Deth

I don’t really make it a secret that I’m legally blind and therefore have very poor vision. I also do at least to the best of my ability keep it from being a limiting factor. I do realize and accept that it does cause some reasonable limitations if for any reason due to safety.

Box jumps are one of those movements used in Crossfit that always have and always will make me nervous due to the poor depth perception of only having one useful eye and sometimes misjudging the angle or distance I am to the box. I’ve only missed a few times and one of those was pushing out of my comfort zone and doing 30 inch box jumps. They are a movement that I really do enjoy though and are lots of fun. Crossfit probably does over use them and high rep box jumps are kinda dumb but they are fun to me.

Today’s WOD involved 8 rounds of 8 burpees/front rack lunges and 16 box jump overs. I took my sandbag and box out onto the patio since it was a nice day and I want to have space to fail should that occur. When I do fail I go off the other side of the box and sort of just roll with it so I don’t want any objects that I could smash into. The other thing is the ceiling isn’t that high in the garage. The other week when I did step ups I could feel my hair was touching the isolation and I didn’t want to be a distraction and cause me to loose my focus and potentially have an accident.

The first warm up box jump I think I had 5 or 6 false starts and it was getting in my head. I only had the box set to the 20 inch height since it was going to be 128 reps of the box jumps and it’s been well over a year since I’ve done that movement. Technically it’s probably been closer to 2 years since we hadn’t gotten into the gym that much before we stopped our membership. I want to think late fall or early winter of 2017 seems right.

Once I made one though I was good to go. My intention when starting the WOD was to do maybe 2 or 3 rounds of the jump overs then switch to step overs after that but I never felt the need to scale down to the step ups. I did have one miss but that was just the simple fact that I was probably not quite as close to the box as I thought I was and my one foot caught the edge of it. I got up and took a couple of seconds for adrenaline to wear off and make sure I wasn’t hurt and got right back on it.

I am one hundred percent positive that the box was a good investment at least for me. I can jump with confidence again and the box is solid enough. I could never bring myself to jump on the bench as the padding just made it feel too unstable to me even just stepping up on it. It’s also a narrow target and there was risk of catching my toes underneath of it. I did at times jump completely over it. Stacked plates were too small of a target but obviously solid to land on. They did shift a little bit though.

For now I’ll stick with the 20 inch box jumps and build a little confidence in it. Now isn’t the time to risk an accident with all the corona virus stuff going on. Eventually I’ll get back up to 24 inches which was never an issue for me. I’ve done 30 inches. I was just thinking last night how I’d be repping out the 30 inch box jumps if I was young and dumb like I used to be 20 years ago.