Michelle feeling the love on the Sumo Deadlift High Pulls. Great work today, Michelle!

WOD:

“Cindy”
Complete as many rounds in 20 minutes as you can of:
5 Pull-ups
10 Push-ups
15 Squats

OR

“Mary”
Complete as many rounds in 20 minutes as you can of:
5 Handstand Push-ups
10 One legged squats, alternating
15 Pull-ups

Post your choice of girls and rounds completed to comments.

Believe it or not, the Cindy WOD is not named for your gracious hostess here at CrossFit Playground. Regardless, this is a fantastic workout, in that it’s self-scaling. Do what you can, and see how you stack up.

We did a little bit of spring cleaning here this evening, meaning that Will was up on a ladder with some sort of a swiffer on a stick contraption getting the cobwebs out of the ceiling areas. We also moved the refrigerator out of the way (finally), and Cindy spent an absurd amount of time scrubbing the garage floor for future improvements.

Another new face at The Playground today, as Michelle joined us for her CrossFit initiation / hazing / trial by fire. She showed the “fire in the belly,” and really dug deep in the late rounds to put up some impressive numbers in Saturday’s Row / SDHP / Pullup WOD.

And for those of you who need a little something special, we invested the 35 bucks and 40 minutes of our time to create CrossFit Playground’s newest bundle of joy: parallettes. If you think you know anything about handstand pushups, these are for you, because…. hell, just try it. Parallettes are also excellent for L-sits, which are a new level of abdominal burn. As Cindy said after her (impressive) 18 second L-sit:

Five seconds on these things feels like 20 seconds!

I’m sure you’ll all be lining up to try them tomorrow.

Sleep well, and get ready to bring it hard tomorrow, kids. It’s going to be a fun metcon hell day!

Mark Rippetoe coaching the squat

CrossFit Milford will be hosting the CrossFit Basic Barbell Certification on March 28 and 29th at their facilities in Milford, Connecticut.

This is a great and rare opportunity to learn the squat, bench press, deadlift, and power clean under the watchful eye of Mark Rippetoe, or “Rip,” as he is better known.

Rip, along with Mike Burgener, are the two major CrossFit strength coaches.  Rip is a funny man who tells it like it is, and you can expect a whole lot of memorable quotes as well as a large amount of knowledge if you can make it to the Certification.

Cindy and I will both be attending the Cert, and if you’re interested in improving your technique with any of these lifts and can find the time and money to attend, we encourage it.  If you do decide to go, let us know, as we can probably arrange to carpool.

A favorite Rip quote of ours:

Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general.
- Mark Rippetoe

Christmas 2004. Odin looks concerned that Dad might eat him. Thanks to CrossFit, he doesn't worry about that any more. This might be one of the worst pictures of our family in existence.

If you are following the CrossFit main board WOD schedule, I recommend sticking to it, and taking a rest day. Rest days are important for your body to have a chance to recover. Enjoy your day and if you are itching to do something.. Of course its got to be constantly varied, so put on your snow gear and go sledding with a friend or a family member.

Irrelevant aside, but we just awarded the win for our logo design contest.  Expect some new chrome, and some new schwag to be up on the site in the next couple of days.

And of course, in the interest of keeping the quote of the day going:

“Once, someone asked me what pleasure I took in riding so long. “Pleasure” I said. “I don’t understand the question.” I didn’t do it for pleasure. I did it for pain.
Lance Armstrong

Odin - 5 days old being treated by The Magic Man

Today, I took the kids on a trek up to see the man who helps keep us functioning properly – C. David Burns P.T. (or as we refer to him, “The Magic Man.”)  Will has been seeing Chris since his H.S days and his first shoulder injury.  I started treatments with Chris after meeting Will.

The thing that The Magic Man does that’s different is that he treats the body as a system.  You’ll walk in to see him, complaining of a pain in your back, and he’ll spend 15 minutes working on your knee.  When he’s done with your knee, the pain in your back will be gone.  The magic man will explain that your back was hurting because you had strain in your foot from whatever it was you did, and that made your foot not move right, which made your knee compensate for it, which made your pelvis tip, which threw your spine out of line, and that why your back hurt.  It may sound crazy, but I know from experience he’s right.

The body really does function as a system; all components need to work together for the body to work properly. The Magic Man’s system for treating the body is a lot like CrossFit.  The Magic Man treats the body as a system, and fixes the problem at its point of origin rather than at its point of manifestation.   Similarly, CrossFitters work to become better athletes by using complex movements… using the body as a complete system.  There’s a reason that a workout like “Virtual Shoveling”  will make one person sore in the low back and another sore in the legs:  by using the body as a system, CrossFit will expose what is the weakest part of your body in a workout, and will then force that part of your body to grow stronger.

Joe and Will doing pullups during today's workout.

Joe coming back for some more fun at the Playground. I altered 1/8/2009 pull-up extravaganza WOD Got lots of work, mostly rearranging work to do at the PG this weekend. And tons of projects in the works around the hizzy.. so it should be interesting.

A picture on the right of Joe and Will on the pullup bar doing today’s horrible pullup workout of:

Ten rounds for time of:
3 Weighted Pull-ups, 45 pounds
5 Strict Pull-ups
7 Kipping Pull-up

Joe brought it hard and put up a solid time.  The kip is really coming along, and he’ll be swinging like a monkey from the pullup bar in a couple more weeks.  He’s drunk the Kool-Aid and is well on his way to becoming CrossFit.

Joe got his first rips during today’s WOD, immortalized by the picture below.  Rips are a right of passage, and as we told him after the workout, “That means you’re doing it right!”  Cindy performed a little bit of rip first aid on the hand after the workout, and we taped the hand up so that it starts healing up.

Joe's right hand after today's pullup WOD.

We’re still in the process of getting everything officially done: insurance, all the paperwork with CrossFit HQ, moving things around in the garage, etc.

It’s a work in progress, but the progress is coming along.

We spent a lot of time in the garage this weekend, mostly working on fixing the pullup bar.  Nothing like working overhead while standing five feet high on the ladder to get a little bonus midline stability work in.

We got a few pictures when the kids came out to join us for the deadlift workout.  While they didn’t do any deadlifts, they did get a workout in:

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The last picture is of the rebuilt pullup bar.  Cindy and I did concurrent kipping pullups on it after it was finished, and the thing is rock solid.  A nice change from the last version, which had quite a bit of sway in it.

We’re going to spend some time this weekend getting the kayaks out of that bay of the garage, and working on getting the gym into a more buisnesslike state, get the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed with our paperwork, and open up for some fun.

We received our approval email from CrossFit HQ today, and are ready to hit the ground running or rowing. We have begun to figure out the layout of our garage gym. We have a few additions and changes that will be made in the next few weeks to make our garage suitable for our prospective athletes.