Why I Hate St. Patrick's Day, 12.4 and the End of The Open For Me...

     Let me start by saying that I can't stand St. Patrick's Day.  It's straight up amateur night.  This year was compounded by the fact that I was working, it was my turn on the ambulance (we tend to rotate between truck, engine and ambulance and this was my ambulance day), it was a Saturday and it was about 80 degrees out.  I expected to be in for a long shift and I wasn't disappointed.  From the "Irishman" who managed to inexplicably remove a part of his chin (he says he didn't fall or get into a fight and has no idea what happened.  I suggested that perhaps he was punched by a leprechaun.  He didn't laugh.), to the Princess passed out drunk and covered in vomit at the bar who decided to take a swing at me in the back of the ambulance, to the drug seekers and the psychotic who was just 20 minutes ago released from the ER but decided he wanted to go back for no particular reason, I managed a grand total of about 3 non-consecutive hours of sleep.  I came home and fell asleep for another hour bringing my grand total up to 4 hours before having to go to the gym and tackle WOD 12.4.
     (Incidentally when I was getting my final hour of sleep I had a fantastic dream.  I don't remember much of the specifics but I remember that I was happy and having fun.  Then, in my dream, I thought "Fuck!  I have to get to the gym to do this workout!" and I was filled with enough panic and dread that it woke me up.  This was not a good omen.  The first of a couple of bad signs to come...)

"I'm a goin' ta ruin ya night!"

      12.4 looked like this:

                Complete as many rounds/reps as possible in 12 minutes of:
                        150 wall balls, 20lb.
                         90 double-unders
                         30 muscle-ups

     Yet another endurance workout and another benchmark workout (this time "Karen" paired with 30 muscle-up for time with some double-unders thrown in for good measure.)  Wall balls have never been my strong suit;  I've described them before as having 20 pound rocks thrown at your head.  What I thought I had going for me was that, coincidentally, I've had some wall balls in my training recently and this workout was at 10 feet rather than the 12 that we usually target at Windy City.  I'm good at double-unders and I'm good at muscle-ups so I figured that if I could get through the wall balls I was relatively home free.  Not 1 round home free, but I figured I could get in some muscle-ups at least.  Mike Tyson had a quote, something to the effect of "Everybody has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth." (In fact that's exactly what he said.)
     I showed up at the gym completely exhausted and too tired to even warm up.  This was the second warning sign.  I did some super half assed stretching, counted for a few people as they went through and decided to go for it.  I set up my rings, found a wall ball station and layed my rope out.  3,2,1 Go!  I grabbed the ball and looked and it was the wrong size ball.  This round ended before it even started.  Bad omen number 3.  I waited until the workout was over and decided to go with the next group.  I re-set up, made sure everything was right this time, and dove in.  From the start it was a mess.  I started with sets of 15 and 10 but quickly was at 6s and 7s.  My left knee, which has been inflamed and sore for about 2 weeks now, was killing me with each squat and my right leg was picking up all of the slack.  It got to the point where my knee was hurting so badly that I couldn't take it and I threw in the towel after 109 wall balls.
     So that's it.  I've decided to move my week off from next week to this week and take some time to heal.  I didn't submit this score and I'm not intending on doing WOD 12.5.   I'm not 100% sure how I feel about this.  Sure, I've said all along that I was fairly detached from this year's Open and it's not what I've been training for specifically.  But that doesn't mean that I'm not disappointed and I certainly didn't want it to end this way.  The toughest thing is that my mind is what gave up first.  Yeah, my knee was destroyed, but mentally I checked out of this workout before it even started and my body just followed along.  I've talked before about visualization and the mental aspects of training and it's a topic that I'm still fascinated by and a skill I definitely have yet to master.  This time my mind completely let me down and that's why this is hard to take.  Everybody's bodies break down physically- I checked out mentally on this.
     I'll get over it and learn from it, same as all of my other failures.  In the meantime I'll be resting up and laying low.  My plan is to stay off the grid as much as possible to give my mind a break as well.  I'll do some reading, maybe a teeny bit of writing, but no Facebook and as little Internet as possible. See you in a week!

      (I got caught watching The Sound of Music at work once on Christmas and I had to pretend that the remote got stuck as I was flipping channels.  I truly am a terrible liar...)