Tasty, Tasty Tabatas

Driving to class today in the bitter, bitter cold I was pretty much dreading getting my feeble body abused again.  As I was approaching the gym, however, some Journey came on the radio and I proceeded to rock out with authority and was instantly motivated.  I began to wonder at what point would I have enough clout to influence the music selection during CrossFit?  Surely they wouldn't listen to my no-pullup-doing ass at this point, but if I could rock out, say--25 pullups would I be allowed to throw some Separate Ways on?  How many would it take for some Phil Collins?  I don't know one individual who wouldn't CRUSH THE SHIT out of their squat box jumps with some Easy Lover going on in the background. Speaking of CrossFit music I've noticed that the selection is heavily rap-centric.  I'm fine with this, as it's mostly old-school, but I've noticed they always play the censored MTV version.  Lots of B.I.G and Dr. Dre.  However, they'll play the hell out of Rage Against the Machine's Bomtrack, which features a good 3 minutes of simply repeating "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me".  Not only does that seem to be inviting mutiny but it seems unfair to Biggie.  I was always more of a Tupac guy, but I got to say Biggie's getting the shaft on this one.

It was the usual cast of characters today with some notable additions.  There was one portly fellow who is a spitting image of Paul Giamatti, and another middle-aged guy who looked like the guy who ate Paul Giamatti.

 

This guy was dressed to the nines.  High performance gear head to toe (which, interestingly enough, seems to come in size XXXL). I'm not knocking the guy for trying to get in shape, I just think when you're clearly on the bottom rung of fitness it's best to blend in the background, not stand out.  We puss-bros have to stand together in anonymity.

The word of the day was Tabata.  It sounds like a delicious entree, or a worthless fringe outfielder that I carried on my fantasy baseball team all season waiting for him to break out and prove my brilliance, but apparently neither is the case.  It's the practice of doing sets of intense reps, then a short rest, and then back to the reps.  In this case, we were doing sets for 20 seconds with a rest of 10.  We did 8 sets of the following:

-Rows
-Pushups
-Situps
-Air Squats
-Pullups

We were told to keep a tally of how many reps we did in each set and total them up.  Naturally, my reps for the pullups were laughable.  Even using the bitch strap on one leg and full-on using a box to lift with my other leg I couldn't do more than 3 legitimate (well, chin over the bar) pullups.  The rest I just floundered about and made noises to indicate that I was working at it.  I didn't even want to know how The Guy Who Ate Paul Giamatti was doing. For all I know, he was rocking those things out like nobody's business. I didn't look, to protect myself from embarrassment, but the guy was making noises like a mammoth in labor.  I could hardly hear Zach DeLaRocha telling the establishment that he refuses to do what they tell him.

All around that was a pretty quick WOD.  The finisher consisted of Tabata sets of planking, v-crunches, bicycle crunches, and spiderman planks (I don't even want to explain that).

I did pretty well on those, but was sure as hell ready to be done when HeMan announced the end.  I jumped up and hauled my mat to the pile and threw it in.  I was a little perplexed why no one else did.  I know we had some stretching to do, but we don't need the mat for that.  We did a few of the usual stretches, and when we were done I bolted for my sweatshirt, pulled it on and was ready to jet out the door, but damn people were in my way.  Apparently, it's a common courtesy to spray your mat with disinfectant  and wipe it down.  I was kind of under the impression that my sweat was a gift to the next user, but evidently that's not the case.  It was too late to find my mat now and I was feeling like a real dickhole, so instead of my usual custom of elbowing my way through the doors I held it open for a lady.  I'm a motherfucking gentleman, fools.