Paleo Challenge - Day Three

Not again. He's not going to write about this stupid challenge again, is he?

Well, it's pretty much the focus of my fitness regime and my diet right now, so it's what I have to write about. I could write about politics, but that would cause my limited readership to go somewhere else, I imagine.

Yesterday, I ate a salad with some tuna for lunch, after having only coffee for breakfast.

After work, I went to CrossFit and had a great workout. After some stretching and foam rolling, we started with work on Snatch Balances. Because I'm still dealing with some mobility issues that affect my overhead squat, and the bottom position of overhead squats the same as the finishing position for the snatch balance, I focused more on overhead squats. I did 7 sets of 5 OH squats, at 45 and 55 pounds. That's pretty lame, but a few months ago, I couldn't do this lift at all due to mobility problems.

It's easy to look around the room and see that my older body is nowhere near as mobile as many other bodies there. I also know that my lack of mobility (42K+ running miles in 25 years probably had something to do with this) affects my skiing adversely. So, I'm taking the mobility part of CrossFit very seriously and I'm making progress.

The MetCon (Metabolic Conditioning) portion of the workout was a spin on the Tabata protocol. Instead of doing just 4 minutes though, we used two lifts and did 8 minutes. We started with deadlifts and then moved to medicine ball slams. Basically, it was deadlifts for 20 seconds, rest 10 seconds, med ball slams for 20 seconds, rest 10 seconds, with a total of 8 rounds.

The prescribed weights were 225# for deads and 20# for the med ball. I knew I could do the workout at that level, but the goal was to do lots of reps. So, I opted for level 1 and dropped my deadlifts to 135#.

I did a total of 150 reps, with over 80 of them being deadlifts. I remember the first time I did a 135 pound deadlift. I looked up the date and it was June 19, 2007. That day, I was very happy that I'd made enough lifting progress to play with the "big wheels", the 45# plates in the weight room. (I've since gone on to do a 355# deadlift, but that's another story.)

Last night, I did over 80 reps at 135#. I don't feel sore today.

For dinner, I ate roasted chicken thighs and a salad with a homemade vinaigrette.

I got a good night's sleep and had some eggs for breakfast this morning. This afternoon, for the first time since I started CrossFit, I'll do a CF workout four days in a row.

Tomorrow will be a rest day with a weekend of teaching skiing approaching.