Paleo Now Seminar at Crossfit LaGrange
Crossfit LaGrange Seminar
Thank you to Crossfit LaGrange for hosting the first Paleo Now seminar outside of Columbus. Great group of people with a great load of questions.
The seminar took about two and a half hours, which is a little longer than what I try to shoot for, but there were some great questions that really drove the seminar. It always surprises me how similar the questions are no matter where I go and who is asking them. Expect a few posts to cover some of the topics.
Some links that I referenced:
Baby You Want Some Cod Liver Oil With That Shake?
Also, when you’re at Crossfit LaGrange, you must WOD in uniform.
And that uniform is weight vest
One’s Poop
I recently moved in with someone way smarter than me.
So to paint the scenario: we had spent the day moving the majority of my crap into the new house. I had reserved a U-Haul, but the people at the 10th Street U-Haul (my first mistake) would deserve a brain tumor if they had the requisite organ. So this left us with his truck, strong backs, and degrees from an engineering school (important note: I was a history major and have a much weaker back, so I contributed mostly snappy remarks).
After loading an 800lb gun safe into a pick up truck without so much as a dolly, we consumed 2lbs of brisket while driving from Fort Benning to Exit 10 in Columbus. Not relevant to the story, but majorly bad ass.
After downloading the safe and prior to meeting with friends for boating and dinner, he was changing his oil while I retired to the internets to be a dork.
I saw this post on Mark’s Daily Apple: Japanese Scientists have successfully synthesized meat from human fecal matter
I’ll wait while you read it.
Yep, that means that they’re turning poop into meat in Japan.
It’s like Soylent Green…only so much worse because its poop.
Dear Japanese People,
This is why I made Tsunamis and Godzilla.
Love,
God
Holy Hirohito, why would you even try to do that. If you are so smart that you can make poop into meat, than you should be curing cancer or making a car engine that runs on blow jobs.
Why would you do this?
I had to know, so I decided to ask Erich.
While I was concern more with important things like: Would poop meat be considered vegan. Probably not, but maybe vegetarian, since its pushed out of the body like an egg. What meat could you confuse for poop, probably only ground beef. Or maybe they’d claim it was something fancy like duck butter. He approached it from a scientific angle.
He very calmly and rationally interrupted my lunatic being attacked by butterflies level of ranting to ask: “Matt, at the chemical level what is the difference between a pile of sticks, a plastic water bottle, and poop.”
Instantly I responded: “One’s poop”
If you need anymore reason not to eat synthetic poop meat….than I have nothing for you and I hope Mothra swoops in and destroys you.
By the way, the technical term for eating poop is corprophagia. Nobody wants that.
Read MoreEating Whistler
View from Whistler
Over the previous night’s dinner, I decided that I had seen all there is to see in Vancouver and to take a drive into the country. Google confirmed that I was about an hour away from the Whistler Ski Resort.
With that much thought and planning I decided to go skiing for the first time in about a decade.
I woke up early so I could go to Crossfit Optimum Performance, which was close to my hotel. Definitely a friendly crowd in that box. It was located downtown and about two-thirds the size of the 101 room at Inception.
The three part workout consisted of: A. 3 rounds for time of: 7 front squats 185lbs, 14 handstand push ups B. 3 rounds for time of: 12 Turkish Get Ups, 12 Knees to Elbows C. 500m Row.
I did well in all three and was the only one in a small class of six to do all workouts as prescribed. I love Turkish Get Ups, but doing them in a metcon is pretty trying. The first workout was a huge kick in the ass, especially the handstand push ups.
Following the workout, I had a mediocre breakfast of bacon and eggs and headed out to Whistler. The Sea to Sky highway was one of the nicer drives that I have ever taken. It was about an hour drive winding along the bay and through the mountains.
Whistler Village is really nice, although my upper limit for walking around a large outside shopping mall has an upper time limit of about two minutes. I got bored pretty quickly, but that lead to a kick ass lunch.
I walked around for a bit trying to find a good restaurant, and finally found one. Black’s restaurant had Bison ribs, beets, and new potatoes listed on the menu. After sitting down, I realized it was only available on the dinner menu. When I asked the waitress for a hamburger without any bun she gave me a weird look and asked why. I told her I was Celiac, and than she arranged to have the ribs made.
success
So that was an epic win.
I spent the afternoon skiing and than drove back to Vancouver. I once again devoured an inordinate amount of sushi for dinner.
