Garage with Nick: Helen and EMOM

My longtime friend Nick took me up on my invitation to do weekly Sunday morning workouts.
 
Like me, he's a dad of young kids and getting to the gym consistently can be a challenge.  Sunday mornings seems like a good time to sneak in a workout without being too disruptive to all the other demands on our time.

Nick isn't a newbie to fitness, by any means.  He's lifted weights (off and on, I think) as long as I've known him and has run marathons in the past.  As an athlete, he's definitely a cut above me.  When we played Frisbee, he was always way faster.*   When we were teenagers, if we ever wrestled, he'd ragdoll my overweight body around with shocking ease.  (I preferred to tap out his scrawnier brother, Jim.)

Nick hasn't done a ton of CrossFit-style stuff, though, so I thought this would be a nice change of pace for him.

For his first outing, I introduced him to a classic CrossFit WOD:

A. "Helen"
3 rounds, for time:
-400m run (or, in our case, around my block which may be a bit farther)
-21 bell swings (I used my 28kg KB, and let Nick use my 24kg)
12 pull-ups  (Nick had yet to be introduced to the wonderful cheat code known as kipping, so he did 6 deadhang pull-ups, instead)

This took me 15:30, which is considerably slower than my best ever Helen time.  Like, 5-6 minutes slower.   It was probably the slightly heavier kettlebell.  Yeah.  That's it.

This was rough, but I guess that's the point.


B. 12-minute EMOM, in alternating minutes:
1. 20 double unders (Nick did 30 seconds of single skips, which is actually harder)
2. 10 sandbag squats.

We got through this.  Next time we could up the work a bit more, but it was a good start.

And Nick texted me to tell me he was pretty sore the next day.  So was I.



*(and more skilled and more handsome and with better hair)