I'm a Filthy Beast

It's never a good sign when you walk into your box and in place of the strength/skill portion of your workout it says "Don't die!". If I hadn't already been thinking about scaling down the number of reps, I was at that point, but I decided to just give it my best shot and see what happened and...

I did it! I completed the filthy 50! WOOOOOOO!!!

It wasn't easy, and by the time I got about half-way through the burpees I actually started to question whether I would finish, but I pushed on at my snail's pace and at about 30 reps I pulled something out of me I didn't know I had and knocked the last 20 out in 2 sets of 10. That only left some jumping rope, which at that point wasn't going to stop me. 38 minutes and 30 seconds later, I was done! Here's what I did:

50 Box jumps (24/20) - scaled to step up/down
50 Jumping pull-ups
50 Kettlebell swings (70/53) - scaled to 26 lbs
Walking Lunge, 50 steps - knee has to touch the floor, damn that makes it harder!
50 Knees to elbows - scaled to v-ups
50 Push press (45/35)- Rx!!
50 Back extensions (on the GHD machine)
50 Wall ball shots (20/14) - scaled to 10 lbs
50 Burpees
50 Double unders - scaled to regular jump roping, which meant I got to do 150 reps

That's 600 reps of challenging stuff by the way, 600!

Tomorrow is an easy recovery swim day and I am going to have absolutely no qualms about doing as little as I want, even if it's just 500 yards and then sitting in the hot tub for as long as I can stand it GUILT FREE.

I've officially been doing Crossfit for 2 weeks now and I can say that nothing has ever led to so much pain, so often in such a short period of time (my WODs often take 10-11 minutes, not nearly 40). It's astonishing to me how hard I thought I was working in Body Pump and my other workouts. What a wake up call. To me, more than anything else, this is evidence that this is what I need to be doing to see the best results. Bob Harper of The Biggest Loser agrees. He does a nice job of summarizing my feelings and it's really encouraging to see that it's true for someone at a much higher beginning fitness level than me.