The secret supplement – Vitamin R….

….as in “Rest.” I have been back to CFOT for 2 days and I have been dialed in like never before. The past two weeks I was at the beach dealing with a flooded vacation house and kids in pools and I lifted a weight exactly once – not including clean and pressing those kids in the pool – and otherwise had a few metcon visits to CF Lewes, DE. But those two weeks away from weights were so helpful.

In early August I had my 6 month CF anniversary. Lately I have been tracking all my workouts on beyondthewhiteboard.com, and in addition to it being a good resource to look up max weights lifted and times, the main page has a handy graph that tells you how many visits per week you have had over the past few months. Prior to CF I was doing the bicep curl, stairmaster workout 2x per week. Early CF had me coming in 2-3x per week and being very, very sore. Starting in June, I see that I have had 0 weeks of less than 4 CF workouts and a bunch of 5x and 6x weeks. That is a lot.

Another few signs of overtraining included the near constant soreness of muscles and joints, the foam roller near my bed, the ice packs that have replaced the Ben & Jerry’s in the freezer, and my recent email to Jerry asking him how do I know if I am over-training? So yeah, I clearly have been overdoing it.

Today’s WOD was 100 thrusters with 95 pounds for time. Everytime you drop the bar or do a bad rep, hit 5 pull ups. I started at 2:10 after Heath did his 3^rd pass through the thursters. That way, I thought we would not bump into each other too much. I finished at 14:30, which means my time was 12:20. I was surprised how well that compared to some others. My goal was just to finish as fast as I could, duh – but more so, because it was sucking the wind and the life out of me and I wanted it to be over. Heath had a med ball for the thrusters – I am certain that this helped my time and effort. Although I knew touching it on each rep meant I was low enough, you do get a little bounce. So I am not sure how my time would have been otherwise.

But best of all, the front squat portion of the thrusters felt good. Vitamin R had cured my knee pain, and I seemed to have more upward drive to get that bar weightless. Shoulders felt strong as well – more Vitamin R. So I was able to do 15, 15, 10, 7,7,7,7,7,5,5,5,5,5 = 100 plus 12 rounds * 5 pullups.

Two other tricks – I brought a big water bottle that was in the fridge overnight. Saved trips to the water fountain. Also, I cut down on the pacing and aimless wandering around. If I was tired, I waited at either the pullup bar or the thruster bar. You see a lot of people pacing in that tired, zombie state. It wastes more time and energy than you might think. You don’t even realize it when you do it. But when you see videos of the CF studs, they do not do it at all, and I used to do it a lot.

Shout out to: Leslie and John and their new son Luke born 5 this morning. Kind of thought they would still stroll in – I mean they had 4 hours to recover. Just kidding, take some damn time off and enjoy that baby.

Look at me go!