Hey Crossfitters - I hope that you are all doing well and getting your WOD on!
On a recent trip to San Francisco I had the pleasure of visiting a pretty famous Crossfit in San Francisco. This Crossfit is owned by Kelly Starret. If you don't know who he is, he is the writer behind the Mobility WOD and if you have not seen this, I suggest you check it out. He has copious amounts of information related to mobilliy and flexibility. You can find a link to his site from the link below. The box is located right close to the marina district near the presidio
http://sanfranciscocrossfit.com/
During this trip, I wanted to get to one of Kelly's classes but the time slots just didn't work which left me with the 6 am slot. This box does not charge for drop in crossfitters but instead you make a donation to their local charity, nice idea! They also do not post the WOD's the night before, so good and bad because I do like to cherry pick but not in this case. Also, this is the only crossfit that I know about that is outside, they do have a covered area but its small and I have only been there when the weather was nice and quite honestly I can't imagine what it would be like to WOD in the rain.....
From my hotel, it was about 3 miles to the box and decided to jog there, so I left at 5:15 which should have given me plenty of time, at least that is what I thought. I got about half way when I ran into construction signs and a major detour and when your running this early in the morning in the dark it can be challenging to find your way around. At one point I was pretty turned around and honestly thought that I might not make it to the class. At one point I could see where I needed to get to but didn't know how to get there. Eventually I kept running and while I had to take the long way there, I did make it. Yes, I was 10 minutes late and thankfully there was no penalty for being late!
I arrived and after introducing myself to the instructor, I joined the 20 or so crossfitters in a warm up and stretch. The WOD for this day was strength and skill work, Wow, I really enjoy doing strength work for a couple of reasons, first of all I need to get stronger and I have found it helpful to get tips, feedback, and instruction from other trainers which has proved beneficial for my form.
WOD
Back squats to a box - find your max and then do 3 sets of 5 at 80%
then
Find your max box jump and hand stand skill work.
During the warm up, I met up with a nice kid who was back from school and training at crossfit until he heads back for the fall term. His name was Gary and he was on the rowing team at a small school in PA and he really enjoyed crossfit. We partnered up for the back squats. The idea here was to focus on really moving the hips back and sticking your butt out and keeping the knees stable while moving slowly to the box, we used a 18 inch box and after finding our max we moved to 3 sets of 5. This felt different than a normal back squat and more difficult. Best I could muster was 195 and so we moved on to our sets.
After our sets we moved to max box jumps and while rotating through this you were supposed to work on hand stand walks. Honestly, I do not remember what height I got to but Gary went higher than anyone that morning! Way to go Gary! I managed to put in some good hand stand walks, nothing super special but progress.
If you are ever in the downtown area and want to see how they do crossfit in San Fran, I suggest you visit Kelly Starett! Thanks again for allowing me to visit and WOD with you all.
Until we WOD again.
Steve Umscheid
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