For time:
135 pound Thruster, 15 reps
Run 200 meters
95 pound Thruster, 20 reps
Run 400 meters
65 pound Thruster, 30 reps
Run 800 meters

Lights Out

Growing up I had a bedtime until I graduated from high school.  Yup, all through high school I had to be in bed by 9:30pm (not including Fridays and Saturdays, thank goodness).  That meant that I got eight and half hours of sleep.  T.S. Wiley, author of Lights Out, wouldn’t be impressed.

For any CrossFitting, Paleo-minded, interested-in-health-and-wellbeing athlete, Lights Out is a must read.  As CrossFitters and a community, we have grown to make the connection between processed foods, excessive carbohydrate intake, hyperinsulinemia, and a host of autoimmune conditions and medical diseases.  In T.S. Wiley’s book Lights Out, he goes back one step further and makes the case that the average person’s massive and habitual lack of sleep is really the precursor to excessive carbohydrate intake and the conditions that result.  And he makes a compelling case.

Here are two of my favorite excerpts.  One is a statement on disease and the other is a hypothetical walk through of a family in the US.

– All diseases that are not caused by contagion and injury are born of immune dysfunction by way of metabolism.

– In the 1940s, TV was rare.  By the mid-1950s, three in ten households were receiving visible radio waves.  Even in the heyday of Nickelodeonderived programming, harried houseivew only occasionally poisoned their families with TV dinners.  Now the average family has two adults employed full-time and eats out or from the freezer case at least four nights a week.  If that’s the norm in a two-parent family, imagine how rarely the average single-parent household gets a home-cooked meal. 

Mom either picks up the kids at day care and they go out, or she calls the baby-sitter to start boiling the water for the pastsa.  It’s already at least 6:30PM by the time dinner (pasta, juice, or low-fat milk for the kids, plus bread, and dessert) is ready.  Mom needs a drink just to keep going and there’s still homework, baths, and “quality time” to accomplish.  If Mom cooks a read dinner from more than two of the recognized food groups, instead of feeding the next genreation Cheerios or pasta, it’s even later.  And if she does that, Mom needs two drinks.

Now it’s at least 9:00 or 9:30PM and she still hasn’t had a minute to sit and stare after work.  In the summer, this would actually be okay.  But the scenario we’re describing is during the school year, which means “dark time” in nature, so this single-parent family or working mother with a lazy or on the other hand even harder working “absent father” will endure at least five, maybe seven, extra hours of light in a twenty-four-hour period, day in and day out for seven months out of season every year, year in and year out, decade after decade – until Mom gets breast cancer, her little girl has acne and is too fat to find her image in Vogue, and Junior, who is only 5’5″, has asthma.  If our imaginary dad is present, he has clogged arteries, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar.  

And how this all happens is a complete mystery to medical science.

The book is available in paperback and in iBooks and Kindle.  Although, if we’re going to get back to a healthy sleep pattern, T.S. Wiley wouldn’t recommend you purchase it on a backlit device.