Tour de CrossFit - Stage 2

Went climbing on Sat at an indoor climbing place called Earth Treks outside of DC. $20 got you three climbs with coaching/instruction from one of their instructors/staff. If you're anything like me, you probably thought three climbs would take all of 8 seconds even if you did all the climbing with only your arms. Turns out indoor climbing is hard as shit. Indoors climbs probably last somewhere between one minute and five minutes with each climb being a good full body challenge. The climbs were as mentally taxing as physically, if not more so. The urge to quit when you're stuck 30 feet up on a wall with no where to stick your legs or hands is tantamount to any time I've wanted to quit during a WOD. So in conclusion, rock climbing is an awesome supplement to other training, a great sport to learn, and hard as shit.

Went to Potomac CrossFit today for a free beginners class. Initial impressions were: the gym was nice, basically all the equipment you could ask for sans ropes for climbing; gym was in a good location close to a metro station though probably 30-40 mins from my apartment; and there were a shitload of people there on a Sun morning for the free class.

There were 18 people there for the free beginners class. Apparently they've had larger beginners classes. The gym has over 430 members - supposedly one of the biggest in the country. Pretty ridiculous. I spoke to the trainer after the class and all the trainers have full time jobs outside of training, which, for some reason or another I didn't expect. Similarly, our rock climbing instructor had a full time job working in biohazard threat analysis for the FDA. This all makes getting a level 1 cert a bit more intriguing. The programming is probably similar to other CF gyms that have a strength bias. Monday is a squat day + WOD, Wednesday is a press day + WOD, and Friday is a pull from the floor day + WOD. Tues and Thurs are generally metcon days and weekends are probably a clusterf of whatever they want.


Back to the WOD, it's probably a huge pain in the ass trying to put 18 complete nubs through a CrossFit workout for the first time. The WOD was a team workout the trainer pulled together on the fly. I could have programmed a better WOD if I took a dump on the floor. You don't ask people who have never touched a barbell or dynamax ball or plyo box to do 360 reps for their first mfing workout.

WOD:

3 rounds

30 KB swings
30 box jumps
30 burpees
30 wall ball shots

kbs, boxes, and wall balls were all different heights/weights depending on how big you wanted other people to think your d was. The team aspect meant each member of your team started on a different movement and each member could only progress to the next movement when everyone finished 30 reps of their respective movement. My team initially consisted of the girlfriend and myself, which was going to be sweet b/c I fully intended on kicking everyone elses ass. Right before the WOD started Kahn arrived, about 20 minutes late, and got added to our team cause everyone else had three people already. Which brings me to the gentleman on the far right in the following video:



The guy in the video would have looked like a fucking crossfit allstar compared to Kahn. Anyways, we start the WOD, after two rounds with half the class about to throw up, our trainer decides to cut all the reps to 20. Come 17:30, our trainer tells everyone to stop, turning the WOD into an AMRAP since no team made it through three rounds.

Our friend Kahn did 2-3 reps of each movement before calling out that he was done. After the first "round" he decided to sit the rest of the class out. Our trainer told us our trio was now a duo citing communication issues with Kahn. After the WOD we were pow wowing with the rest of the class talking about the types of movements you can expect in CrossFit WODs. The trainer asked if anyone had completed all three rounds. Kahn was the only one to raise his hand.



All in all I liked this gym more than Balance CrossFit, though Potomac Crossfit is twice as far from my apartment. I'm looking forward to trying out District Crossfit and Primal CrossFit before making a decision. Capped off the Sunday with brunch up in here: