Ahmad the Jump Roping Fool
Today was 300 workout day. When I got there I hopped on the recline bike to do my 5 minute warm up routine. As I did I noticed in the back room where I do my thing, there was a younger guy doing jump rope. I thought to myself that it would be rather annoying to have someone jump roping while I am going through my self inflicted torture but I was sure by the time I got back there and had everything set up, he would have surely moved on to something else. I was wrong.
I got back there and started to get set up and Ahmad (I found out his name after he answered his cell phone with hip hop ring tone) was still jumping rope, poorly. The gym has several jump ropes, one of them is the conventional type, the other two are rope with little plastic cylinders covering the rope. I don’t understand the point of it. I suppose the thought is the plastic would protect the rope and keep it from wearing out? The reality is the plastic makes the rope bounce off the floor more making a racket at the same time as making the user trip.
Well Ahmad didn’t get it and he kept jumping rope badly. He would normally get less than 10 reps in before he got the rope stuck on his feet. Many times he only got 2 or 3 reps in before failure. I am not sure if his goal was to do like 1000 reps but the kid was jumping rope well into my routine, only stopping when I was maybe two thirds done. When I am exerting myself hard physically, my temper is on a feather light switch. I felt the urge in my throat to say to the kid “What the F are you jumping rope for if you can’t jump rope??!! Christ!” I mean I am straining to crank out the last of my double digit reps and I gotta hear the f’in plastic rope banging off the hard rubber floor non-stop. I was really getting annoyed. When he did finally stop and went to doing some sort of ab exercise with equally bad form I thought I was finally freed from his rope jumping antics. I’ll be damned if he didn’t come back as I was cleaning up the weights and start up again. It was like someone told the kid if you jump rope incessantly it will make your penis grow.
Anyway I had some good results in my workout. I decided to stick with my one arm at a time Clean and Presses. I have seen conflicting info about what is the preferred way to do it. Although pressing 36 pounds with your legs is definitely easier than 72 pounds, lifting weight only one side at a time creates an imbalance that requires you to use your core to compensate for which is a good thing in my book. Plus it is f’ing hard enough as is.
I went up in every single exercise as you can see in the log. I was most proud of upping my box jumps to twenty (even though I took a few second breather between a couple reps at the end) and upping my last set of pull ups. I am so tired by that point that doing more than 10 is just an incredible chore. I hung on the bar until I could squeak out number 11.
I was very surprised that after last Friday’s workout I had minimal soreness the day after. It will be interesting to see how I feel tomorrow.