Morning, friends!
Matt and I had a fun dinner date last night at my very favorite pizza place in the area — Faccia Luna in Clarendon, VA! I’ve been coming to this place since I was a little girl with my parents — it’s always been a favorite. Check it out if you’re in the area and haven’t been! It’s very reasonably priced, too, especially if you get pizza. 🙂
We started with some drinks — wine for me, beer for him!
Plus a starter salad with their homemade balsamic vinaigrette, which is the most delicious ever.
And we shared a pizza, of course! We topped it with spinach, basil, mushrooms, peppers, and pepperoni. Winning combination. I <3 toppings.
I had 2.5 slices. 🙂 It was a beautiful night and we had fun enjoying the weather, the food, and each other’s company. Plus people watching, of course. There were a lot of people out and about!
In fitness news, Matt and I hit up Crossfit Dupont twice this week — on Monday night and Wednesday night. On Wednesday, we practiced rack pulls, which are basically a variation of dead lifts — instead of starting with the weight on the ground, you start with it on the rack, so it’s a smaller motion. I don’t have any pictures but it went well — I’m working on my form and using my legs vs. my lower back, and was able to make it up to 95 lbs before my form started to go. Yay! We also did some chin ups, which I can’t really do fully on my own so I did assisted chin ups. 🙂
After the rack pulls, we moved on to a quick boot camp workout — plate pinches! Each round we were to hit a total of 4 lengths down the court; we carried a heavy plate as far as we could, then dropped the plate and sprinted the remaining distance.
It was fun but hard! My plate wasn’t that heavy (15 lbs.), but Matt’s (and most other people’s) were way heavier! I like that CrossFit is scalable to different ability levels because 15lbs (or maybe 20) was hard enough for me!
On Monday night, the WOD at Crossfit was unfortunately another of the strength moves that I couldn’t do because of my crazy tight shoulders/back. (I wrote about this issue last week related to back squats.) On Monday, the workout involved front squats, which I can kind of do with just the 15 lb. bar, but no more weight than that because my form is so bad due to tightness. Basically, I can’t get my elbows out in front of me any farther than you see in the photo below, so all the pressure of the weight ends up on my wrists and really hurts. Fail.
I ended up spending most of the hour doing some mobility-related stretching moves with a couple of the trainers, who were really awesome about helping me, but I was pretty bummed that I couldn’t do the workout with everyone else. I just felt silly sitting around doing other stuff — plus, I wanted a real workout — it’s my only hour to cram in a workout in a day and I didn’t want to spend it standing around! Sigh. I’m going to keep working on mobility stretches at home on my own (the trainers gifted me a lacrosse ball to use to roll out my shoulders — hurts so good), and until I get better mobility I might stop going to any of the workouts that I know I won’t be able to do (e.g. front or back squats) because it just bums me out, and I like working out to be my happy place for the day. 🙂 Any other thoughts/advice? Such a bummer.
At least I could do the pushups that Monday’s workout also involved. 🙂
TGIF — off to work and then it’s the weekend, yay! Have a great one, friends!