The skiing was awesome. I had not done any skiing since I was a kid. I originally thought it was a decade, but doing math I realize that its now probably closer to fifteen years. Good thing I just thought of this, because that extra five years might have been enough to deter me.
I remember as a kid having a hard time getting enough momentum to really go fast. Either my definition of fast has changed, or the extra hundred pounds of my frame is enough to do the job.
I skied for about three and a half hour. I did only one green run. It was my first run and I spent the rest of the time going down intermediate runs. I never repeated the same trail twice and once accidentally found myself on a double black diamond.
No falls, but I probably looked like a moron inching my way down that hill.
My quads were on fire the whole time from all of the front squats and I definitely favored my right leg. Learning new sports is an essential and overlooked part of Crossfit.
I am very concerned about falling over
It really highlighted some physical skills that I am frankly terrible at. Unilateral work, balance, stabilization, accuracy, and fear of killing myself as I barreled down the hill. While my stylish combo of jeans and rental jacket that was at least two sizes too big may distract from it, the constipated look on my face is a reflection of the fact that I have so little balance that standing still on any sort of decline was next to impossible.
While not under ideal conditions, skiing was definitely something I’d like to do more often. Not like its the missing piece between where I am and being a firebreather, but it is fun and something different than the regular 3,2,1 routine
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UnRx Podcast Interview
http://unrxpodcast.com/post/6792117161/episode-7
Check me out on the UnRx Podcast talking about Rumble By The River, Paleo, CrossFit Inception, Crossfitting and Paleo while deployed, the future of the sport of fitness, and more. Subscribe in iTunes.
Don’t forget the Paleo Now Seminar at Crossfit LaGrange this Thursday
Read MoreEating Vancouver
When I decided to go to Vancouver, I really did not know too much about the city. My parents went there a few years ago and the best memory they had was the Chinese food. The reason why became pretty apparent once I was in the city.
First of all, Canadian customs is crazy compared to the TSA that I am used to. They were not all overweight, they seemed attentive to their job, and showed a concern with getting people through quickly. Things like opening extra lanes when there was a crowd. That was actually the only piece of culture shock I experienced the whole trip.
I landed pretty early in the morning, so I stopped into a cafe downtown and had ham (Canadian Bacon to be precise) and eggs for breakfast.
After that I hit a WOD at Crossfit Vancouver, which is one of the more famous boxes around. Pretty friendly group and really good coaching on my jerk. I set a ten pound split jerk PR at 185lbs. Not too bad considering the flights and that I was feeling a bit sluggish from the beer.
It was weird to go to a place that makes warming up the member’s responsibility and includes that on their waiver. I was wary of this at first, but everyone showed up early, did the posted warm up, and than worked on weaknesses.
This is something we need to work on at Inception. Every member has something they can/need to work on before class. I know a lot of people show up running on a tight schedule from work, but it only takes a minute to do the Burgner Warm Up on your own. Even less to work on your dead hang pull ups or hit one of your favorite mobility pieces.
After that I went to an all you can eat sushi place, as recommended by one of the coaches there, and did some work. I love sushi and I probably cost the place a small fortune.
Vancouver has a really large Asian population, and is right on the water. The sushi there was the best I had ever had. I know that everyone will scoff at the amount of rice that I ate, but completely worth it and way better for me than the beer I had the night before. I do not think I’ll ever eat sushi that quality again, so I can file that under my once-in-a-lifetime transgression folder. I did not eat any of the soy sauce, because that is definitely not worth it.
Sightseeing in Vancouver was pretty good. There was not too much manmade to see. Stanley Park was definitely the highlight of the city. Its really an area where the natural beauty is way greater than the manmade beauty.
I spent a good amount of time walking around, especially through Stanley and Vanier Park. Vanier Park had some enormous driftwood logs on the beach. I of course cleaned and jerked them, well the ones that I could. Normal people break a sweat when sightseeing right.
That night I had Dim Sum in Chinatown. Once again it was at a recommended restaurant. The quality of those two places was enough alone to make the trip to Crossfit Vancouver worth it.
Dim Sum…well there’s no way to justify that other than delicious. With the sushi you can argue about the amount of Omega-3s and vegetables and on and on. Dim Sum, not so much. It was delicious.
I walked to and from the restaurant and spent a good amount of time just wondering around the city. I brought my lacrosse balls and a jump stretch band with me and caught up on my mobility WODs before bed. No rest days, even on vacation.
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