Happy Halloween: My treat is a year's worth of progress

Trish, myself and Andrew after a Halloween Crossfit workout

Happy Halloween everyone!!! I hope everyone has a safe and fun Halloween this evening. I spent my Halloween evening working out with my friends at CrossFit Palo Alto. As always, we still made sure we had our fun (see picture of some fellow members in Halloween costumes they somehow worked out in). As I was recording my results for the evening, I had this feeling that I did the same workout last Halloween too because some of the quirky Halloween-themed names sounded familiar. I flipped back in my notebook, and not only had I done it before, but last Halloween was the first time I ever worked out at Crossfit. It was exciting to compare my results! 

The workout today was called "Hallow-bata". The objective was to do as many reps as you could of an exercise within 20 seconds. Between each 20 second interval there was 10 seconds of rest. We would repeat each exercise for 8 rounds of the 20 second intervals. Then, there would be a 30 second rest to allow us to move on to the next exercise. We did 4 different exercises in total. Our score consisted of the grand total of all the reps we were able to complete. The 4 different exercises and their Halloween-themed names were: 1) "Green Slimey Grasshoppers" - grasshoppers, which I've never done before Crossfit, consist of being in a push-up position and bending one knee and externally rotating that leg at the hip to get your shin as close as you can to the opposite arm; 2) "Headless Horseman" - not sure where this name came from, but I didn't lose my head thank goodness. It consists of picking up a kettle bell from the floor with one arm, putting the kettle bell in the palm of your other arm and then pressing it up. On the way down, you grab the handle with the same arm you used to picked it up and place the weight back on the ground; 3) "Cauldron Jumps" - box jumps, except we jumped over the box to the other side, and; 4) "Deadly Double Unders" - jumping rope with the rope going under twice with each jump.

Comparison of my results 1 year apart

The result? I was able to do 292 reps in total tonight, compared to 119 last year. I was amazed that in one year, I was able to do more than twice the amount of reps. Since it was my very first session last year, I wasn't as good about recording what I was doing (like the actual weight I used). I think it is safe to say, though, that I used less than the 12kg I used tonight, I vaguely remember just stepping up and down on the box instead of jumping, and I absolutely couldn't do double unders yet since I just started doing them a month ago. Today helped me appreciate how far I've come, and how much fitter I am now than I was last Halloween. It is difficult to recognize progress on a day to day basis, but seeing a year's worth of change was shocking! This is the best treat of all. Just to see how far I've come. Sorry I wasn't able to carve a pumpkin this year though... couldn't think of anyone I wanted to carve this year. I'll just share my pumpkin from last year, and maybe next year I'll do another...

My pumpkin carving from last year