I’m here in lovely Orange County, so I dropped in on my favorite Crossfit box.  It’s about half a mile from my hotel, and the walk/jog to and from there makes a good warmup/cooldown.  The place is always hopping, and the people are very nice.  I just go get an erg from the long line of well maintained model d’s that they have along the wall, set it up so I can watch all the people doing their Crossfit thing and do my session.

Today’s session is the last high intensity session before the race this Saturday, and boy was it a doozy.  Here’s the plan:

• 15 x 3′
• 1′ rest
• pace target: 1:52 (Actually 800m per interval was what I wanted to beat in each interval)
• rate target: 26
• No HR Cap

This is a classic Wolverine Plan “L3” workout.  The rests are not long enough to come close to fully recover, so you dig yourself in deeper and deeper as the workout progresses.

I attacked this session with vigor.  Maybe a bit too much vigor.  I was able to hold my pace below 1:50 for the first 7 intervals.  But I was in deep trouble by then.  I backed off a bit, but came close to blowing up in the 11th, about 1 minute into it.  I took a few strokes around 2:00, and then slowly brought the pace back down to around 1:54.  I rowed the next couple of intervals more conservatively, but I was running on fumes by the time I got to #14.  I purposely sandbagged that one so that I would have a chance on the last one, which I very much wanted to be ahead of target.  It was.  I was shaking all over and it took me a good couple of minutes before I could get off the erg.  This was a very good workout.

Add in another 10 minutes of LIT for the warmup.  So, 45′ of HIT and 45′ of LIT.  And a whopping 9 minutes of anaerobic.  Ouch.

Tomorrow:  Steady State Session.  4 x 20’/1′ rest at 185W.