Crossfit Total

Today I did the baseline workout Crossfit Total.  I was worried about this and did not think that I would be able to score well but I surprised myself.  To calculate your Crossfit Total you take your best attempt at the following three exercises:

1. Back Squat
2. Overhead Press
3. Deadlift

You take three attempts at each weight take the best attempt add them up and get your total

I was able to lift 265 for my back squat.  I hit each of my attempts which makes me think that I could do more next time, hopefully around 285, maybe even 300.  I lifted 155 for the overhead press.  I had an missed attempt at 160, if I start there next time I bet I could hit it.  This is an area I think I could improve a lot in as I keep training.  My deadlift surprised me the most.  At home I struggled even doing 135, but I was able to hit 300 on my last attempt.  I don't think I could do much more but maybe by the next time I do this I could improve.

My total score was 705.  Based on the current scores at my gym I would be tied for third, I don't think I will still be there by the end of today, but I hope I am still on it.  Based on the CFT rankings I score just over the novice level.  Lots of room for improvement.

My Home Gym

For a while now I have been putting together my home gym I have had a treadmill, bike rollers,  a bench and an Olympic bar for a while, but this combination wasn't doing it for me.  I started crossfit at TwinTown Crossfit to learn how to push myself more and also learn more exercises that I could do at home without a huge investment in equipment.  Since I started I have added a few things, a pullup bar, rings, a 16" and 24" plyo box (I made myself), some pvc bars (empty and weighted with sand) a kettle bell, and my latest is a new rubber floor.  I finally got to use the floor tonight, and I am very happy with it.  It is a completely different feel then when I was on the concrete.  I ended up getting the Puzzle Lock Flooring from Rubber-Cal. They had other flooring options too, but this one was simple to put in, looks good, and will be easy to take out if I ever move.  I wish I got it a long time ago.

The whole gym

Here you can see the pull up bar, rings and plyo boxes

First Time for Cindy

Cindy is a Crossfit Work out of the day that consists of doing:

1. 5 pullups
2. 10 pushups
3. 15 squats

You do this rotation as many times as possible in 20 minutes.
I got through this routine 7 times, I did it all as prescribed but I had to use the green band for the pullups.  This is an improvement for me since not to long ago I couldn't do any pullups with the green band.  The pushups were the hardest, I tended to have to pause around 6 rest for a bit then do the last four.  Overall I was pretty happy with this.  As a warm up to this I did 5 minutes at a 5 incline and a 3.5 pace on the treadmill, then I did 3 sets of 5 x 16" box jumps, 5 burpees, and 5 cleans with a weighted pvc.  This was tough to tell myself to do, since I hate burpees, but I need to get better at them, and doing them is the only way.  The whole workout took me 45 minutes, I burned 570 calories and my heart rate averaged 155 and maxed out at 185.

How did I survive without Cygwin

About 3 years ago I read the Pragmatic Programmer and it talked about using a shell. It mentioned about how powerful it was and all the things you could do that you just couldn't do with a UI in windows. I took what it said to heart and looked into it and downloaded Cygwin. I choose Cygwin because it was a bash shell and that is what Ubuntu used along with Mac, and I figured I might try to switch to one of those platforms one day. I installed it played with it a little, but it just had a hard time sticking at first, I couldn't see what I would use it for.

Then I started working with a guy that just loved the shell. He is the type of guy that has emacs open all the time to mange tasks and other things. I started seeing all the things he was doing and was impressed, I decided to keep it around and started playing a little more with some commands and started to find enough uses to keep it around.

Then the final straw happened, I went to a talk about Mercurial and decided to start using it. Cygwin comes with it, so I started using the command line for using Mercurial. With that I started writing scripts to make it easier to work with, I started modifying my prompt to show me things about my repository. Then I started writing more and more scripts to help me do anything that I had to do more then once every month or so.

I have gotten to the point that I have no idea how I would get along with out it. Between find, grep, symbolic links, powerful scripting, non invasive mercurial and svn integration, tail and many more. I am sure that as I keep going I will keep picking up more and more things I won't be able to do with out.

