Tag Archives: WOD

Thinking about doing Kelly

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From the Crossfit Subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/crossfit/comments/oy5t5/do_all_the_girls/

Goddamn, I’m sick. I mean, I WODded yesterday, but it’s now clear to me that I was in a delusional state induced by Tylenol Cold & Flu Daytime and Mucinex. And anyway, it didn’t really count because I did my Thrusters all wrong (as push presses…) and mostly felt like Weaky McWeakling. WODing with one of the wonderful but also ridiculously fit and shirtless Crossfit Nyack coaches didn’t necessarily help that feeling. My WOD had its analog in the nonsensical work emails I sent on Wednesday while high on industrial-grade Nighttime Flu medication. They went something like this:

So, you get the picture. THAT BEING SAID the comic above still made me laugh because it combined reddit with hyperbole & a half with crossfit jokes (aside: I plan to make my millions on a crossfit joke book). Today, Crossfit Nyack says they’ll be clapping me through   Kelly. Non-Crossfitters, Crossfitters name their workouts after girls sometimes. I’d like to think that their naming scheme is similar to the server naming scheme of Jonathan Reams who, last I worked with him, was naming all of his servers after girls he’d never met. This only became weird when he’d meet girls with one of his servers’ names. Cos “Hey, I have a server named after you…” is not exactly the first thing you want to hear when you meet a cute guy in a bar. In this case, Mr. Crossfit would meet a nice girl named Kelly in a bar and say “Hey, I have a workout that makes people want to die named after you…” and despite his rock-hard abs, outgoing personality and winning social network, Kelly would probably want to shrink into her sparkly shirt and Louboutins and find another bar.

But now, we’re back to the issue at hand: to WOD while it’s pretty obvious that without medication I am, in fact, still recovering.

To WOD or not to WOD — that is the question. Whether it ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer five rounds of rowing, box jumps and wall ball shots on Tylenol Cold while acting as a typhoid Mary for my box, or to take arms against this hacking and general feeling of unwell and by opposing them, to stay in bed — to sleep.

Ok, I’m cutting myself off. Enough of this. I looked up how long one is likely contagious with a headcold and I’m pretty sure I’m in the clear. I’ll head in and see how I feel when I get there.

10:07 AM EDIT: Worst idea I’ve had all week. I mostly just felt crappy and whined at everybody. Who kicked the sleeping turtle, indeed! I’m going back to bed.

Thesis

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There’s a reason I called this Save Me From Grad School.  I need saving.  I’m a thesis away from an M.A. in English Literature with a concentration on early twentieth century American shiznit.  My thesis will be on early twentieth century Jewish-American Literature.

No, I’m not Jewish. It’s OK, though. It’s what I like. Yes, I work in IT and spend my days worrying about data flow. It’s OK. I can be good at two things.

I tell people I want this degree like some girls I know want a really expensive purse. In my case, this purse is tens-of-thousands of dollars, but whatevs. I want this thing so bad, it hurts.

So, thesis. I’ve been avoiding registering for my thesis because I hit a wall. In December, I was done. Done. DONE. Done with a capital D and an exclamation point. Except thanks to the sunk costs cognitive bias, I wouldn’t say this to anyone. And I’ve worked through it. I joined a new gym, stopped eating anything that wasn’t a vegetable, fruit or discernable as meat (thanks, Tim Ferris! Thanks crazy CrossFit folks!) and working off three years of late-night readings, six-credit semesters, marathon paper-writing weekends and something that resembled a nervous breakdown in Spring 2011 (I actually did ask my therapist if he thought it would be OK to voluntarily check myself in somewhere. He, thank god, advised against it). In addition to my ridiculous mental decline, this has also taken the physical form flab and my rapid decline from respectable 8-minute-miles to my sad and lumbering 12-minute-miles.

Today, I did two WODs at Crossfit Nyack. Well, if we want to be technical, I think I did 3 WODs. I showed up at the gym at 8:10 AM with Jo Sinclair’s The Wasteland in my hand. I read The Wasteland until I caught a ride to the “throwdown” we were doing in Chestnut Ridge. And, I remembered why I’m doing this in the first place. I love this shit. I love Jo Sinclair. I love thinking about theory and narrative and all that goes with it. I just need to take a huge gulp of air and register. I went to the throwdown, worked out, came home, took a nap, and went back down to the gym and killed myself. It was spiritual. It was almost a ritual. Actually, it was more like an exorcism.

Afterwards, I came home, sat down, emailed the graduate director at Lehman, checked the start date for the Spring semester (January 27! I’m not too late!), and picked up The Wasteland again. If I can do three WODs in a day, I can write a 60 page thesis and be done with this motherfucker.

Watch out, Jewish-American literature. I’m coming to mess you up.