Muscle ups!

Today at crossfit we did “nasty girls”.

“Nasty Girls”
3 Rounds
50 Air Squats
7 Muscle Ups
10 Hang Power Cleans (135/95)

I usually do my muscle ups banded (either on the bar or on the bands).  Bar muscle ups feel more comfortable to me, probably because I’m never on the rings for anything else and pull-ups happen to be my favorite exercise!  They also take more out of me, but that is probably because I pull the band too tight when I use it on the rings and make it too easy for myself! Today, Joe pushed me to try jumping into the muscle up from a box instead.  I did a couple before the wod and felt pretty good!

Then we started the wod.  The jumping muscle ups got REALLY HARD REALLY QUICK!  But I got all of them in! 🙂  My triceps are gonna be sooooooooooore tomorrow!

Also, I PR’d my push press by 10# for a total of 105#!!!  Woohoooooooo

Totally unrelated, today is my last day at my job, so I’m obviously blogging instead of working.  

Happy Friday 🙂

Paleo confessions

No, I’m not going to confess all the champagne and cheesecake I had this weekend… it was my bridal shower this weekend, give me a break.  🙂

I consume 3 things on a DAILY basis that are not paleo.

1. Pre-workout drink.  It wakes me up before Crossfit, gives me more energy to lift heavier and faster, and it’s a lot quicker for me to get ready in the mornings than coffee.

2.  Protein shake.  It’s loaded with protein, it’s a quick way for me to get protein right after working out and it tastes pretty damn good!!!  If I don’t take my protein shake right after I work out, it will be about 2 hours before I get anything in my stomach after working out, and you don’t want to encounter me when I am that hungry.

3.  Coffee creamer.  Guilt pleasure.. I have no excuse.  I’ll be in the kitchen at work (where people know how I eat), having a conversation about paleo, while pouring my coffee creamer into my coffee.  I’ve been called out on it more than once.  It’s almost embarrassing, but I still use it every day.  

I wanted to put that out there more of a disclaimer before this next paragraph.  I am in no way perfect, I don’t follow paleo 100% but I try to use my head about it.  I don’t eat something bad for me and try to justify it.  I “like” a lot of Crossfits on facebook, I like to see the different WODs, the set up of the boxes, maybe I have friends that go there, or maybe I’ve visited or thought about visiting that box.  The other day I saw a local box post about a “24 day Advocare challenge”.  I looked up advocare and saw that it’s basically a TON of supplements, appetite suppressants and meal replacements… MEAL REPLACEMENTS????  REALLY????  If you are hungry, then you should EAT!!!  And eat real food!!!  No need to suppress your appetite or replace a meal with a shake!  I was extremely shocked to see a Crossfit box promoting this.  Seems like a gimic and not quite in line with what I understand from Crossfit/paleo.  I’m sure it works, I’m sure you can lose weight, but does it really fall in line with Crossfit and paleo?  Is that really healthy????  I don’t feel like this is something that a Crossfit box should be promoting or selling. The box that posted this “challenge” is one that is close to my house and if my situation ever changes and I’m not able to go to OCCF, this one would be an option for me.  It’s not anymore.

Here is a blog I read when researching Advocare.  http://whole9life.com/2010/08/supplements/

Crossfit Games Open 13.1

This morning was my first Crossfit Games Open workout.  The anxiety that I felt yesterday waiting for the workout to be released is almost comical.  I refreshed the Crossfit Games website every 10 seconds at 5pm to make sure I got it right away and didn’t miss anything.  Honestly all I wanted was a workout that I didn’t have to modify anything.  I can’t do muscle ups or double unders but mostly anything else I can deal with… well anything but burpees.  I hate burpees, but who doesn’t?!

