A Cure For Migraines

Warm up: Pick a "goat", Coach Burg's snatch clean progressions
WOD: Power cleans, 1-1-1-1-1-1-1

I went to bed last night sick to my stomach from a migraine. I can tell you that my pulse was probably in the upper 60/lower 70 bpm because I could feel the veins pulsating in my head. I have had some sort of headache since the 13th of September, on and off, but mostly on. I woke up with the same headache and having hot flashes that would've made me look like I was up in flames had you looked at my image through a thermal lens. Yet somehow, after I got up and started warm ups today, my headache dissipated. As I sit here typing, however, I can feel it coming back. I think the physical activity I'm doing at CF every morning somehow diverts the flow of blood to my muscles and lessens the pressure in my head. Just a theory.

What is this goat thing? you may ask. Are you guys doing CrossFit with farm animals? While I wouldn't put that past some of the local yokels, no goats were harmed at the gym today. A "goat" is something that is a roadblock for you, something that you could use some practice on. Box jumps can be a goat for some because of the tricks your mind will play on you about the height of the box. For me, pull ups will always be a goat until I can get up there and knock them out like a pro, doing the kipping and going all the way up on my own strength. I worked on doing good jumping pull ups and then practiced kipping back and forth. I can tell I'm getting a better range of motion on the kipping but still lack the strength to pull up my body weight. With a little practice, I think it will come.

The snatch clean progressions break down each step of this olympic lift into three reps each, finally putting them all together in one fluid movement at the end. We did these with the PVC pipes, so we weren't bearing weight but working on form and warming up those joints we would need for today's WOD. Pretty easy, pretty fun.

When we got ready to do power cleans, we did lots of practice with PVCs before actually handling the bar. It was a little intimidating to finally pick up something heavy, but once I did that and did it with the proper form, I was so proud of myself! Now for the real test -- adding weight...

I started off with 65# and got that up easily. Once I added what I thought was 10#, I just couldn't get up past the shrug. I was so bummed! Long story short, I had not added 10# -- I had added 10 kg! Big difference! Basically I had unwittingly gone from 65# to 85#. No wonder that weight wasn't going anywhere! So the girl working with me swapped out kg's for lb's and we got to cranking them out. She and I finally topped out at 80# successfully! WOO HOO!!! I worked well past the WOD requirement of seven reps because I really wanted to see how far I could go, and once I got up to 80#, I was sooo close. I failed a couple of times but was just too close to walk away from it. Finally, that last time I got it up there, and let me tell you -- that felt gooood. :)

Side note: I have learned the art of a good bail. A couple of times I either lost balance and rocked too far back or just couldn't get underneath the weight properly. Allowing myself to fall and just letting the weight go was all I had to do, and I was able to dump the weight safely. Check!

Posted weight: 65-65-85F-85F-70-70-75-75-80F-80F-80