Odds That This Workout Will Be Hard = 9:1

It's Monday and that means it's the official kick-off of birthday week and "no official CrossFit classes" week, and "I'm getting myself back on track" week.

Whew!

The Spartan Challenge starts in just 12 days, so Dave and I put together a training schedule that includes CrossFit workouts, running, and pushups to get us from here to there. This week looks like this:

M - Hard Eight
T - 3-mile run + pushups + abs
W - Bootcamp
Th - 3-mile run + pushups + abs
F - The Murph
S - 4.5-mile run + pushups + abs (+ rock show!)

We chose the Hard Eight -- one of Crystal's inventions -- for today because it puts lots of focus on legs and we wanted to save our upper bodies for pushups tomorrow (and the Murph on Friday).

Hard Eight
8 rounds:
20 jump squats
20 walking lunge w/PVC overhead rotation
20 PVC snatch
30-second isometric squat
hill sprint

We found a 100-yard hill near our house and after a regulation CrossFit warmup and the pushup assessment (me = 16; Dave = 20), we got on it.

Eight rounds is a lot, people. We'd given ourselves a 30-minute cut off, but at 30:30, we only had one round left, so we kept going. Final time: 35:11.

My legs are Jell-O. It's pretty sad when you're desperately looking forward to a hill sprint.

Now I'm off to be a guest lecturer in a "Sociology of Sports" class at Huston-Tillotson University. The class has been reading my book (!), and I'm stopping by talk about what's been happening in the world of Roller Derby since Rollergirl: Totally True Tales From the Track was published, and to share what playing sports has taught me about life.