Kids, don’t try this at home.
Our build-out process went very smoothly. We did everything perfectly on the first try and didn’t make any mistakes. Operating out of a garage space is a piece of cake and it’s easy to accommodate everyone that shows up for a WOD because we have all the equipment we could ever want.
HA! Yea right.
Here are some highlights and tips for starting a garage facility:
Put metal cages around any exposed light bulbs – The ceiling of our garage is high enough to jump rope inside (sweet!) but apparently not underneath the light bulb. Smashing the bulb into a million slivery pieces onto a floor where people place their hands and lay down is a tedious exercise in thorough clean-up.
Weather – have a back up plan. 16″ of snow, no problem. Get creative. Shovel for warm-up. Snow angel burpees. Practice POSE running technique on the sheets of ice covering the road!
Temperature inside the garage - Our garage is nothing more than a one-car framed wood box with a cement floor. If it’s 32 degrees outside, it’s probably 34 degrees inside. Tell me this, are you inspired to do a WOD while glancing up at a frost covered pull-up bar?? Seriously, frost and ice particles! Ever seen A Christmas Story?
Sure, ok, I understand that Flick sticks his tongue to the frozen flag pole and not his sweat covered hands; HOWEVER, I had visions of my sweat covered hands freezing to the pull-up bar, then me being stuck in a never ending lat stretch, and having no way down but for Eric to rip me and my hands from the bar while my hard earned and well-kept calluses remained frozen in place.
So, Eric got out the blowtorch. Yup, we blowtorched our pull-up bar. It worked quite well and the warm bar actually helped to prevent my hands from going numb while doing the other exercises.
Stall mats are heavy – The rear suspension of Eric’s 4Runner may never be the same. Apparently the (very old) truck was not designed to transport 800 pounds of rubber. Sadly, the 4Runner still looks like it’s carrying 8 mats that are weighting down the back end even though we removed them over two weeks ago.
Stall mats do not provide enough cushion for sit-ups.
After completing somewhere around 150 sit-ups while lying on our stall mat floor I felt a painful throbbing on my tailbone. Reaching down the back of my pants to feel what was going on I found a tender to the touch area. I basically gave myself a tailbone rug burn. Awesome. The scab is healing nicely although I have carefully chosen my underwear the past few days. Buy some yoga mats or foam squares for sit-ups or else you’ll end up like this…
Ok a little graphic but hopefully this will deter EVERYONE from attempting to do large quantities of sit-ups on stall mats. OUCH!
We utilized the CrossFit Journal and the message board to piece together our facility. Those two resources provide all the information we needed to build-out a fantastic garage facility. I’ll track down and post the specific articles and posts if people are interested.
We’re almost done, pictures soon, need to paint.
A blowtorch will quickly melt any frost or ice on a galvanized pipe.
16″ of Snow, No Problem, We Have Shovels
On an unseasonably warm day in February, Eric and I decided that March would be late enough in the winter season for us to open our garage facility without significant risk of weather issues. After all, Colorado was wrapping up a less than stellar winter with little snowfall. Oops.
Wednesday night a huge spring storm moved across the Front Range dumping 16″ of snow on Boulder. Scratch the planned WOD and get creative!
Snow storm WOD:
Warm-up: 10 minute sidewalk shovel (also good for neighbor relations!)
Skill work: OHSs, can easily be done while wearing down parkas, hats, and snow boots
WOD: Back squat, 3-3-3-3-3
Warm-down: 5 minute sidewalk shovel (more neighborhood praise)
Eric warming up in the garage.
Pull-up bar, Part 1 – Watch Your Head
Our initial plan was to construct our pull-up bar outside. A large tree stump planted directly in the spot where we need to drop one of our posts delayed the project. It’s still in the works, more on that in a future post. In the meantime, Eric built a pull-up bar inside the garage.
Materials:
6′, 1″ diameter galvanized pipe, threaded (1)
Floor flanges (2)
2×6″ piece of wood (1)
1/4″ hex bolts, grade 8 (12)
I’ll have Eric add step by step instructions.
The finished product is VERY sturdy. Two people can use the bar at the same time with plenty of space although a user must check the alignment of their head with the floor joists or a kipping pull-up could become a pathway to a concussion. We made the decision to set the pull-up bar close to the ceiling with the idea that our head would kip in between two floor joists to keep our oly platform air space free for overhead barbell work. Plus, this way we can work on accuracy, one of the CrossFit ten general skills, in every WOD that involves pull-ups!
