Tag Archives: 13.1

01182019 – CrossFit

Finally back at the gym! I had hoped to earlier in the week but forgot to sign up and was waitlisted. I don’t usually look at the workouts, I wouldn’t have skipped this one. I think lots of people did though!

We are in a prep cycle for the CrossFit Open. And a lot of that is doing old open workouts. Mike was the only other person who showed up for the 3:30 class to do 13.1 with me!

This was rough! Here is the RX written workout from the website:

MEN – includes Masters Men up to 54 years old
Proceed through the sequence below completing as many reps as possible in 17 minutes of:
40 Burpees
75 pound Snatch, 30 reps
30 Burpees
135 pound Snatch, 30 reps
20 Burpees
165 pound Snatch, 30 reps
10 burpees
210 pound Snatch, as many reps as possible

That’s a lot of burpees and some heavy snatching! My 1RM is 110 for the snatch. I don’t remember exactly how all the scaling was laid out, but I decided to start at 65 and then jump to 95 and maybe get into the third round. The above also doesn’t highlight that the burpees are to a 6 inch target (6 inches above your arm reach). So you actually have to jump at the top.

Rich Froning completed 7 snatches in the AMRAP part. The most anyone did was 9 and several athletes in the top 20 that year didn’t make it into the last set of Snatches. All that to say this was a hard workout!

At the go I took a nice and steady pace with the burpees. You wouldn’t think jumping 6 inches is a big deal, but it does add time and quickly adds up! After the first round of snatching 65# I was almost half way done with the time. Yikes! Burpee fatigue was definitely accumulating and then I loaded 95 onto the bar for my second round of Snatch. I failed the first one. Got the second one. Failed the 3rd. Coach Bobby quickly came over and helped me drop the weight back down to 65. The bar felt super light on the first one, but the next ones hurt! I had hoped to go 10 at a time throughout, but ended up just doing 5. I ended with 114 total reps!

That was a lay on the floor afterwards workout for sure!

08262018 – Run

Today was so humid that at the end of my run my fingers were starting to prune up a little bit.  At least it was relatively cool through the whole run!  I picked a route that I’ve ridden before but never run and when I’ve ridden it is been 12 miles.  So I thought it would work for 13.1.  I was quite off and needed to add a good amount of trails at Wirth to get there.

I started out running from my house and ran to the Mississippi River.  I haven’t run along the river in a long time. Especially this section.  The run was a Time Trial, so I wanted to find the balance of going fast, but surviving the entire 13 miles.  I set my Virtual Pacer for 9 minute miles and thought that would be good.  I was a little shocked when I came through the first mile in 8:13. Ok, no problem slow down a little bit… Crap.  I came through the 2nd mile in 7:52.  That was not going to be a sustainable pace for the whole thing. I turned off the River onto Cedar Lake Trail and my pace finally slowed down to 8:37.  I haven’t run on such flat easy places for awhile and my body wanted to move!  The Cedar Lake Trail is pretty straight forward urban trail that turns into a prairie trail.. I did 8:15 and then 8:34 for mile 5.

I wanted to run the dirt trails on the East side of Cedar Lake and to add some distance I ran all the way to where they actually start on the southside and ran back around the lake.  I never ran these trails enough to know what the best routes are or an easy way to add a nice loop.  One time in there I had to backtrack quite a bit.  I ended up running less than a mile in the dirt trail section.  Mile 6 was 8:48.  Running on the paved trails around Cedar Lake are so nice with the sun coming over the trees and downtown sparkling. I ran past all the beaches and extended the run by going out onto the points when possible.  Mile 7 was 9:25, 8 was 10:23, and 9 was 9:38.  I was definitely feeling tired at this point.  I had been drinking some, but the food I brought wasn’t very good and was hard to eat.

It was right before mile 9 that I turned off the pavement and was on trails for most of the rest of the run.  I knew that from Cedar Point beach home it would be about 3 miles on the Parkways. So when I ran past it before hitting 8 miles I would need to make up a lot of miles somewhere.  I’ve not run around Brownie Lake, but I probably should have tried today!

Obviously being back on the trails at Wirth was going to slow down my pace unless I tried to pick it up. Feeling tried at that point wasn’t ideal, but I kept pushing on.  I ended up walking some of the uphills. Mile 10 was 12:55, 11 was 12:19, and 12 was 11:20.  Mile 11 was the end of the dirt trails and back on the parkway.  I went past the Trailhead at around 11.5 miles.  The Trailhead is only a half mile from home, so I had to keep going!  It is always sad to pass my road and know I need to keep running!  I hit Mile 13 at the top of the hill on Golden Valley Road in 13:31 and then knew it was all downhill from there on out!  I stopped about 1/4 mile down the road and hit 8:33 pace again.  I decided to stop my watch and walk the last few blocks home (uphill).

My plantar fasciitis foot was really hurting at the front of the arch.  Hopefully it recovers quickly.  I also need to get my nutrition figured out for the race.  I did order some gel packets and will bring a bar or two to have during the race.

Just a few more weeks to go!

08182018 – Run

This was the first of two half marathons that I will run.  I had looked at trying to do a race for one of them and actually almost signed up for the Bluff Tuff race or the Mendota Bottoms 10 miler.  I probably should have but it was also nice to save the money and get to sleep in a little bit!

I’m actually writing this a week later so I won’t remember the details…  I started out with the event trails at Wirth.  I ran North first to get some distance in and then ran down to the starting point of Karate Monkey trails. And then did them, skipping the spaghetti loop. After exiting the Karate Monkey trails I ran along the cart path up the sledding hill and turned and kept going up to the upper stadium and jumped onto the trails there.  From there I finished out the Area 36 loop with the shortcut through the Quarry and then ran the entire Area 36 loop with The Tube.  This actually earned me the 8th overall time for the loop!  The 2.5 mile loop has 80ft of elevation gain and took me 28:38 to complete.

After completing the loop I grabbed some water at the Trailhead fountains and then did my normal Wirth loop backwards through the Bog.  I had to get a little creative on the Butler side of the park to get more miles in.  I knew that when I left the park by Xerxes I’d have a mile to go straight home.  I ended up hitting that point with about a mile and a half left.  So I added on some extra sections and kept heading towards home.  I passed all my normal cut thru’s and hit 13 miles just north of the main parking lot and finished out the run completing 13.28 miles in 2:23:07.  I got about 1,000 feet of elevation gain for the entire run.

There were only a few flat sections so my pace never really got close to where my “goal” pace should have been.  My mile splits were really all over the place with mile 10 being the slowest.  I did walk some of the hills after the halfway point and I didn’t really take on much nutrition throughout.