Going For Broke

(I am still not done with my Potty Training piece below, but a PR takes precedence.)

Who: Me, 108 lb. (previous) + 7 lb. (excess), measured at 1 pm
What: 82 sets of VO2-max snatches, 15:15 protocol,
7 reps per set, 8 kg kettlebell
When: Wednesday, October 15, 2008, 8:45 pm - 9:26 pm
Where: @ EBM Kung Fu in Oakland (in the back room)
How: Just do it!

Last week at the same time, I did 40 sets, 20 minutes. That was the plan. I felt a little fatigued towards the end, no doubt from the expectation that the end was near. I executed. I earned my dessert. I ate my cupcake.

The overall game plan was to add 8 sets per week, so it would take me five more sessions to hit 80. Tonight I set the Gymboss in 15-second intervals, so 48 sets = 96 rounds. It is actually kind of cool that the Gymboss rounds decrease by 4 per minute - it seems to approach zero at a faster pace :-) I was running high on qi from the tai chi class (with some bagua to boot), so I just went for it. I was mentally counting each set and focusing on form. I am still not happy with how my left arm is snatching. So I was tweaking this, tweaking that, but always making sure that I completed 7 reps before the beep. At T = 16 minutes, I started counting down. Eight more minutes and I'd be done with 48 sets. At T = 20 minutes, I looked down at my hands for the first time and I saw blood. I was wearing fingerless cloth glove-liners and there's a bright red patch oozing from right below the left pinky. I perked up like a hungry vampire. Quick mental calculation - if I finished 56 sets instead of 48 today, I will have one less week of this hand-shredding nonsense to endure.

As soon as the Gymboss flatlined, I restarted the clock. Four more minutes! Four more minutes! Four more minutes! No term limits! And so it went. I lost count and my body went into auto-pilot. I didn't feel tired. I could feel the irritation from the bloody blister, but by that time I was going for broke and nothing could have stopped me. I became confused as to how many 15-second rounds should remain on the Gymboss by the end of 80 sets. By the time I figured it out - the answer is 32, since I restarted at 96 - I had six more minutes to go. I rallied. ROOOH AAAH! I began to compose this blog post in my head. When 80 came around, I felt like the Energizer Bunny. Why don't I let the clock run down? So I snatched two more sets. Okay, enough is enough. I should be practicing something else. I had the Viking Push Press on my to-do list.

By that time, people were coming into the room to change. (They were taking sanshou class in the main studio.) The extra Danish torture will have to happen on another day.

I will try the 36:36 protocol when my hands are all healed up, and then cycle back to the 15:15. Right now, I don't think I can increase my snatch cadence to 8 and still finish within 15 seconds, so my next goal is to use a slightly heavier weight. I am going to buy a 20 lb. kettlebell.

So, in summation, or multiplication, 82 x 7 = 574 snatches.
Or, in summary, or multiplicity, 1 snatch, 574 times. (And acknowledging W2 for first putting it this way, so poignantly.)