REMINDER: This Thursday is the last Cool Cruel Summer event. We will be doing the hero WOD, Nick. Suerte Tequila will be onsite sampling delicious drinks! Pre-Order your Yellowbelly here! Bring a favorite drink to share!

25min AMRAP:
15 unbroken squat clean thruster slamballs (20/30)
400m recovery run

August 2016

Some of what you’re missing at the Cool Cruel Summer Series!

We’re all familiar with what lactic acid feels like in our bodies but do you know what is really happening? Your body breaks down glucose for energy and a byproduct of that process is lactate. At slower easier movements, because your body requires less energy, lactate can be reconverted into energy (through the Cori Cycle) at a rate fast enough that lactic acid does not begin accumulating, and thus you can continue moving. But in intense environments, where we as CrossFitters spend a lot of time, the lactate production can escalate to amounts that begin accumulating in the body, and through a lot of other mechanisms too long to discuss in this post, your muscles become acidic which in turn makes them need to slow down to slow the whole process down so your body can catch up at converting the lactate, and so you can go on living. In short, its a built in protection function of your body.
During last weekends Aerobic Capacity Seminar with Chris Hinshaw we discussed this in detail, and it is his opinion that the biggest bang for your buck in terms of running workouts CrossFitter’s should be doing is lactate training. If we spend time training our bodies on how to best deal with lactate then we can push further into intensity without hitting a wall. Lactate training can then be broken down into three categories: threshold, stacking, clearing. Today’s workout is clearing focused.
Rather than hitting every run with intensity and trying to achieve the highest score, today we encourage you to use the run as recovery. If you’re a good runner and your body is more adapted to this already then your runs may still be “fast”. The goal with today’s workout is to hit the slamball movement hard and fast (unbroken sets), accumulating lactic acid. Then we’ll head out the door and use our run to flush out that lactate, by running slowly. By slowly, we mean your marathon pace. Don’t have a marathon pace? Just imagine that it is really really slow. We want your runs today to be slow enough so that by the time you get back to your slamball you can immediately pick it back up and perform another unbroken set, for 25 minutes. We have some checks and balances in place to make sure this happens and as always scaling will be available to dial you in further.