It’s even more fun if you sing them in your head.
Saturday WODs are always fun. They’re not so much about serious weightlifting, or focused training, as just goofing off on the gym and having fun with friends. Don’t misunderstand, they’re still lung-busters most of the time, but I always feel more like I’m in a grade school gym class than an adult fitness center.
And that’s a good thing. Who didn’t love gym class?
Today’s WOD was a special, Christmas-themed edition, variations of which pop up at boxes all over the country at this time of year. CrossFit Dedication’s version is at left, and was billed as a partner WOD, with one person working at a time.
I partnered up with Katie again, and we quickly gathered our weights and divvied up the exercises. I’d do the cleans, she’d handle the snatches, then I’d go do pull ups, and we’d divide the rest on the fly, based on who was more out of breath.
The 12 Days of Christmas workout has the added complication of mirroring the song, a detail we promptly forgot when the clock started. I did my power clean and we started marching down the list of exercises, instead of doing 1, 2-1, 3-2-1, like we were supposed to. We got all the way to burpees before we realized what we were doing, and backtracked to catch up.
Once we were past that mix-up, we got into a rhythm and started really busting it out. It might seem like working with a partner would lower the intensity, but with the low rep counts per exercise, we were still both flying all over the place. With an eye toward speed, we started breaking up even the low rep exercises to get through them faster, clapping and yelling encouragement to each other.
The whole gym was happy chaos, with weights and athletes flying everywhere, barbells slamming to the ground and music blasting. It was hard work for Katie and me, but a couple people took it another step toward crazy and were doing it solo! Maybe next year…
Katie and I finished up in just under 29 minutes, which is longish for a CrossFit WOD, but still short enough that we never got to the misery stage. I was laughing before I even caught my breath, just at the childlike fun of the whole thing!
A sweaty Christmas tree.
If we do the same workout next Christmas, it’ll be fun to try it solo, or do it again with Katie and compare our results. But even if they change it up, I’ll look forward to it!