We’ll Always Have Lake Placid

This morning at our CrossFit gym, we did some crazy-ass, modified 4-station, 3-round Fight Gone Bad thing. (For definition of CrossFit Terms, see here – and while you’re there, check out some of the hero workouts.)

At each station, you did as many repetitions of the exercise as possible in one minute, then moved to the next station. After you hit all four in four minutes, you rested for one minute and did it all over again, and then again!  The stations were the push-press (a personal weakness and therefore something I had worked on during warm-ups just prior to reading the WOD on the whiteboard – that’ll teach me), sit-ups, dumbbell clean and squats, and a 10-lb. slam ball.

So I used the empty bar. So what? My arms were tired, I tell ya, and 45 lbs. is nothing to sneeze at when you have one functionally incompetent arm! Then I did sit-ups with the ABMAT, clean and squats with 20 lb. dumbbells, and then slammed the slam ball.  Frankly, for reasons I don’t even care to explore, I usually find the slam ball inordinately fun.  But after two rounds I could barely get the ball up to my head. With a little encouragement and some reminders to breathe, I finished all three rounds.

Wow! That was fun.

But the title of my post refers to the healthy competition I have going with my husband who joined me in this morning’s workout.  Happily, we were not partners because that might not have worked out so well as we both forgot the steps involved in a clean and squat. You see, first, there’s the clean (getting the weight to your shoulders), then, there’s the squat.  As simple as that seems, neither of us seemed to be able to remember it in real time. (Hypoxia’ll do that, said my trusty teammate, Tim, who modeled what I was supposed to be doing as he counted off my reps.)  In turn, I just jeered at Stephen when he forgot. (Tim is clearly a better man than I.)

When we totalled the reps I came in at 223 and Stephen a mere 222.  Oh well. If he had only known, he assured me, he would have been able to pull off another repetition of something!

On the way home he said, “It’s Lake Placid all over again.”  It took me a while to rolodex through my scant Lake Placid connections: 1980s USA Hockey Team? Bad horror flick?  Ah-ha! That time we shot a fake biathlon rifle at an old Olympic site and I hit 5/5 targets and he hit 4/5! 

Men.