Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Dr. Darrell White's Personal Blog

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Posts Tagged ‘fran’

Sunday musings 4/5/15

Sunday musings…

1) Easter. For my young life two days each year were always tough. Easter and Halloween. Seems I always got sick. Turns out I’m allergic to chocolate. There you go.

Happy Easter, anyway!

2) Failure. “A stumble may prevent a fall.” Proverb of some sort.

That’s pretty good. Whether the endeavor is physical, mental, or spiritual, the act of righting oneself before calamity is instructive, no? One sees the upcoming fall and is somehow able to remain upright through recalculation, recalibration, and then realignment to the new reality.

Learning from a mistake in progress, as it were.

3) Competition. We finished up the Open season at CFB yesterday with the first competition held there in its brief history. We did something radical, at least as it relates to the various and sundry fitness competitions held at CrossFit gyms and elsewhere over the last several years.

We did CrossFit WODs.

I know, I know…that’s just crazy talk. Have a competition in which you do WODs that you do every month in your gym, WODs that have come up time and again on CrossFit.com. Classic couplets where the work lands squarely in the Phosphagen energy pathway. “Every Second Counts” kinda stuff. WODs where you have history, where you can track your progress, done in a competitive setting where proper form is required. Measurable, observable, repeatable with a dose of virtuosity.

The athletes did “Fran”, followed by “Grace”. The top five men and top five women then faced off in “Diane”. No epic beatdowns. No exotic or esoteric movements. Nope, this was the CrossFit we all thought of and all did back in the day when CrossFit.com and CrossFit Santa Cruz were all there was. Pretty much everyone came to the event with a history in all three WODs, and pretty much everyone left with a new PR in each one.

The strong did well. The technically proficient did well. Lots of lessons were learned by both the athletes and the spectators, most of whom are relative newcomers to the CrossFit world. Most of what they learned came from watching who won: the winners were both strong and proficient.

One lesson was particularly telling, although not at all unexpected by yours truly (10 years a CrossFitter). One athlete who competes at many an all-day slog-fest said afterwards that she almost didn’t enter the competition because she found the announced WODs “too easy.” During a congratulatory fist bump (she came in 3rd) she said how hard it was and how thankful she was that she participated.

Go back and read “What is Fitness”, CrossFit Journal vol. 1, #2. It says something about the evolution of CrossFit in the wild that a competition in which the athletes do “Fran” and “Grace” is considered novel. That classic “Girls” now constitute something that you program as a novelty. That after only 10 years an event named “The Three Girls Showdown” is considered somehow retro.

Once upon a time all you needed to stratify a group of athletes in a competition was one WOD per day, and I get it that the evolution of CrossFit as sport means that it is now necessary to ask more from the 1/%. I understand that there are individuals who need more volume in their training in order to perform at their highest level on the job. More of everything is called for in these small cohorts.

For the rest of us, though, whether in the gym getting our daily dose or in the arena competing against our last PR, we could certainly do worse than returning to what it was that made CrossFit what it is. Constantly varied functional movements performed at relatively high intensity. Start with yesterday’s WOD, “Angie”, the very first WOD I ever did. The one that left me in a quivering mass on the floor of a commercial gym 10 years ago.

Simple. Elegant. Brutal. Go get you some.

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at April 5, 2015 6:11 AM

Why “Fran” Still Matters

“Fran” came up as the WOD on CrossFit.com a couple of weeks ago. Then it came up at my son Randy’s Affiliate, CrossFit Bingo. For the umpteenth time since 1/1/06 I saddled up and did “Fran”.

I got crushed.

It’s funny…well, it’s always funny when someone ELSE gets crushed by “Fran”…but I was just talking with my friend Jeff about programming in general, and programming for old Guys like us in particular. We’re kinda wonky nerds when it comes to CrossFit programming, and we talk about this stuff all the time. Jeff said he no longer does “Fran” at all, so frustrated is he that he will never even approach his lifetime PR that he finds no value in doing “Fran” as Rx’d. Instead he does all kinds of variations on the theme as a pure training exercise, seeking the value of the work and not necessarily the comparison to a previous set point. I get that, at least to a point.

In that response lies the answer to a plethora of questions about CrossFit programming, and indeed CrossFit training itself. A benchmark workout by its definition is meant to provide a marker against which one might measure oneself. This is one form of the competitive nature of CrossFit, my beloved “you vs. you”. It is also a source of continued attack from outside the CrossFit community, that all CrossFit programming and training is necessarily performed in “attack mode”. Every WOD is only a successful endeavor if you go to that “dark place” in which PR’s are found. This is a gross over-simplification of not only CrossFit but high intensity exercise in general because it implicitly ignores the fact that the definition is “relatively high intensity”. There are some days in the gym when intensity is relatively not very high at all. Sometimes even on purpose.

While I fully understand Jeff’s sentiment (I will never get within two zip codes of my “Fran” PR), and I do find myself looking for “Fran Proxies” for most of my training, I still do “Fran” in both “as Rx’d” and scaled forms. Getting crushed by “Fran” the other day was just as important as a measurement as were each iteration on my way to that PR so long ago. IMO there is a definite value to knowing and understanding where your fitness stands at any moment (mine is challenged by the time issues of not enough time to train, and too much life stress affecting the quality of my non-training time), and “Fran” is as good a metric as any. I had little to give that day, but I still got back value from my training–I went to the gym and moved both my body and a bit of extra weight instead of just heading home from the OR.

We all lose a little bit of our objectivity when it comes to “Fran”, though. It’s the original WOD, after all; every CrossFitter in the world not only knows exactly what you are talking about when you say “Fran” but they can tell you pretty much every time they’ve ever had with her. There’s still much we have to learn from “Fran”, both about ourselves and about high intensity training in general.

“Fran” is pure CrossFit, a couplet that combines gymnastics and barbells in a time domain that allows us to work almost completely within the glycolytic energy pathway. Each time we are about to transition to the oxidative pathway we change exercises. Doing “Fran” is a worthwhile training exercise done as part of a fitness program that emphasizes variance as well as intensity. Even if your fitness has crested, if you are on the back side of the mountain in some way like my friend Jeff and I are, returning to a well-known benchmark to provide a measurement of your moment is still instructive. Knowing where you are at any given time gives you an important compass point that allows you to objectively evaluate why you are there and how you will get where you wish to be. Doing “Fran” as your WOD is step one on your way.

Viewed as either a pure training exercise or a near existential benchmark, “Fran” still matters after all these years.