Finally admitting it

OK...OK...OK...I admit it...I HEART crossfit, and I don't know why. I've stopped asking myself 'why do you like it? It is kinda insane'...and just accepting the fact that as insane as it can be, I like it. I like the intensity. I like that in the middle of it you think "dude this sucks so bad" and then you finish it and think "AWESOME...i just finished that!!" The sense of accomplishment with pretty much every workout is totally worth it. The strength gains I have made over the past 5 months also are pretty awesome in my book. Here are a few:

1)Resistance bands for pull ups come in a variety of colors, black, green, blue, red and white. Those are in order of decreasing assistance (black has the most resistance hence will help you the most with a pull up). Once I got the hang of the kipping pullups and how they 'worked'...I was started on the BLACK band in January. I just recently moved down a band to the red band! Although if we have lots of pullups in a workout of the day, I do move up to blue.

2) I've started doing my pushups in my warm-ups with my knees off the floor, finally.

3) I FULLY accomplished doing box jumps on the 24" boxes...i started on 12" inch boxes and was generally afraid of the taller boxes to begin with. (I fall on things...that's not a good habit of mine)

4) I can deadlift well over my bodyweight and am closing in on 1.5. One day I hope to at least backsquat my bodywieght...i'm getting close.

There are many other little accomplishments, these are just a few. And while I enjoy these accomplishments, I still have a long way to go to get to some of the prescribed weights for a workout. Like this week on Wed our workout was 'Snelen' ('Helen' with snatches rather than kettlebell swings.) It looked like this:
3 rounds for time
Run 400m
12 snatches (supposed to be 45lbs for women, 95 lbs for men...me...i'm a weakling and could only do 22lbs)
21 kipping pullups

23:18 was my time. Pretty darn slow..someone did 10 something and I think there were times that were shorter than that too. But no matter, I'm improving.

Tuesday we did:
First we bench pressed: 5-5-5...i'm a weakling therefore I only pressed 68lbs.

Then the timed workout of the day was:
Run 400m
30 kettlebell swings (1 pood for women, 1.5 pood for men. pood = 16kg)
30 box jumps (24" for women, 36" for men)
30 knees to elbows (not even close to even getting my knees near my elbows...one day)
Run 400m

One of the guys made a comment that when doing kettle bell swings we should all be 'equal'...bla, bla, bla. (he just didn't want to do 1.5 pood which is about 55lbs)I had to point out to him that for me and the other woman who was doing the workout if you scaled the workout according to how much weight we as woman could throw around, we actually were swinging more weight proportionally around. I had pressed 68 pounds and the other woman had pressed something like 80lbs...and I had just watched this guy bench 200 pounds, so proportion to our upper body strength the women were doing 'more' so to speak. I know kettle bell swings aren't really the same muscle recruitment as a bench press...but it was more of an idea of that kind of strength ratio.

As we were doing the workout the three of us were kind of going back and forth as far as who was going faster on what activity. The guy could thrown down knees to elbows pretty fast so he ended up finishing first, but the other woman and I were still toe to toe by the time we got to knees to elbows. She actually was a little faster on everything and headed out the door first for the final 400m run. She took off...I took off...and it.was.on. I caught her before the turn around and finished well before her. She asked me afterwards "Did you used to be a runner? Cuz you smoked me on the run" OK I rarely ever hear something like that! But I just dug in for that last sprint and made it count for everything. Sweet.