Tabata This

Once again, I seem to be fighting a cold. The symptoms aren't too bad, but I think my insane winter schedule is just not letting me recover. I took Monday and Tuesday as rest days. My wife and I are both so tired from life in general that our Valentine's Day consisted of us eating pizza for dinner and falling asleep on the couch while watching TV. This was our 29th Valentine's Day as a couple, so I guess we're "tired" of each other. Or just tired.

Anyway, after two rest days, I made it back to CrossFit last night. After the warm-up, we worked on pull-ups for 15 minutes. This surprised me, as I thought we'd be doing back squats yesterday, but the coach mixed up the weekly schedule this week. I still use assistance bands for pull-ups most of the time, so I started the fifteen minutes by doing 2 strict pull-ups (without bands) every minute on the minute for seven minutes. After that, I did negatives - I'd start at the chin-over-bar position and basically lower myself as slowly as possible. Well, it's not really lowering myself; it's more like a slow motion muscular failing. I hold on as long as I can, but my strength fails bit by bit. I did 5 or 6 negatives with about 45 seconds rest before the 15 minutes was done.

Then, we had a really fun 25 minutes, doing mostly bodyweight work in Tabata style intervals. Basically, the Tabata protocol is 8 rounds, where you go all out for 20 seconds and rest for 10. It's easy to find out more about the protocol through Google, if you want. We did 5 different exercises, Tabata style, with a one minute break between each movement:

Pull-ups (band assisted)

Push-ups

Abmat sit-ups

Air squats

Rowing

Our score for the workout was total reps for the first four movements, plus calories burned for the rowing. With the pull-ups, I started out with 8 for my first round and gradually dropped to 5 by the last round, for a total of 47. For push-ups, I started with 10, but eventually, I was only doing 5 or 6, and I did some as knee push-ups. My score was 62 here, with about 2/3 of them as strict push-ups and the rest as knee push-ups. For sit-ups, I was fairly consistent and did 66. I was amazed by my friend Tanya, who was working out right beside me as she hit 99. We use mini whiteboards to track our workout scores sometimes, and thanks to a shortage of the dry erase pens, I kept score for both of us. So, Tanya was calling out her scores to me every five minutes. (We are short of dry erase pens, because our gym mascot, Hawks the dog, likes to eat them.)

Next was air squats, and I started slowly with 13 in the first round. I eventually pushed this as high as 16 and did a total of 117. Lastly, I accumulated 51 calories during the rowing, for a score of 343. Tanya had a very impressive 371.

At lunchtime, someone had posted a score over 500. I guess being the old guy in the gym (they're going to start calling me Grandpa one of these days) means I'll never post the top scores. But, I'm there to improve myself, not "win" anything, and it was a good workout. I'll be back at CF as soon as the workday is done.