Good morning and happy Monday! It’s been rainy and gray here for the past two days but I’m trying not to let it put me in a gloomy mood. Nothing eight hours of sleep, a pot of coffee and some doggie cuddles can’t take care of.

I wanted to share details with you on the CrossFit competition that I attended and the rest of my weekend but got distracted last night by the urge to tell you about santosha so we’ll cover those things now.

A group of CrossFit boxes in the Charlotte area have decided to take turns hosting “Throwdowns” where we all get together for a friendly workout/competition. The goal is to do them once a month and the first Throwdown was held at South Charlotte CrossFit on Saturday. I was planning on participating but when I got there it was a complete zoo and became clear that the event was going to last more like 4 hours than the 2 we had thought. My partner couldn’t stay so I decided to become the official photographer for the Metro team instead. Honestly, it was pretty intimidating and I was happy to be a spectator and not a participant in my first competition experience.

Here is how the competition went down. There was a strength and skill component before the teams moved into the MetCon (or WOD).

Strength
– 1 rep max deadlift, 1 rep max bench press
Choose one partner to perform DL and one to bench. Highest combined number wins.

Skill
– 1 minute maxes for muscle ups/pull ups
Each male partner will perform as many consecutive muscle ups as possible, then finish with pull ups. Each female partner will perform as many chest to bar pull ups possible, then finish with pull ups.  Scale = band. 5 points per muscle up or chest to bar, 1 point per pull up. Highest combined team score wins.

MetCon

400 meter sandbag carry (50/25#), 1 bag per team

THEN

21-15-9 (decreasing reps)
Power Clean (135/75#)
Toes to Bar (men) Knees to Elbows (women)

THEN

400 meter sandbag carry repeat
*Partners must remain together on the run. Each athlete must compete all T2B or cleans prior to switching exercises or rep schemes.

Got all that? Geez!!!

Our Metro team was amazing and put up some huge numbers for the strength portion of the workout. One of our guys got a new PR of 425 on the bench (seriously!) and three of our girls got huge new deadlift PRs. We’re talking like 265 pounds here. Crazy!

We are actually hosting the next Throwdown at Metro on Saturday, September 8. Event details here. We will be focusing more on getting everyone together to do a WOD and most likely will not include a strength/skill portion of the event in the interest of time. Maybe I’ll get brave enough to participate? 😉

So after that eye-opening experience I still hadn’t gotten my own workout in for the day so I headed out for a run with Sullie and then came in and did my own mini-WOD in the living room.

3 Rounds

20 air squats
20 tricep dips (on the coffee table)
20 lunges R
10 decline pushups (with feet on coffee table, hands on floor), 10 strict push ups
20 lunges L

And then I did a ton of stability ball crunches and called it a day. It definitely wasn’t a workout that lived up to the Throwdown but at least it was something.

After all of that CrossFitting, I needed to do something girly. Luckily, I had an appointment at the Laura Mercier counter at Belk for a special event. They were launching some new products/colors for their Fall line and had one of their national makeup artists in who frequently works big events/photo shoots with celebrities, Jarvis Johnson. I have been invited to a lot of these events but this is the first one that I have attended. It was quite an experience. I was warmly welcomed, given a glass of wine and then my artist spent over an hour with me doing full makeup. Jarvis came over to visit in the end and that’s when the eyes happened.

I am pretty sure that every artist they had working the event stopped by to stare and ask how he created it. It was weird because the blue tones actually made my very brown eyes look hazel. They thanked me for allowing them to do something a little more extreme for the education of their employees and sent me on my way. Although this was a fun look, it’s not something that I’ll recreate in my everyday life!

On Sunday I finally CrossFitted for the first time in 9 days. I think that’s the longest I’ve gone since I started CF back in February. We worked on snatches and overhead press for our strength work and then moved into this WOD. It was short but a major booty kicker. I kinda felt like my brunch was going to come back up after it.

So there you have it…CrossFit and makeovers. You never know what you’re going to get around here, huh?