Conquering Grace

So.....When I die, I would like my tombstone to say: Here lies Brittney, she made life her bitch.

Long winded story, the BF and I went to Hawaii and got married (yay) and I missed working out for 10 days (rest days are a good thing). I was checking out the workouts from home and they spent a week doing benchmark workouts, AKA the girls.

I love benchmark workouts because it is cool to measure your progress. We don't do a lot of benchmarks but when we do, it is cool to see how far you have come. I was super sad to miss these. I know I have come a long way and wanted to see if I could some of them.

THEN, there was a little competition event in L.A. last weekend called the Crossfit Games. I spent most of my weekend watching them, yelling at the T.V. and enjoying the community of the games. The final workout was "Double Grace." You read it right, double the grace workout.....

I have done Grace in the past but at 65lbs.

Grace is for time:
30 clean and jerks at 95lb (for women)

Essentially it is taking a weighted bar from the ground and cleaning it up to your shoulders (clean) and then raising it above your head (jerk), check out this video on what I am typing about.

Using some reasoning skills, I know I can clean 110lb and I can jerk 105lb, so I really wanted to do Grace at prescribed weight.

After asking (ok, begging) my coach, he agreed for me to skip the workout on Wednesday and replace it with Grace. So while everyone was running 1 mile, 60 pull-ups and another 1 mile run, I was in the gym conquering Grace.

We did our usual dynamic warm up and spent some lifting time, 5x3 of power cleans at 75lbs for me.

And then I got to work.

My plan of attack: Grace at 95lbs, split the reps into sets of 5. After the first 2, my plan switched to single sets. By number 12, I didn't think I could finish it. You see, I can clean and jerk a high rep but never more than 2-5 at a time. Then I started to only pull the bar up to my chest and dropping it. So all my plans of attack went out the window and I focused on finishing it.

And I did. 12:57 later, I was done and I made Grace my bitch.