35º temps may have kept a bunch of the regulars away, but it brought in an old (in all senses of the word, especially compared to his firehouse brethren) regular who was… still on the clock! This meant my original trip down to the tunnel would be off the table – gotta stay in radio distance – but you know what they say: one door opens, and out through the other door comes Wacker with a 100 feet of bundled hose. That’s right, he came bearing coupons this morning.
And to be honest, YHC was thankful it wasn’t the 130 lbs dummy that has been oft teased, as fun as it sound picking that thing up with frozen fingers. Also, the buried memory of carrying Frank through a path of slop during a Tough Mudder would’ve no doubt resurfaced, and sometimes it’s best to keep those things buried.
And of course, Granny’s favorite grandson, the ever present Russo, was also there. So after some chatter, we got down to it: SSH, GMs, ACs, HBs, IWs, GGs, and a quick lap around the trailhead to finish warming up (and also give me time to come up with a plan!).
Thang:
First up, 1 guy would carry the coiled hose up the stairs and back, while the other 2 would be performing steps ups. Rotate until everyone’s carried said hose. (There’s a joke in here that I’m missing – where’s Zoolander when you need him?)
Next up, same thing but instead of step ups, we did freak nasties and derkins.
Time to give the hose a rest and get started on legs. Lunge walk the small field along the corridor, stopping at each tree (there were 5) for a set of: x5 squats, x5 jump squats, x5 monkey humpers, and x5 Apollo Ohno’s. The original plan was to head back bear crawling and doing 4 different type of merkins x5 at each tree, but that sounded terrible, so instead we did some Rochamburpees.
Now, while you may see YHC at 0515, I don’t actually become a functioning human until around 0800. So while this seemed like good idea with three people (“hey, there’ll just be two losers or two winners”), the actuality is that it doesn’t really work if each of the pax chooses a different shape. That’s just a tie. So we modified and when that happened we simply split the number of burpees/merkins.
Nearing the home stretch, we finished up with a sprint down the corridor, quick trip up the stairs and back, sprinting back down the corridor to the start.
Mary consisted of quick rounds of leg raises, heels to heaven, lbcs, Freddie’s, Dolly’s, Rosalita’s, and 10x merkins.
Countdown, nameorama, announcements (remember to send in your RCR team members, shirt sizes, and payments ASAP!) and Russo offered a thoughtful prayer of thanks. Which I second – thank you guys for posting on such a chilly morning, offering me the opportunity to lead, and just generally pushing me to be better in so many ways. Appreciate it.
