Today was my first day back after a week (had the flu or something). They must have seen me coming.
The workout was a 20 minutes amrap of 500m row, box walk handstands, and max pullups. The final score was the number of pullups. The “box walk handstand” involves getting into a pushup position with your feet on a 20 inch box and your hands on the floor, getting as vertical as possible (to mimic a handstand) and hand-walking around the box. The requirement was four times around. What it does is exhaust upper body strength really fast. When you combine this with a 500m row and pullups and a time boundary for max reps it’s tough.
I was fighting failure in the first two minutes, so I had to scale down the box walks — instead of four I did two, and I had to use my knees. This was a partner workout and I was alone. So the timing was a bit confusing. I got 25 rx pullups. Those last few pullups took a lot of willpower.
The thing I learned here was that the scaling was not a retreat. The only way I was going to get a full workout, once my upper body gave out, was to scale.
More importantly (for me) I discovered that it’s not so much the failing, it’s the recovering. It sounds easy to say when you’re sitting in a comfortable chair, but managing the process of scaling so you can fail faster and recover faster and do more work is tricky to do in real time. So I was failing quickly – but not giving up. I call this the “mean time between failure” or MTBF.
I didn’t quite get to 100% exhaustion, but I’m learning how to get there.
That’s it for now. Cheers.
