Category: Fitness

Big Hike

Today I went on a hike with some colleagues up Blackcomb Ascent.

> The Blackcomb Ascent Trails are three interconnected uphill hiking trails that meander through beautiful old growth coastal rain forest terrain from Whistler’s valley bottom to the Rendezvous Lodge on Blackcomb Mountain. Upon completion, the trails will travel a total of 6.1km with a total elevation gain of 1,200 metres.

It was definitely one of the hardest hikes I’ve ever done, but the views were worth it!

CrossFit Goals Update

I’ve been working this month on a few CrossFit goals and I’m making good progress on handstand pushups. 

Push Ups – been working on these sporadically. Probably could get 30 straight (in one set only)

Handstand push ups – I got six unbroken today, which is well on my way to my goal of 10 straight 

Handstand walk – blah. This one is hard. I have a hard time committing to the handstand and usually fall back on my feet. 

Muscle Ups – I did a ring MU with a four pound medicine ball between my feet, so I’m definitely getting stronger. Tomorrow’s WOD had 5-4-3-2-1 of muscle ups and I’m going to try to go unbroken. 

#goals

August CrossFit Goals

I have gotten pretty decent at most CrossFit moves, but I’m focusing on four in particular in August to get better.

  • Push Ups. This is one of the easiest to work on and I always feel dead after about 20 in a WOD. I’d like to be able to get 50 straight by the end of the month
  • Handstand Push Ups. Goal: 10 unbroken kipping 
  • Handstand walk. I’m pretty terrible at this now. Would love to be able to walk 20 feet by the end of the month
  • Muscle ups. 10 unbroken bar muscle ups. My current best is 4, so bit of a work to do

My plan is to stay after class a bit each day to work on a skill. 

1000 Reps

Found with workout that will be great for traveling.

*Complete each exercise 25 and repeat circuit 4 times for 1000 reps:

  • Mountain Climbers
  • Body Squats
  • Push-Ups
  • Burpees
  • Left Side Lunges
  • Right Side Lunges
  • V-Ups
  • Body Weight Dips
  • Jumping Jacks
  • Plank Shoulder Taps

First CrossFit Competition 

Today I participated in our gyms annual CrossFit competition. 

It was really hard. Yeah, really hard. But it was fun too. 

We were on teams of four, two guys and two girls. And I agreed to be on a RX team, which is basically signing up for pain 😜

Here were the four events. 

Event 1 – B17: Flying Fortress

This is a Bombers CrossFit special. I’ve done the workout twice in a scaled fashion, never the RX. 

The workout was five rounds of 17 back squats at 135 lbs and a 400 meter run. 

The tricky part was that we had to all squat in formation at the same time.  The first few rows were okay, but rounds 3, 4, and 5 destroyed my legs. 

Event 2 – Skills Competition

In this round there were four max effort events that each team mate had to do one of the following moves:

  • Max rep muscle ups
  • Max deadlift
  • Max standing high jump
  • Max L Sit hold

I was drafted to do the standing high jump. And even though it was 30+ minutes after the first event, my legs hadn’t recovered. 

I ended up getting 21 inches which was just short of 10 feet in the air. If I could have a step to approach, I’m sure I could have gotten 25+ inches. 


Event 3 – Three Legged Race

This was a partner workout of back-to-back-to-back girl workouts: 

  • Karen (150 wall balls)
  • Annie (50-40-30-20-10 double unders and sit ups)
  • Fran (21-15-9 thrusters and pull ups)

We had a pretty good strategy and I had a super human partner. 

I did 30 wall balls, then Travis did 90, then I finished it off with 30 more and Karen was finished. 

I moved straight to Annie and did 50 double unders and 50 sit ups. Travis did the next two rounds of 40 and 30 and I completed the last rounds of 20 and 10. 

Finally Travis did the hard pars of Fran, 21 thrusters, 21 pull ups and 15 thrusters. Then I did the rest of 15 pull ups and 9 thrusters and 9 pull ups. 

We got second in this workout and we were all exhausted by the end of it. 

Event 4 – The Obstacle Course

This was a goofy short event where we had to pull a sled with 180 lbs on it and maneuver around obstacles and twice pick the sled up and carry it over an obstacle.

The twist on this one was we had to all for be touching the whole time. 

Since we had super strong Travis, he picked the sled up himself and we got first on this one. 


Overall it was a fun, yet exhausting day. I am not looking forward to seeing how my legs feel the next few days!

Didn’t Last Long

I had the fastest time for today’s CrossFit workout, until the afternoon class came in. 

Five rounds of

  • 5-10-5 Shuttle Run
  • 12 Hand release push-ups
  • 24 Sit-ups 
  • 48 Double Unders

I got the first 4 rounds of double unders unbroken and got tripped up after 32 in the final round 😢

CrossFit Open

I signed up to compete in this year’s CrossFit open.

Last year I had a ton of fun, even though I had only been CrossFitting for about 5 months, I joined the world-wide competition.

Our gym does all of the workouts on Fridays and then we log our score with the official app and can see where we rank against all the other people in the world.

Here’s my ranking from last year:

Screen Shot 2017-02-09 at 8.40.42 PM.png

There were 178,538 worldwide men, so I scored in the top 42% and top 44% in the Central Regional.

My goal is to be in the top 35-40% after adding a year’s worth of experience.

4 Weeks of Paleo

Over the last few years, I’ve been a pretty clean eater.

We’ve typically eaten gluten-free, with little sugar, and the occasional dairy.

And in November, I challenged myself to eat gluten and sugar free and was successful for the entire month.

Starting today, our CrossFit gym is doing a Paleo challenge for four weeks leading up to the CrossFit Open.

Each week, we start with 35 points and for every “cheat” meal we have, we have to deduct 5 points.

We get 10 points for coming to the gym (max 30 points per week).

The winner will be based on the number of points, amount of improvement in the benchmark workout, and changes in body measurements.

A fun little challenge to hopefully make the cold Ohio winter go faster 🙂

Health Data Restored

I got a notification on Wednesday about a new challenge from my Apple Watch activity app and as I looked at it, I realized that I had no data prior to getting a new phone at the beginning of November.

It turns out that the data isn’t connected to your iCloud account and can only be added back to your phone by restoring from an encrypted backup.

I exported the last two months of activity from my phone and saved it to my iCloud Drive. Then I followed the steps here to restore all my Health data since May 2015.

Lastly I used this app to import the last two months of data back in.

It’s all there now, but I’m missing almost two months of rings in my Activity app. Definitely better than losing the 18 months of data.

100 Pushup Challenge

Last week at CrossFit, we had a workout that had four different moves and each move had 100 reps. The moves were box jumps, pushups, situps, and lunges. For me, the pushups were the by far the hardest.

Since this a move that I can work on at home, I found the 100 Pushup Challenge. Over the next few weeks (and while travelling next week), I’m going work on getting strong enough to do 100 consecutive pushups.

After doing the initial assessment, I was able to skip to week 3 to start the program. The last two rounds of 13 and 17 were tough! I’m excited to see how I progress thru July.