More 70's and 80's

Fantasy Island

The Love Boat

Good Times

Sanford & Son

Three's Company

Mork & Mindy

Mary Tyler Moore

Chips

Charlie's Angels

Wonder Woman

The Incredible Hulk

Knight Rider

70's & 80's TV show intros

I love YouTube:

YouTube - The Rockford Files introduction

Six Million Dollar Man

Dallas

Dukes of Hazzard

Starsky and Hutch

Kojak

Columbo

Hawaii Five-O

2007-12-30

Early afternoon:

Volume 2 of the Iron Core kettlebell DVD with Wifey. I used my brand spankin' new 35 pounder (that's 16kg = 1 pood)... I'd played around with Wifey's 10 pounder, and didn't think the workout would be that taxing.

I was wrong. It worked me hard. My arms are bruised from bad form, and some of the snatches towards the end were actually very difficult to do. The intensity isn't Crossfit, but the sheer volume makes up for it by the end. My grip was fried, compounded by the fact that my hands sweat bigtime. I'm a big fan of the Kettlebells now!

My favorite part of the workout: Wifey doesn't like Turkish Get-Ups, so she doesn't do them. I reasoned with her as calmly as I could, and we settled on her doing them without any weight at all. We had the most wonderfully nonsensical debate about it, too.

"I don't think they are good exercises, so I don't do them" she said.

"Is that because you can't do them?"

"I just think you'd hurt yourself if you did them wrong." What, like dropping the KB on your head? Yep, that would hurt.

"Well, you could do them without any weight, just to work on form."

"But then it wouldn't be an exercise, because there's no weight. What's the point in doing that?"

*groan* She had me there, with her impeccable logic. :)

I cajoled her into doing them, though, and she did very well. I can see why she doesn't like them- her hips aren't happy with her as far as range of motion goes, especially in the transition between sitting up and getting your feet underneath you. You could see where they limited her movements. She did great on the other exercises- I think they will help her get there flexibility-wise.

Training with her is fun when we can do it unencumbered. For a while there we were swinging the weights in sync, side by side. Most of my workouts are pretty lonely and lacking external motivation, this was nicely different. It's also fascinating to watch how somebody else learns something. She's good at totally different things than me.

We also did this workout parent style. Not only were we juggling kettlebells and rewinding the DVD, we were juggling Owen. For a while, we had him upstairs in his favorite swing, so you had to sprint upstairs to check on him after doing your segment.

After that, it was time for some light Crossfit. You know, just to work out the kinks. I had the idea that I could maybe do this one in under 20 minutes.

5 rounds for time of:
500 meter Row
50 Squats
30 Back extensions

Turns out, I was right, but not by much. It was brutal, and I couldn't afford any rests or to let the performance drop off at all. The pacing worked out pretty well:

As Rx'ed:

Round/Time
1/3:49.76
2/3:58.77
3/4:03.41
4/4:00.59
5/3:50.66

Total: 19:43.19

Rowing at 1:48-1:50 pace, 28-30 strokes/minute
All squats unbroken. Need to work on form here- could have been deeper.
Most back extensions broken 15/15 or 20/10.

I really do need to work on my squats some more though. I'm fighting a minor groin pull from the 150 burpee workout on Christmas, so that's a bit of a limitation as to how low I can go, but I'll keep working it. We don't have anything the right height at the gym to get my legs parallel to the ground, so I have to stack things on Plyo boxes. Hard things that, er... hurt when you land too hard. Since the workout didn't say "Smash your balls against a 25-pound weight 250 times, for time", I skipped that bit and did it freestyle.

Christmas Day Workout

First of all, good job to Joanne, who is coming a long with her pushups nicely!

http://jehr.blogspot.com/2007/12/really-thats-all.html

So I'm at my parents, which means that all I have access to is a flat, cool basement floor and some woefully outdated Weider cable pull machines.

Thankfully, Crossfit yesterday was brutally simple:

150 Burpees.

So I did them: 20:40.96

Owie. That suxx0r3d pretty hard. To make up for it, I had one of my Mom's excellent home-cooked meals. All is right with the world.

Tomorrow is Crossfit Total. I suppose I could go to the local gym and try it (haven't seen what they have for free weights yet.)

That, or Joanne and I discussed this alternative, since she has access to two (count 'em!) 8-lb dumbbells.

21-15-9 of
Dumbbell Thrusters
Dumbbell Swings.

I'll see what I can find for heavy things in the basement. If I could find one heavy thing to use that would probably be enough... perhaps a partially disassembled Weider cable machine could be useful after all?

ouuuuuch.

So Joanne redid the 400m walking lunge thing:

Red Shoes.: Legs no workie

Sounds like she recovered pretty quickly. Good job!

Me, I'm still in very bad shape. But that's because *all* of me hurts. Owen got something, then Megan got it and got over it, and now I have it and Megan has it again. It's a tummy upset thing, but it packs a wallop... full body ache. The roots of my hair hurt.

So that, on top of being sore all the way through my legs... well. It's no fun.

But my time improved. I had to estimate distance, so it looks like I did about 370m instead of 400m. Corrected for 400m my time was 10:40 something, down from 14:02 last time.

That was an evil one.

British Ad Awards

2007:

YouTube - Honda Choir Spoofed

"Elvis" Commercial

Honda - The Power of Dreams

Squeezy Marmite #1 (This wasn't included, but it should have been.)

Squeezy Marmite #2

Tango



2006:

http://www.dane101.com/arts/2007/04/15/wisfilmfest2007_british_television_advertising_awards

Red Shoes.

So Sumo Me.

2007-12-06
Yeesh. Joanne had about as much "fun" with this one as I did. "Fun" in this instance is defined in the usual Crossfit way... "It doesn't have to be fun to be fun."

So... let's see how it went.

5 Rounds for Time. Yes, 5. Ow.

Run 400m.
75lb Sumo Deadlift High Pull x 21
75lb Thruster

I knew this was going to be a beeyotch and a half. I wasn't wrong. My buddy at work wondered aloud if the first round could be done unbroken: go directly from the run to the SDLHP, and then to the Thrusters without putting the bar down.

I decided to test this theory.

I shouldn't have.

Round 1
Run was at 8mph/7.5 minute mile. I'm happy how this is coming along for me. When I started Crossfit, I couldn't run these at much faster than a 9:30 pace. My previous training had mostly been long, slow, boring, soul-crushing distance. I was not used to running quickly. In fact, I used to define "quickly" as "faster than 10 minutes/mile" pace and it didn't count if it was for less than 5 miles. My 5k time was around 30 minutes.

SDLHP. Did all of these in one go. I don't find them to be particularly taxing from an aerobic standpoint, but after a while my hands start to give out.

Thrusters. Without putting the bar down. These weren't so bad for the first half. Then by about rep 12 I was wondering why I was doing this, and on the first round of a 5-round workout. By about the 15th rep I was questioning my own sanity. Amnesia set in at rep 18. I came to about halfway through the run on round 2.

Round 1: 4:00.3

Round 2 was a lot slower (more than 6:30) and it went downhill from there. Last round was torture, but I survived the whole thing in 36:20 something.

Ouch.

Teddy Bear Uproar

Ya know, all it would take is some joker doing a cartoon about a teddy bear named Mohammed wearing a suicide bomb vest, and things could get mighty sticky around some parts.

The Blasphemous Teddy Bear - TIME

Wow. Clearly parts of Sudan are lacking a sense of humor. Oh well, scratch that off the list of places to go on vacation.

Thankfully, the rest of the world more than makes up for this lack. While researching something else (which I swear has nothing to do with Photoshop, teddy bears, or suicide bombers,) I came across this: