip to the physio and a few short walks with the dogs. 11 hours in a plane is bad enough; with a sore knee and no class A pharmaceuticals available, I was liable to throttle a fellow passenger over the Atlantic. Better not to risk it. I planed with a pain-free, well-rested knee and de-planed without pain and sans police escort, much to the relief of my family. I’m planning to keep active once I get over the jetlag.
Things are always a bit weird the first day here. Between the jetlag and a 2 am. nosh at Burger King, the old biorhythm gets quite a jolt. I decided to call it a rest day and eat healthy food when I woke up later that morning. Manny’s Chop House is just down the road and I’m slightly tempted to go paleo for 3 weeks, but they also serve buttermilk biscuits and a wicked Jack Daniels chocolate cake. I may be nuckin’ futz but still not crazy enough to pass up Southern cooking when I can get it. Bring on the grits, bring on the pecan pie, Miss V. is back in Dixie!!! I’m off wine for the time being though. There may be places where one can find a good sauvignon blanc in this country, but Central Florida is not one of them.
Since Crossfit is “everything you suck at”, and I pretty much suck at a lot of the activities you might find in any given WOD, I’ve decided to focus this holiday on one element that requires no equipment: the situp. Keeping active Florida style means a light workout involving planks and situps, a little bit of powerwalking with the odd golf lesson in between to keep things interesting.
New Golf Shoes!!!
Raising the Bar
“Ok,”says the trainer, “we’re going to do ‘toes to bar’ today. So you jump up and grab the high bar, then swing your legs up and touch your toes to the bar.”
Yeah right. I’m barely 5’2”and unless there’s a mini-trampoline involved, there’s no way I’ll be able to jump up and grab the high bar. “No worries,” says the trainer, “feel free to climb up on a box.”I climb up on the box and my hands are so slick and wet with sweat you’d think I’d been doing dishes. I grab the bar and think, “No way.”Then the trainer walks over with the bucket of chalk, which I daub on my fingers. I grab the bar again, swing my feet from the box and have a flashback…
It is summer in Bucks County and a particularly humid summer, but sunny. I’m eleven and visiting my cousin, Sandy, who’s had a brilliant idea: we’re going on an adventure. We are going to explore the abandoned barn.
The abandoned barn lay at the end of an abandoned lane, overgrown and virtually invisible if you don’t know it’s there. We slip through undergrowth that smells like the jungle and we’re able to get into the barn through a hole rotted through one of the walls.
It is amazing inside. The roof had rotted through in places, letting in daylight so our eyes didn’t even need to adjust to darkness. The barn smelled like old hay, damp earth, and the sun. It still held a few metal milk cans, some rusty tools, lots of interesting junk..but what was really spectacular was the building’s inner framework. It was just asking to be climbed. One of us had the idea to get up to the hayloft and walk across the beam traversing the barn. It would be easy peasy..there was even a second support at shoulder height that we could hang onto, and a ladder hanging from the opposite wall. The center beam we would walk across was about 20 feet above the dirt floor.
I was halfway across the beam, when I looked down. What had I got myself into? Suddenly I was scared. I readjusted my grip on the second beam and disturbed a wasp nest. What do you do? I pushed myself back and my feet came off the center beam. I fell but for some reason, managed to grab onto the lower center beam and catch myself. Sandy stood in shock, looking up at me from the barn floor. I was bawling but she managed to talk me over to the ladder on the wall. Stung all down my right side, hanging 20 feet over the barn floor, I edged my way to the ladder one hand at a time. Finally I could toe the ladder. When my foot made contact with the first rung, it disintegrated—–dryrot. Lucky I was still hanging onto the beam for dear life. More bawling. The second rung held and I was able to climb most of the way down, and drop the last few feet to the ground.
I’d completely forgotten all of this until I was hanging from the high bar, a continent and a lifetime away from that little girl in the barn but with palms sweating and heart thumping as though I were dangling 20 feet above a hard-packed dirt floor.
The mental challenge of Crossfit is something I’m finding really difficult at the moment. After my second workout, I set a goal: to be able to do a decent burpee by May. I can do a single decent burpee now. The next goal is to get over this high bar anxiety. I think this one might take longer to accomplish.
While looking for some photos of the type of barn Sandy and I were exploring that day, I came across the work of a wonderful photographer, Josh Lohmeyer. I couldn’t use his photos on the blog, but he kindly allows a hyperlink to his website–it’s worth a look.
The Hurdle Test
I don’t know if it’s general practice, but the box where I train posts the WOD each morning. It’s a well-meant gesture, butI quickly discovered that it’s often better to be surprised. Knowing that a myriad of burpees, double-unders, or my all-time favorite, toes to bar (for me its knees to chest) awaits just throws up another little hurdle for me to surmount on my way out the door and I don’t need any more hurdles.
After my very first workout, I took a rest day. The morning of my next workout saw me in the notorious turtle position in bed, unable to flip over and put my feet on the floor. I was raised Catholic, so I did what all lapsed Catholics do: I promised God that if I could get out of bed, I would work out. That seemed to do the trick. First hurdle, known as the “turtle hurdle” cleared.
Sitting on the side of the bed with every muscle I knew I had, and some with whom I was getting reacquainted, screaming in agony, I approached hurdle # 2: getting dressed. A few more promises to God or any other deity who might be fielding emergency calls that I would work out if I could manage to get dressed, and I was dressed.
Hurdle # 3 was driving. The car has a manual shift and I needed to be able to use the clutch. The brake didn’t worry me. Brakes are for sissies. If I could use the clutch, I’d work out. I made it to the box in one piece.
I sashayed like a zombie with back problems into the building where the box is located and was confronted by hurdle #4– the friggin’ stairs. I’d forgotten about the stairs.”Ok, Missy,” I said to myself, “ hike up the big girl panties. You get yourself up those stairs and work out like you mean it.”
The friggin’ stairs
Nuckin' Futz 
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