Here is the workout (The men’s weight is on the left, women’s weight is on the right)…

Open Workout 13.1
17 minute AMRAP of:
40 Burpees
30 Snatch, 75 / 45 lbs
30 Burpees
30 Snatch, 135 / 75 lbs
20 Burpees
30 Snatch, 165 / 100 lbs
10 burpees
Max rep Snatch, 210 / 120 lbs

Seeing as how I’ve only snatched 75# twice in my life, and both times were on Monday I was just hoping to get through 5 of them for a total score of 105.

We partnered up in class and went in two heats so that we could judge each other and my friend Carrie went before me.  Her PR on Monday was 80# as well.  I watched her fly through the burpees and snatches, she got them up one after another and made it look so easy.  She got through all of the 75# snatches and had time to complete the next set of 20 burpees with 5 seconds to spare, for a total score of 150!  I thought, ok maybe I can do this… maybe I can get higher than 105.

Then it was my turn.  I hate burpees- did I mention that?  40 burpees, at one time?  That blows.  The 45# snatches were not too bad- then it’s back to more burpees… I was doing them pretty slow at this point.  I got to the 75# snatches with about 10 minutes left on the clock.  I can do 30 snatches in 10 minutes right?  NOPE!  I tried about 5-10 times and couldn’t get it over my head.  I was SO frustrated and thought, ok I’m not even going to hit my 105 goal.  Carrie was cheering me on and Joe came over and told me to PULL harder.  I did.  And I got it!  After that I think I only failed on one or two after that, I got through 14 of them before the time was up.

Am I happy I beat my goal?  Of course… but my goal was too low.  I could have done better.  I should have done better.  If I hadn’t wasted so much time in the beginning not pulling hard enough, I might have gotten 5-10 more in.

I know my scores aren’t going to compare to half the girls out there competing around the world but there is something about doing something like this that makes you push yourself beyond what you would do on a normal day.

OCCF is doing the open wod again on Saturday.  I have a really busy day and I’m afraid it’s going to be an all day event and I won’t have time.  BUT I really want to beat my score.  I’m realizing now that I should have made time on the next 5 Saturdays for re-dos.

Here are some pics of my 13.1 workout!

If I had known this was a “take your shirt off kind of day” I would have worn my pink sports bra.  Ugh.

Chin to bar and pineapple burgers

Chin to bar- It sounds like I’m talking about pull-ups, doesn’t it? I’m not. I wish I was.

At Crossfit on Monday morning we were going through the burgener warm up progression for snatches before we worked on our 1rm. Well, Joe (my coach) always tells us to make sure that we are quick and to bring our elbows up high and outside. Well, maybe I had too much coffee that morning, or maybe I just wasn’t thinking clearly but I brought my elbows up TOO HIGH and TOO QUICK. For whatever reason, I happened to be biting my lip (must be all the 50 shades of Grey I was reading a few months back). The bar slammed into the bottom of my chin at what felt like 50 miles per hour, forcing me to bite down on my bottom lip. I quickly ran to the bathroom to clean up the blood and VERY CAREFULLY finished my warm up. My lip felt as if was as thick as the bar that did the damage, and entire mouth was throbbing for about 5 minutes afterwards. Luckily the swelling went down pretty quickly and a friend told me that it looked like I had lipstick on my bottom lip.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve seen blood at CrossFit and I’m sure it won’t be the last. One time I ripped a mole off my chest doing power cleans and front squats. Yes, completely ripped it off. I had no idea. I didn’t feel a thing. I don’t remember what else was involved in the WOD that day but I was walking away from the bar and a fellow Crossfitter pointed out that I was bleeding. I don’t know if any of you have ever ripped a mole off before but it doesn’t stop bleeding for quite some time. I went through a few different bandaids and had a mess to clean up when I was done but you better believe I finished the WOD!!!

Ok back to my lip- it has hurt like a bitch for the past couple of days (finally starting to feel better) and everything that I ate on Monday had a slight blood flavor. Yum.

