Last night at the gym was “Karen.” As workouts go, Karen is frighteningly simple to describe. You take a 20 pound medicine ball and hit a 10-foot-high target 150 times, making sure to squat down with the ball upon every catch (CrossFit calls this activity ‘wall-ball’). While “Karen” may be simple to describe, it is stupid hard for me to do. I’m short — I can admit it. My license says 5′6″, but in reality it’s more like 5′5″. In addition to just being short, I also have proportionally short arms. This is great for stuff like push-ups and overhead press, but it sucks for wall-ball. In fact, it’s almost as if I was engineered to suck at wall-ball. Here’s a list of things that make wall-ball suck:

• I have to jump with every shot to have a chance of getting the stupid ball to the target. After about 50 jumps, my calves began a very angry dialog with my brain.
• When the ball finally returns to my outstretched hands, gravity has had enough time to accelerate it to approximately Mach 0.98. It takes force of will to fight off the leading pressure wave.
• The only part of my body that seems capable of consistently slowing the medicine ball upon re-entry is my face. My face feels like I pissed off Mike Tyson last night.
• Once I’m actually holding the ball, my short arms and big head make it impossible to rest the ball against my chest. Instead, I end up holding it aloft in front of my face, burning my shoulders out throwing off my center of gravity.
• My altered center of gravity makes it hard to squat on my heels. Instead, I end up coming onto my toes, making even more work for my angry calves and causing my quads to do a whole lot of work that my hamstrings should be doing.

The end result of all this is me whining on my blog… At least I finished the workout – a first for me. I was hoping for under 10 minutes, but in the end wound up with 10:23.