Floor flanges and 4 hex bolts attach the galvanized pipe to the 2x6" piece of wood.
The ceiling joists are spaced two feet apart but the galvanized pipe with flanges didn't quite reach from 2x6" to 2x6". A thin sheet of wood (shown above), about 1/2" in diameter, was secured to the inside of one of the 2x6"s to make up the distance.
Here's the finished product.
Sleeping like a RockStar
Sleep does great things for athletes. It enables us to recover and perform better, makes us less prone to injury, and makes us mentally sharp for our daily tasks. But sleep and I have never been on the same side of the bed. I could go to bed at 8pm or 2am and I will still wake up at 6:30am. I’m a natural early riser and must get to bed early to have any chance of logging some hours of mattress time. The problem is that most of my hours spent in bed are a half sleep where I drift in and out of consciousness. On days that my alarm is set for 5:45, I wake up at 5:43.
Trying to go back to sleep after I wake is a waste of time. The day has started! On the very few occasions that I have managed to sleep until 8am I wake up and think to myself, “Shit, the day is half over.”
If there was a WOD – sleeping for time – I would DESTROY it. My time would probably be better than my Fran time, well, maybe not, but you get the point.
With all that said, it has come to my attention that, since starting the Paleo Challenge, I sleep. I sleep straight through the night and on Saturday – I SLEPT FOR 12 HOURS STRAIGHT. I’m not sure that has ever happened – honestly. I’m also dreaming – vivid dreams that I remember details of after I wake up. I’m sleeping in a deep sleep. This morning I woke up confused as to where I was, what day it was, and why Pink’s So What was blaring in my ear (it’s my alarm song).
I’m still drinking coffee (one cup a day) so it’s not the absence of caffeine. I’m training the same schedule as always w/ CrossFit 3 on 1 off supplemented with CrossFit Endurance workouts.
Could legumes and dairy really have that much affect on my sleep??!! I’ll go sleep on it.
Read More800 Pounds of Rubber
Unfortunately I’m not referring to bumpers, but stall mats, in the title of this post. While bumpers stacked high across the back of our garage would provide a tremendous amount of Oly eye candy – matting our garage space came as a priority.
We got our mats from Stockyards Ranch Supply. All 8 fit into the back of Eric’s 4Runner although the guy at Stockyards questioned Eric as to why he didn’t have a pick-up truck, which is understandable given the normal use for stall mats.
We drafted a plan for the installation pattern of the mats on paper using the dimensions of the garage and mats to get an exact plan. We made sure to stagger our seams for a tighter fit by alternating the start of each new row with either a full or trimmed mat. We swapped out one mat for a piece of ply wood cut to the same dimensions of the mat. This would be our lifting platform.
Cutting the mats was kind of a pain, a WOD for your wrists. We used the CrossFit Journal Sept 2002 issue for instructions on how to lay the mats. We found that putting a 2×4 underneith the mat after the first cut helped to expose and pull apart the cut line. After the second pass, we added another 2×4 to expose the crevice. Three passes with an exacto knife split the mats.
Here are the before and after pictures of the mat project.
Eric shop vacuuming the garage before we laid the mats.
Matted Garage
The Two Week Dance
Two weeks down/two weeks to go. I’m feeling great and haven’t had ANY blips in the program.
Performance, energy, and mood was great over the past week. Weighed myself for the first time in two weeks and I haven’t gained or lost a pound which I find odd for the following reasons:
1. Over the past two weeks I ate 13 oz. of almond butter (mostly straight from the jar with a spoon)
2. I haven’t weighed or measured my food (as I did when I was on the Zone)
3. I am leaner
4. I ate whenever and whatever (all Paleo), and any quantity of food I felt like for the past two weeks, sometimes to the point where I was stuffed and questioned what the hell was wrong with me.
Tonight’s dinner was another great meal, Chicken Korma, from Cooking for Health and Performance finished off with some baked brussels sprouts, my favorite.
199.5 Square Feet
We recently made the decision to convert our one car garage into a training facility. With 199.5 square feet to work with we will have to utilize every square inch.
Our first task was to clean out the garage. This is what we started with:
Actually, this was after a few hours had gone by, but you get the idea, we had a lot of crap in our garage. Most of it went to Good Will, the city recycler, or the dump, but some of it weaseled its way back into our house.
Total time to clean out garage: 3 hours
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