Lighten Up!

I got off night shift yesterday morning and only slept for 3hrs before giving up on sleeping. The house was noisy, but I knew it would be so I made peace with it and got up for the day at 1pm. Needless to say I passed out on the couch at 2130! I had planned to get up at 0500 for the 0600 class this morning (the girls don’t have school today) and I was regretting that decision when my alarm went off! I got up anyway and made my way to the Box for this:

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Warm-Up: Cindy x 3 rounds (5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 15 air squats)

I couldn’t get my pull-ups with just the blue band so I added up the purple band and was n’t impressed with how I was doing, but at least, I was warming up.

Skills: Handstand push-ups: 4-5 x 6-10 reps

I’ve been struggling to find the ideal “tripod” position between my hands and head and I only managed one successful round of 5  strict reps from a yoga block + 3×5# plates. I’ve done better in the past, but I just wasn’t feeling it today. I did try a kipping rep and it is SO MUCH EASIER!!! I guess I should master a strict without any scaling before I start thinking about kipping my reps though, right?!? 😉

 

WOD: Lift Up Step Down

Coach Caleb said we should aim at 75-80% for our DL. That meant I should have gone with 120#-125# for my reps, but as I was warming up, 105# felt challenging enough as it was and I stuck with that for the WOD. My DUs are still elusive and I can only manage one-at-a-time interspersed with single skips in-between. I aimed at the FG for 8 DUs + 16 SUs for each rounds.

We got going and I managed the 1st round doing all the BJ Rx. I did, however, scale it back to step-ups for the rest of the rounds as I felt my form was suffering and I didn’t want to make my sciatic angry. I know DL usually make it angry, so I wasn’t gonna push it too much with the BJ.

Here were my times for each rounds:

1:55 – 1:40 – 1:37 – 1:32 – 1:37

fastest + slowest = 3:27

Was I happy about my performance today? Nope, but at least I went and did the work. Sometimes, you have to cut yourself some slack and not allow a crappy workout to turn your day into crap. Funny enough, the Box blog post was all about scaling and how there’s no shame in scaling movements or weights once in a while!

I realize I haven’t blogged at all last week. I made a conscious decision to deal with more important family affairs and that meant the blog took the back burner. Our nanny is moving at the end of February, so I’m trying to find a suitable replacement. It feels like my days off are spent working out, cleaning, cooking and having nanny interviews. Not my idea of a fun day off and since the girls have a pro-D day today, I’m cutting this post short so I can make the most of our day together!

In other news, Béatrice drew this this morning. It’s her 1st “character” drawing where you can actually recognize the features. Apparently, I’m the one on the right because I’m “the angriest!” Lol!

Budding artist makes me so proud!

 

The one at the top reminds me of Barbapapa!

Anybody else used to watch this show as a kid?

Working On Technique

I’ve been lucky enough to have had a “girls’ night” on Monday with some lovely ladies from Crossfit and the good it has done on my soul is tremendous. It was so relaxing to meet with beautiful, strong women who share so many similarities with me. We had all groups represented: working moms, retired women, women with older kids and childless women as well. We talked about our families and Crossfit (and no one to tell us to shut up about it already)! Not to mention that everyone had brought and cooked Whole30 compliant  delicious food, which made the whole evening that much more relaxing. I came home and felt rejuvenated for my days at work. I’ve slept a little better since and I’m hoping things will keep improving now that we have met with the dermatologist for Béa’s eczema. Maybe her new skin-care protocol will help her (and me) sleep through the night! Fingers crossed!

I woke up this morning and was very much looking forward to another Oly class. You know you’re at the Box early when you are there to witness the sprinklers go on AND off before anyone else shows up. #truestory #keener

I think there were 8 of us who showed up for the 0600 class and it felt like it was a big class! Jeff also was in attendance in order to assist Coach Caleb. I think he’ll be with us for a few weeks. Here’s what we tackled:

Snatch grip DL with 2s pause 6×3 E2M

I felt comfortable doing these as I had done them with Coach Rachel 2 weeks ago. I knew what to work on (keep my butt down, invert my wrist on my grip and keep my shoulders over the bar). Coach Caleb wanted us to work up to our Snatch 1RM (65# for me) by the 3rd round and increase from there. I started very light and here’s what I did:

45#-55#-65#-70#-75#-80#

It felt good and I really worked on my grip, which, it turns out, really helps to keep my shoulders over the bar!

OHS with 5s pause 6×3 E2M

Coach Caleb wanted us to keep the weight light on these and not aim for our snatch 1RM. I figured I would aim to finish close to my 1RM on the last round, only if I could keep my glutes engaged at the bottom and not struggle too much. I paired up with Ryan (who counted my pauses for me) and go going with very light weights:

35#-40#-45#-50#-55#-60#

The 55# and 60# were challenging. Coach Caleb wanted me to speed up my glutes on the up. Overall, I was pretty happy with how it went, considering I really worked up to my 1RM (I have achieved a snatch at 60#, failed the 65#, but Coach Caleb wants me to use 65# to calculate all my percentages in order to, hopefully, progress).

Barbell love

That got me sweaty and I rushed home to shower. Although Rina has officially “graduated” from preschool yesterday, I still had Béa’s appointment early this morning, which meant I couldn’t just stay behind at the Box.

Kindergarten next year!