Twin Town Crossfit Baseline (1st time)

I forgot to blog about this one when I did it but I thought I should put it up so I don't forget it. The Twin Town Crossfit baseline consists of the following
500m Row
40 Squats
30 Situps
20 Pushups
10 Pullups

I had to scale the pullups to doing jumps with the rings but was able to do the work out in 7:30. I am hoping that the next time I do it I will be able to do it with just using the green bands. I hope by the time I have been at it for a year to do it with no scaling at all.

I also came up with the following goals for myself
Bench Press my Weight
Deadlift my Weight
10 Pulups with no bands

Lets see if I can cross any off by the end of the year.

Fight Gone 300

Today I did one of Teddy's (Owner of TwinTown Crossfit) variations of Fight Gone Bad. The way it is set up is to show someone how hard it is to get a score of 300 in the fight gone bad work out. The WOD consists of 3 rounds with one minute of rest in between each round, each round consists of:
20 20# wall ball shots
20 75# push presses
20 24" box jumps
20 75# Sumo Deadlift High Pulls (SDHP)
20 calories on the rowing machine

Since I did this at home I needed to tweak it a little for my equipment I did
20 12# wall ball shots
20 75# push presses
20 16" box step ups
20 75# sdhp
20 calories on the treadmill

I did the workout in 27:10 - and I am beat. The hardest were the SDHP were by far the hardest. I was typically only able to get 5 in the prescribed minute, but I was able to consistently get 20 wall ball shots in the minute, 10 Push Presses, 10 step ups, and 10 calories. I think I could score 150 if my cardio didn't collapse on me. That is by far my biggest weakness still since I averaged a heart rate of 165 and maxed at 185 for the workout.

Benefits of a Side Project

Just recently I started a side project with some friends of mine. Even though I thought it would be fun I needed to justify it to both my family and my self. Here are the reasons that I came up with for it being a good idea.

Learn New Technology - I am doing the project in groovy and grails and although these are not new to me, I have not been able to put the time into them that I would like. Also when you have to tackle real problems it can really boost your learning on the platform.

Practice what you Preach - On my "Paid" projects I am always telling the people I work with alternate approaches and processes that we could use to improve our productivity. The side project gives me a chance to put my money where my mouth is. I will be able to work on Acceptance Test Driven Development, Kanban, UX design, Personnas, Story Maps and other things that I mention but am not allowed to use in my day to day work. This way I can refine what I say and come up with some real world examples of why and how they work.

New Tools - This new project is allowing me to try some tools I don't use at my current project. Some of these are:

• Developing on my Mac Book Pro
• Setting up and using a Linux Server
• Using AgileZen as a story/kanban board for a distributed team
• Easy-B for ATDD
• WebDriver2/Selenium for front-end testing
• Hudson for my CI server

Experimentation - One of the big experiments I want to try on this project are functional branching and Continuous Deployment. These are things I have been trying to get worked into my current environment but there are just to many things I haven't wrapped my head around to be able to pitch it to a large scale corporate environment.

Just Fun - The last item is that I just think it would be fun to work with these tools and processes and people on this application. Plus when it is all said and done, I will hopefully have a better tool to enter information about my workouts in, and be able to get some good reporting on my progress. I also hope that I will be able use this application as a back-end for an iPhone and/or an Android front-end also.

Well that is my story of why I signed up for this and I am sticking to it. Hopefully later on I will be able to write some good posts about some of the tools I worked with here and some good lessons learned.

Squat Ladder

, baYesterday I was able to do one of the Crossfit benchmark workouts. It was the squat ladder. The way it works is you do one squat the first minute, then two the second and so on, until you don't complete your amount in the minute. At that point you continue on starting back at one. You do this for 30 minutes and your first 10 minutes are overhead squats the second ten minutes are front squats and the last 10 minutes are back squats, the weight I used was a 45 pound bar.

When I first saw this I thought it would be no problem, I can do thirty squats in minute, but when you add it up, it is 465 squats if you get them all. Needless to say I was wrong, I was able to get to the round of 17 squats before I missed, I finished these up and started back at one and did not miss again for the rest of the work out. I ended up doing 244 squats. My legs are killing me today. Next time I hope to get to the 20 minute mark.

My first Blog post

After some time I have finally taken the plunge and created a blog. I have found some great information on Blogs that have helped me get over some hurdles and save me quite a bit of time. I hope that this Blog becomes a helpful resource for others.