Back to slightly less irregular posting

The week started like weeks normally do with a Monday which started with a WOD that consisted of rowing, ground to overhead(35kg) and HSPU. Ground to overhead was done right after rowing which means that the legs were full of lactic acid. That resulted in my shoulder to overhead going from snatch to clean and jerk to muscle clean and strict press ending in stiff legged narrow grip snatch. Yes, it looked like crap. And I've never received that many complaints about my technique. But it worked...

The day ended with gymnastics where we did a lot of hanging from the bar and ended with 14 minutes of the horror seen next to this pic....

I went with 80 kilos which felt heavier than normal probably because of the gymnastics the day before. I finished in 19.07.

In the evening we did a swim-wod: run 800, swim 100, run 300, 40 slamball(30kg) ground to overhead, run 300, 40 burpees and swim 100. I would've preferred more swimming and less running, but this was fun.

30 minutes of OTM work. None of the things were really heavy but, due to too many people in the box, the transitions took a lot of time creating a lot of stress.

Did some squatting afterwards. First attempt at 100kg front squat. Miserable failure.

Ended the day with some mobility training. First time I managed to get my palms to the floor without bending legs...

I replaced T2B with T2R to preserve some semblance of grip. I started with 50kg barbell, but had to lower it to 40 halfway. Lunges is probably my weakest barbell technique. I guess I need to do more of those...

Ended the day with a running wod. First we "jogged" to Hästhagen and then we did 15 100 meter sprints. My legs still(3 days later) haven't recovered...

Midsummer-WOD contained a bit of everything including some swimming. We scaled the weights (60 for HPC and 50 for everything else) and scaled some of the gymnastics and it still took an hour but it was a lot of fun... I am becoming a fan of those really long wods.




















The weekend started with some snatching. I worked up to a max (which didn't go that well) and then did Isabel which went fairly well. 9.44 is 2.5 minutes faster than last time.

First competition!

A week ago I participated in my first competition (well, actually third, but this one was the first "public"one) and I opted to have my birthday on the same day.

The good news is that we didn't come last. The bad news is that we came 27th out of 30. It was also a great learning experience.

Things I learned:

• I have a tendency to not extend my hips all the way. That happens both when squatting and when lunging. That gave us a couple of no reps. 
• I have a tendency to leave my elbows too far back when doing hang power cleans. That gave us some no reps as well.
• Buck furpies is a completely valid emotion.
• I can do thrusters @40kilos at a reasonable speed. That makes me feel like doing Fran which implies that something is seriously wrong with me
• I would've felt better if weights were heavier and events longer...

I also learned that there is a lot of room for improvement in most areas

In other news:

I went with 55. Unfortunately Squat snatch deteriorated into a power snatch followed by overhead squat after a few reps which sucks since if I was going to do that I could've gone with 60. 

I am much happier with the second part where we went with 45 and managed to get done with less than 10 seconds to spare which is awesome.

This was actually a lot of fun despite presence of burpee pullups. Somehow I feel that burpee pullups is a less horrible movement than a simple burpee since the addition of pullups slows it down and makes the life easier.

Later that day I did running WOD(running sucks). The wod was 4x800 with 1 minute rest in between. My time was 17:34 including rest which is reasonably good for me. We will be redoing this in a couple of months. Let's see if I can go sub-17....

The day ended with swimming WOD which was 5 rounds of 15 meter HS-walk(I did bear crawl), 15 slamball GTOH, 15 burpees  and 50 m swim. That felt surprisingly good despite all the workouts earlier that day.

Tuesday started with a bunch of strict work: 20 minute AMRAP of 2-4-6.... of strict pullups, strict one arm KB press(24kg) and squat clean and roll over shoulder slamball(30 kg). Strict pullups are hard so I am very happy with almost finishing the round of 12. Tuesday ended with another swim-WOD: 2&2 - row 3000, 60 burpee over rower, 60 KB-swings, farmers walk to scania-badet followed by 10 rounds kb step-ups each (1 work, 1 swim) followed by walk back, 1500m row, 30 burpees over rower, 30 swings. All that work took around an hour. The only parts that felt really hard were the step ups since my grip sucks, but swimming made it all better....

It's always nice to repeat a workout. I believe last time I did was during winter or maybe even last fall. This time we scaled the weight the same way and were 4 minutes faster. I guess we'll go with a heavier weight next time....

Summer is a time when a lot of brewers deliver session IPAs since the low alcohol content enables people to stay better hydrated in hot weather while drinking something tasty. This IPA is a bit special since it uses Swedish hops. A good beer, but I would've preferred more hops.

No good excuse this time

Forgive me readers for I have sinned. It has been almost 3 weeks since my last blog post and unlike previous time I took way too long between posts I have no good excuse this time except for watching regionals and good weather (although I am perfectly capable of typing and sitting outside at the same time).

Covering all of those 3 weeks would be tedious so let's do some highlights!

Murph is evil. Team Murph is worse since sharing enables us to do harder stuff (as if Murph itself is too easy). The hardest part, at least for me, was the farmers walk.

Due to summer arriving we had to go outside and play which resulted in this obstacle course which we did last year as well. This time it included bear walk which made everything much much worse.... On the other hand I managed to do 20 swing with a 28 kg kettlebell (last year I was swinging a 20 kg kb)

This was horrible, pretty much as expected considering complete lack of barbells and presence of wallballs. Despite that we almost made the timecap and went for a swim afterwards.

This looks like a nice and friendly workout, but it's not. Both swings and toes to bar tax the grip which stops being fun after a few rounds. But I survived....

In the evening I decided to do some gymnastics. That day we practiced acrobatics which is a fancy word for weird stuff like standing on each other's shoulders and jumping up on your partner's shoulders (I didn't do the jumping, but I managed to provide a good enough base). Lots of fun....

Heavy hang squat cleans and strict HSPU are 2 things I suck at so having both of them in the same workout kind of sucked. I did hang squat cleans (singles all the way) as prescribed and did HSPU with 15 kg under my head to shorten the range of motion. It was still horrible. But I did manage to finish with a few minutes to spare. But it was still horrible.

First we run and then we snatch. Running is still horrible, but my speed is improving. I didn't feel too good but I still managed around 1:30 every time with 1:25 as my best time. It's not that long ago that 1:40 was a good time when I was feeling great. I also managed on average 5 snatches at 60 every round which was much better than expected as well.

In the evening we did some running (hill intervalls suck especially when you have somebody on your back) followed by some swimming (first swimming wod of the year!) which felt great.

We went RX on that one which probably was a bit too much. Lunges felt really heavy and went really slow. Front squats sucked as well. We were at the final round of front squats when the time cap hit us.

I don't have much of a problem doing 4 backsquats at 90. I do have a problem repeating it for many rounds especially when the "rest" is assault bike and high boxjumps (I went with 70). Not sure how many rounds we did, but it started sucking a lot after 3 or 4. Lunges sucked as well, not because they were hard as such, but because bare knees to tarmac is a bad idea. Maybe I should get knee sleeves?

Brewdog is one of the most well known craft breweries. They also have a chain of pubs. Most of them are in UK, but a month ago Malmö branch was opened. The place is a bit too hipster for my taste and their food appears to be a bit expensive but they do have a great selection of beers on tap including a large part of Brewdog's range

Mikkeller's K:rlek is rereleased every spring in slightly different versions. While it started out as one of my favourite summer beers this year it appears that they cut down on hops making it much less interesting:(