Today was\u00a0my first day back after a week (had the flu or something). They must have seen me coming.<\/p>\n
The workout was a 20 minutes amrap of 500m row, box walk handstands, and max pullups. \u00a0The 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. \u00a0The requirement was four times around. \u00a0What it does is\u00a0exhaust\u00a0upper body strength really fast. When you combine this with a 500m row and pullups and a time\u00a0boundary for max reps it’s tough.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0This was a partner workout and I was alone. So the timing was a bit confusing. I got 25 rx pullups. \u00a0Those last few pullups took a lot of willpower.<\/p>\n
The thing I learned here was that the scaling was not a retreat. \u00a0The only way I was going to get a full workout, once my upper body gave out, was to scale.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0So I was failing quickly – but not giving up. \u00a0I call this the “mean time between failure” or MTBF<\/a>.<\/p>\n I didn’t quite get to 100%\u00a0exhaustion, but I’m learning how to get there.<\/p>\n That’s it for now. Cheers.
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