The Four of July

Workout date: 7/4/15

To steal a term from Michael Wilbon, it turns out that I have not been giving enough "dap" to the badass ladies at KOP.  Or more specifically, there are some tough women at the gym who have not been given their just due on the blog as of yet.  That's fair.  Someone reading this blog for the first time might think that it's really Rachel and Michal's blog as much as it is my own.  Current Athlete of the Month, Jill C., has been a prominent fixture in the blog.  She is simply continuing the Summer of Jill as Jill A. won the award last month.  No one works harder in the gym than Shawna.  And a wave of newcomers like Laura and Christine are already scribbling their names all over the gym whiteboard.  I could fill another paragraph with the female All-Stars of the gym, but today I'm going to focus on four that I haven't mentioned a whole lot, simply because I haven't worked out with them a lot this year.  They would be Sue, Steph C., Erika, and Kate.  (Or is it Marci?  I'll defer to Cline on this one.)

But before we get to them...Happy Independence Day!  To commemorate the day we told England "yeah, that was nice...now you should get going", KOP was hosting a Friends and Family WOD.  That meant lots of kids showing off how much more energy they had compared to the adults who regularly do this stuff 4-5 times a week.  Youth is so wasted on the young.  To add to the craziness of the workout, we were operating out of the Annex.  For those unfamiliar with the Annex, it is a smaller gym that is separate from the main gym that can accommodate about 10 people for a workout.  Including the kids, we were approximately 30-35 strong on Saturday.  In other words, we were all about to make some friends whether we liked it or not.

In honor of America's birthday, we imported Cline back from Europe.  It was the first time I had seen him in weeks as he had glumly traversed that continent unable to find anything fun to do for more than a fortnight.  Poor guy.  Maybe we could cheer him up by asking him to flip a 1,300 pound tire with us.  I know that always breaks me out of a funk.

We were supposed to be forming teams of 4 for this workout, but that standard went out the window pretty quickly.  Cline and I joined the aforementioned quartet to form Team Chaos.  At first, we didn't have a team name, but when it became apparent that our strategy for the workout would be "uhhh...you do something!", it seemed like an appropriate moniker for us.

The workout was as follows:

25 tire flips
100 pull-ups
200 push-ups
300 KB swings
400 double unders
1,600M run

(Two people may work at a time, except for the tire flips.  Because two people would get crushed trying to flip that thing.)

I wasn't kidding about our strategy.  It was a little out of control.  We were going to start with the pull-ups, but when someone dropped from the pull-up bar, someone else would knock out push-ups.  That meant that there was a running count for pull-ups and push-ups going on at the same time, which had to be communicated to the next person doing that movement.  And we were switching back and forth between the pull-ups and the push-ups.  Got it?  We barely did.  However, we were moving fast enough that we nearly finished the push-ups at the same time as the pull-ups.  Sue and Erika had knocked out a bunch of the push-ups while Steph and Marci led the attack on the pull-ups.  Cline and I tried not to be in the way too much.

From there we moved on to the KB swings.  We had an 18 lb and a 44 lb KB, with a plan of doing 20 swings each then passing on to the next person.  Except Erika started doing 30 reps when she went.  And Cline did 15 one round.  (How could we not be Team Chaos?)  As I grabbed the 44 lb KB and started doing my second set, Cline told me to "just do 35" and then we'd be done.  35?  That escalated quickly.  I thought I was only doing 20 and so did my body as the last 15 weren't the most pleasant feeling reps in the world.  But I was able to hang on the whole way.

The one part of our strategy that did work out well (Cline thought of this - smart man) was doing the run in the middle of the workout so that we could get some rest before finishing things off.  Erika and her son went out to run a 400M together, then Cline and Marci went for a 400M run to cap off our 1,600M team requirement.  When they got back, Steph and Sue got to jumping rope.  They were doing single unders, so they were dividing their reps in half before contributing to the double under score.  Cline and I were chipping away at double unders when it was our turn to go.  Again, with single under amounts being divided by two and then throwing in double under counts and communicating these things across six people...chaos.  Simply chaos.  But we got to 400 reps.

Finally, it was time for the tire flips.  The six of us lined up behind the tire, Cline gave us our cue, and we lifted.  And then we stuck our knees underneath it to prop it up.  And then we pushed it over.  In fact, every rep became "3! 2! 1! LIFT! <pause> KNEE! <pause> PUSH!"  The only exceptions were one time when Cline decided to hell with the countdown and just said "go!" and one time when we all yelled "Hashtag Keithie!" while lifting the tire.  It was exhausting, but slowly we managed to flip that massive tire 25 times.  Final time: 26:38.

Those look like smiles.  Clearly we haven't flipped the tire once yet.

I had a great time on Team Chaos.  Hopefully I will get to work out with Sue, Steph, Erika, and Marci more often than I currently do as they were fun teammates.  Cline will be back at the 6:30 soon enough, so I don't have to worry about him.

Next blog: an unexpected rest day on Sunday, but Monday brings yet another whooping from yet more female KOP badasses.  Souka, souka!