Anaerobic Conditioning

One of the things I did when I was in Oklahoma was a "minute drill" from one of Ross's books. The idea is to do as many 3 minute rounds of the following as possible:

- 30s of burpees
- 30s of jumping jacks
- 30s of grasshoppers

Normally, you're only supposed to give yourself one minute of rest between rounds, but since I wanted to try to do more rounds than normal, I gave myself 2 minutes. It didn't help, I still only managed 3 rounds. I'm really pretty disappointed by this. I'm supposed to be in shape and I can only manage 9 minutes of intense exercise? Granted, this is a tough workout that I don't do very often, but only completing three rounds is still indicative of pretty poor anaerobic conditioning.

I think doing this type of workout more frequently would actually help me on the bike, especially for cyclocross. On the other hand, I don't want to substitute this type of workout for a bike ride on a regular basis.

One of the websites that has intrigued me lately is CrossFit. The core of their program is the "workout of the day". I've looked around a little bit, and these workouts appear to split the difference between Ross's conditioning workouts and normal (slow) strength work. Based on the WOD's that are shown for the past week, I could probably still do these and put in quality rides. There is also an article on the CrossFit site entitled "What is Fitness?" that is definitely worth a read.

I may experiment a bit with all of this over the winter. I've sort of been looking for a "fitness project" for the winter anyway.