I didn’t even have time to finish breakfast before we left, but like I said, it was for a good cause! I came back home, got into my comfy clothes to clean the upstairs, turned the music up and got to work.

 

When it’s 25C outside early in the morning and you have to clean the house, you gotta rock the booty shorts. Any tips to get rid of my inner-thigh bulge are welcome! 😉

Ben helped out by keeping up with the laundry and I was done a little earlier than usual, which gave me time to go for a walk with the girls before lunch and get some groceries.

I am very much looking forward to my nap this afternoon before my night at work and even more so, to our special Beach WOD on Sunday. Ben said he would come see us and bring the girls as cheerleaders! I don’t know what the WOD is, but I’m pretty excited to go for another WOD outdoors!

Béa, showing me her muscles and her ponytail!

 

Up To My Eyeballs In Poo

That’s right! Let me explain.

Béatrice has taken it upon herself to gradually potty-train herself. That means she wears pull-ups during the day and she lets us know, of her own free will when she needs to pee or when she has peed in her diaper. Sometimes she’ll make it to her potty or the toilet, sometimes, she doesn’t and we just change her pull-up. Fine by me, I’m not really stressing out about it since she just turned 2. My problem is with her poop. She doesn’t go on a daily basis and when she does go, it’s usually in her bed, at nap time, and it usually ends up EVERYWHERE: on her clothes, on her bed sheets, on the mattress cover as well as her duvet cover. Which means that I’ve been washing her entire beddings pretty much every other day. The whole process takes close to 1hr because of all this:

• I put Béatrice in the bath tub and strip her down. I then use the telephone shower to hose her down and soap her up real good. I rinse her, then dry her. We put on a new diaper, new clothes and she usually goes to play with Rina downstairs.
• I then hose her clothes down in the tub or in the bathroom sink before I go strip her bed. I then rinse all the stained bed sheets in the tub as well, before putting away all the poopy laundry in the washing machine.
• I go back upstairs to clean her mattress (thank goodness she still has a crib mattress that is covered in vinyl and wipes up easily) before I put new bed sheets on her bed.
• Finally, I go back to the washroom to clean the sink and the bath tub.

We’re gonna have to put her back in diapers for her naps if she keeps this up because I’m getting fed up very quickly of this crappy routine (pun intended)!

If you have any tricks you’d like to share with us, please let us know. My husband, myself and the Nanny would be eternally grateful if we didn’t have to wipe poop off Béatrice’s bed for the next little while!

Up We Go!

I’m so happy Ben came back last night. The girls were dead tired which meant they were cranky and extra whiney at bedtime. I was very proud of Béa though for using the toilet for the very 1st time! And we’re not even potty-training her yet! She started whining as she came out of the tub so I plopped her on the toilet and she went! I made a big fuss about it, giving her thumbs-up and high-fiving her. She was so proud!

We sat down together and watched Rudderless. It was such a good movie and the music is pretty good in it too!

I almost didn’t hear my alarm this morning for the 0600 WOD, but I woke up in the end and here’s what we did:

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Skill: Strict Handstand push-ups

I paired up with Tracey and I started mine off of 2 yoga blocks for 2 rounds. I was struggling and Tracey gave me the great tip to widen my hands. It worked! I was able to do those 4 reps very quickly. I then decided to make things more challenging by replacing a yoga block with 5x 5# plates. It was not a big difference in height, but I certainly could feel it. I did that for 2×4 reps and then removed another plate for a total height of 1 yoga block with 4x 5# plates. I managed those as well, but had to fight for my last rep! I’m still pretty impressed that I can do Handstand push-ups so I was very pleased with today’s work! 🙂

WOD: Amanda G

I wasn’t sure how to go about this one. I knew there was no way I could do RX as I don’t have the pull-ups yet and the deadlift was too heavy (my 1RM is 160#). I settled for this modified FG1:

2 rounds of:

• 600m run (non-stop for both, Woohoo!)
• 15 deadlift x 115# (I broke those in sets of 5 for both rounds)
• 20 kipping pull-ups with red and blue bands

I finished at 16:38, way after everyone else, but I’m proud of myself. The 1st run felt good and the second was a bit more challenging, but I’m so pumped that I can now do these without taking walking breaks. My runs are never fast, but at least, I don’t stop anymore. I was hesitating between 105# and 115# for the deadlifts and I’m glad Marika suggested I go with 115# (I could always have taken out the extra weight). Since everybody was done, I had lots of cheering on my second round of deadlifts and they weren’t letting me get away with sets smaller than 5 reps and Mark was good at making sure my form wasn’t wonky. Looking back, that’s a total of 3450 lbs I lifted in those 16 minutes! Not too shabby for this short stuff!

Then I was off onto the rig for my pull-ups. I decided to go back to the red and blue bands for these today seeing as I struggled so much with the red and purple bands last week. I was able to do a few sets of 3 and 4 with a decent kip and it made me more confident in them.

All in all, it was a fun WOD. Challenging, but fun!

Now, I’m off to a busy day:

• haircut this morning (bye bye long hair, hello new ‘do. I’ll post pics later)
• picking up Rina from preschool
• flu shot (I get mine for free at the hospital since I work there)
• cooking dinner for tonight (shepherd pie)
• massage (I’m sure it’ll be good/painful)

I leave you with a song that I cranked up in the car in order to get pumped up for today’s workout! 🙂