a wedding weekend

Spent the weekend at a wedding celebration in Austin and loved seeing old friends (especially the ones who mentioned this wonderful piece of internet literature you're reading right now). Always fun talking to people about what I'm doing or mentioning paleo and then randomly finding out that three other people at your table are doing it as well. I'm trying to remember all the questions people asked me and share them here, but alas the combination of heat and wine (okay mainly wine) has me drawing some serious blanks. Most of the questions were about cost and commitment, but as I told everyone, you should just go try one of the free sessions. I promise it will break you physically, maybe even mentally, but you'll want to come back for more.

I've hit some weird bumps in the paleo road, namely I feel like my taste buds are changing. Food I used to eat all the time just isn't appealing to me, in fact tonight I couldn't stand all the squash I had prepared (I made about a pound of butternut squash puree for a quick side dish) to eat throughout the week, and ended up throwing it out (along with the cauliflower mashed potatoes experiment). On the bright side I'm really beginning to like chicken, which is a strange development. Growing up (heck, up until last week, and it still is true mainly) I would ALWAYS get beef if available. I didn't like chicken, didn't want to go near it or it come to me. It's always a fun dynamic to go to wing joints with friends (pluckers, buffalo wild wings, etc) for 50 cent wing night and order the burger. Anyway I've been more adventurous and have really started enjoying good flavorful chicken (aka marinated properly). Unfortunately I'm not confident in my ability to cook chicken quite yet, so I'm "settling" for whole foods chicken that is pre cooked (meaning that day, not the frozen variety) and I just have to heat up on the stove. Delicious. I'm wondering if this new found chicken craze will help me drop some more unwanted body fat quicker. One can only hope.

I wanted to share the workout we did friday because it was a MONSTER:

(Don't remember the warmup)

WOD:

400m run
35 overhead squats (45lb bar)
35 front squats
35 back squats
400m run
35 press
35 push press
35 push jerk
400m run
35 hang power clean
35 hang power snatch
400m run

Use the same weight, in this case a 45lb bar for the entire workout. Just looking at the sheer numbers, you should probably be thinking "thats insane", and I assure you it was. With a 35 minute cutoff I skated in at 31:07 and absolutely collapsed.

I guess one of my favorite things about crossfit, is that everytime my roommate asks about how the workout was, I can only think to respond with a "horrible, wanted to die". Every workout pushes me to my extreme limits, WAY past the point of pure exhaustion and sometimes into the "I can't see" phase. Both Andrew and Charlie know are very good about staying on me to make sure I don't rest too much if I need a quick break (I try to limit myself to less then 10 seconds, but sometimes you feel like you need 10 minutes), and I appreciate them for always making me work harder.

I know I usually give progress updates on sunday, I didn't weigh myself today but I was 173 on Saturday before we left for Austin. In an upcoming post, I'm going to re-post all of my baseline stats and note the improvements I've made since.