Finding New Places

A View From The Run

Yesterday we hopped in the car and drove a few miles down the road to a place called Mills Canyon Park. I was hoping for a bad ass trail with steep slops and rocky, technical passes, but, because it was in the hills, west of El Camino Real, I expected to see a wide, perfectly formed path through a tree-lined park.  Well, my hopes were answered, and my expectations were thrown to the side!  This place absolutely rocked!

The trail only led us about a mile and half in a god loop around the canyon, but it was an awesome trail.  Rocks, roots, trees, steep (and I mean STEEP) ups and downs, branches and bushes in the way, off-shoots through the creek and other excitingly scary nooks and crannies.  This trail is going to be visited on a pretty regular basis for sure!  We went through it pretty slowly, one time around, just to see what it was all about. I'll bet there are more like this, but even better less than a mile west, deep in the hills that separate the Pacific from the Bay.

Later in the day it was hang snatch practice, snatch grip, behind the neck push jerks, and Turkish get ups.  Both of us started to feel a lot better with this technical move, still a ton to work on, and I know that my lack of experience with this particular lift was getting more clear as I got heavier.  I was able to get my legs to engage more at the start of the movement, while letting my upper body wait until the last moment to pull.  I was able to get the lockout simultaneous with the foot plant, meaning I was moving faster throughout.  My shoulders are still the biggest issue here, and as I got heavier, I was getting the bar up easily, but I was able to lock my elbows out of some subconscious fear that I was going to tear apart my shoulders.  This led to having to dump the bar too many times.  We did a ton of reps, and I was happy to be able to pull out 155# at the end of it all.

The push jerks felt a lot better than last time.  I was getting under the bar so much faster, allowing my bodies downward movement to lock my arms out rather then trying to muscle the weight up.  I got 4 reps at 215# and felt very comfortable with that weight.  Finally, the TGU's.  I used a barbell and was able to get 95# with a little struggle.  I ended up cutting the session short there as my mind was wondering and I just could not seem to focus on getting the last two sets, oh well.

Saturday is the fifth annual "Fight Gone Bad" fundraiser that has impressively grown over the years in the CrossFit community.  Lindsy and I just so happen to have FGB scheduled into our programming for that day, it'll be fun knowing that we are doing such a tough workout with so many thousands of others around the world.  Check it out.

Never Stop, GET FIT.

Josh Courage