On a brighter note, I PR’d my snatch by 10 pounds for a new record of 80 pounds! 80 didn’t feel as heavy as I expected but I couldn’t get 85, I’m pretty sure it’s mostly mental but it’s amazing how heavy an extra 5 pounds can feel! I can hear Joe saying, “Get UNDER the bar” in my head as I think about it.

For dinner last night I made pineapple stuffed burgers with sliced sweet potatoes. I wish I could take credit for the pure genius that is this burger but I can not. I actually took a recipe that I saw on Paleomg.com and adjusted to my liking (I do that a lot). It’s kind of like a Juicy Lucy but with pineapple instead of cheese… and no bun of course. Amazeballs.

A link to the original recipe is below, I used all beef instead of chorizo because I just don’t like chorizo. For whatever reason, paleo recipes never tell you to use salt and pepper… I added salt and pepper to my beef when I mixed it, along with garlic powder. I made 8 patties and then put the pineapple slice in the middle of 2 and turned it into one patty (4 burgers total). I used about a pound of beef and definitely should have used more. Once the burgers were made, I needed to cook them in bacon fat but I didn’t have any SOOOO I cooked a few pieces of bacon and used the grease to cook my burgers. Took me about a total of 15 minutes to cook the burgers thoroughly. Once they were done, I put the bacon strips on top of my burgers along with some guacamole!

original recipe- http://paleomg.com/pineapple-stuffed-chorizo-burgers/

For those of you that are not interested in paleo, please look up the recipe for a Juicy Lucy and sink your teeth into one as soon as physically possible.

Welcome :)

Ummm…. hi there.  So I made a joke a few weeks ago over instagram about how I want to change my career to food blogging…. as silly as it sounded at the time, I started taking it pretty seriously.  Well, not the changing career part because let’s be honest, it’s not gonna pay my bills.  Please go easy on me as I’m no professional blogger.  The only experience that I have with blogging (as embarrassing as this is to say) was with a blog I participated in with a few other girls to share our horror stories from match.com.  It was fun, but it only lasted a few weeks.  I plan on being interested in paleo, crossfit and blogging about my life for a bit longer than match.com.  🙂    On a side note- if you are interested, here is a link to that blog.  http://memoirsofmatch.blogspot.com/  And no, I will absolutely not tell you which one I was.

So, why bacon, barbells and bliss?  Well, my first choice was already taken, “Eat, lift, love”.  I’m still pretty upset about that actually.  I wanted to involve paleo, crossfit and my life, because those my 3 favorite things and I know I have ADD too much to stick to one topic.

Bacon- Everyone that does paleo loves bacon right?  Correct.
I like food… a lot.  I like to cook food, take pictures of my food, eat my food and talk about my food… in that order.  Notice I didn’t say I like to clean up my food.
Here is a picture of the view from my kitchen.

Barbells-  I have been doing CrossFit for about 9 months at Orange Coast Crossfit, I love it.  I’m not that good at it, but I love it.  Everyone that knows me knows that.  I’ve gotten every comment from I’m too obsessed to I look great.  Whether the comments are positive or negative, they all make me happy because I’m doing something that makes me really happy.  Up until about a month ago, I used to see my fiance after every morning WOD (That’s CrossFit for “Workout of the day”) and the moment I would walk through the door I would say, “Hey babe, guess what I did today at CrossFit?”  I’m positive that it annoyed him but he’s pretty awesome and put up with it.  🙂  I don’t see him after CrossFit anymore, and not everyone on my facebook cares about my snatch PR as much as he does, soooooo I’m gonna tell all of you about it.
This is my box (That’s CrossFit for “gym”)

Bliss- My life is kind of awesome and I want to share it.
This is my bliss.

Disclaimer: I am not a nutritionist, a coach or anything along those lines.. and I’m not going to pretend to be.  I’m not here to tell anyone what they should do, but rather to share what I am doing.  🙂

If you don’t like Crossfit, paleo, or me you probably won’t enjoy this blog very much.

Happy reading 🙂