The Hydra Games.

The Hydra Games.

8-8-19

A band of 26 highly-trained, professional #HIMs laid down their arms to engage in peaceful competition at the First Annual Hydra Games in No Man’s Land. Join us as we relive their triumphs.

Vitals:

Launch Conditions: 69 schweaty degrees. RealFeel™ Temperature: 85

Pax: HIPAA, Cheese Curd, Lewinsky, McRib, Sprockets, Parole, Amber, Horsehead, Puddin Pop, Semi-Gloss, PopTart, Floorslapper, Bluegrass, Leprechaun, Motorboat, Geraldo, Hannibal, Agent Oso, Bluto, Hopper, Marge, Snowflake, Spackler, Gummy, Queen, Deep Dish

Mileage: 1.81 miles

Difficulty: Milton.

Disclaimer: Given and legally accurate.

Strava:

The Thang:

COP Where You Stand

SSH
Mountain Climbers
Hillbillies
Merkins
Cotton Pickers

Saunter to field. Gather together in the tall, damp grass. Form Two Three Teams. [This proved exceptionally difficult. Counting to three is hard. Lining up is harder.]

YHC announced that the teams will be competing in various events throughout the morning, with the winner receiving a small prize or nothing. 

First Event: The Tunnel of Love Race.

Each team forms a straight line in plank position. Last Pax in line Army-crawls underneath everyone to the front. Next guy crawls through. And so on and so forth until the end. 

[Some dispute here as to whether Team 2 or Team 3 won this event. Team 1 did not (mostly because we followed the rules and didn’t cheat).]

Intermission: Mosey to newly-paved parking lot. Down and Backs on Back Parking Lot (Sets of 10, then 9) of the following exercises:

19 x Decline Merkins
19 x Merkins
19 x Incline Merkins

Mosey to Church. 

Second Event: The Rock Mover.

Every Pax on the team gets a rock. [YHC cautioned the pax to get a “reasonably sized” rock and that they would be moving with it. Many ignored this admonition.] The rules: The Rock can only be advanced by someone whose feet are not touching the ground. E.g., you can’t just run with your rock. Partner carry would be fair game. Also using one of your teammates as a basket and piling rocks on top of him. Full Lap around church. First team with everyone home wins.

[No one really won this event. It disintegrated pretty quickly. Team One used Bluegrass as a basket and piled rocks on top of him. Can’t really reprint on the web any of the words spoken and certainly not any of the visuals.]

Team biceps, shoulder press, tris, biceps with rocks. Rotating rocks between sets. 

Mosey to old, semi-re-paved parking lot. 

Intermission: Down and Backs on Front Parking Lot (Sets of 10, then 9) of: 

19 x Merkin Jacks
19 x Diamond
19 x Walking Merkins

Mosey over to the kiddie track for…..

Third Event: [Attempted] Indian Run Race. 

[I think we all won this one.] 

Quick Intra-workout Mary – Fluttah and LBCs

Walking lunge and bear crawl lap.

Final Event: Caterpillar Race. 

Each Teams forms a line. Pax 2-3 feet apart. Box jump to head of line, Indian Run-style. 

Team One won this handily.

Mary: 

Guantanamo

Guantanamo

Routine

Pax in a circle on their backs heels up. First pax jumps up and pushes the feet down around the circle fighting to keep legs off the ground. Followed by next pax in line then hit the ground legs up when back to your start position until last man finishes the circle.

Count Off, Name-O-Rama, and BOM.

Moleskin:

The build up to this one was pretty intense. YHC humbly appreciates the Site Q offer to promote The Main Event, but in the end pride won out and couldn’t resist a D.I.Y. guerrilla marketing campaign. Nothing like a tween-Lori Loughlin-based-period-drama-gif to bring the boys to the yard (know what you’re fishing for and use the right bait, amirite?). 

Hops quickly remembered he had a 5:30am appointment to get his back waxed and promptly HC’ed to another AO (at the same time…). 

Spackler took the time to thoughtfully reply with his usual “Blink182WTF.gif“. I imagine him staring wistfully out his office window, dreaming of fast greens and slow merkins, and, glancing over at the 6-wide Twitter feed on his monitor, casually flicking the designated hotkey to auto-post his response.

Semi-Gloss promised to bring not only the Semi-Gross but the Full-Gross. 

With the foreplay out of the way and the seeds of discontentedness planted, it was showtime.

_____

Hopped in the mountain-dweller standard issue Surbaru and headed to the AO. Saw Cheese Curd cruising down the road at 5:05 (likely on Mile 18 of his pre-run). 

YHC broke out his good gloves (the ones with only one hole in them) for this Very Special Workout. Marge noted that Dredd (or one of his surrogates) once told him that if the Q wears gloves, you should too. Promptly took off the Good Gloves and called for a No Gloves Workout. 

The themes of the day were “Team” and “CSAUP”.  YHC promised a Full Teddy…

… but once you factor in the refuseniks and the cheaters, the average pax probably walked away with a Milton.

Strava indicated this was a “Harder Than Usual” effort. Which probably says more about YHC’s usual effort level than today’s effort.

– The Tunnel of Love Race was a great success. YHC really wanted to get the pax wet, dirty and “rubby” early in the game. Mission accomplished.

– The Rock Mover broke down like a sand castle with the tide coming in. Mass chaos. Clear directions quickly yielded to “that’s impossible” to “too tough” to “I’m just going to walk.” The pax moved through this mental progression at different rates. Queen might have been Full Comp the whole way. Marge not far behind him. Puddin Pop got there in two steps. Spackler didn’t even listen to the directions.  

The strategery for Team One started with this (without the chair): 

And ended with an Omaha and walking/jogging rock presses and such. In between, YHC carried Semi-Gloss for a brief (but intimate) length of asphalt. 

Team Two tried all partner carries (which, if you like math, means that the person being carried has to hold two rocks). 

Team Three appeared to do ok overall. Most of them were pretty far ahead.

Curiously, no one tried this technique: 

– Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more broken, The Indian Run Race set a new standard. Apparently “Indian Run” is a dog whistle of sorts that triggered a number of the Pax into a fugue-state of NASCAR paint-trading. Net outcome: We all ran a couple of laps on the elementary school track.

– Caterpillar race was actually competitive. YHC’s observation is that by the last event, the teams had really started to gel and had achieved some level of coordination. Team One emerged victorious. 

– YHC kindly requested the Pax to circle  up shoulder to shoulder for Mary. 

“It it ends in ‘of love’ I’m in.”

– Floorslapper

Done. Quickly renamed the exercise “Guantanamo of Love”. Apropos. 

Horsehead was out campaigning for Nantan. Mingling with the pax. Kissing hands, shaking babies. Will look forward to your backblast to the backblast. 

Hannibal mentioned that YHC narrowly missed him by 2 blocks on the way out the neighborhood this morning. Must have been ultra super focused on the mission because I didn’t even notice.

Welcome FNG McRib. Brought out by Agent Oso. The naming process started with Pink Slime and only went downhill from there. The Semigloss Ode to the McRib was touching. His eyes went misty. You could feel a deep longing permeating the space around him. I never truly knew poetry until I heard him speak – from his heart, truly – about this iconic psuedo-meat cartridge with bone-like appendages. It’s the particle board of meat products.

Sprockets and Amber trotted off towards home on foot after the workout. I think they are secretly Avengers. 

Several other pax who were new(ish) (to me at least). 

Overhead in the Gloom:

The comments have already started flowing into the suggestion box. Thanks to everyone for their positive feedback! 

“Best workout of all time.”

– Spackler

“I got out of bed for this crap?”

– PopTart

“I’m never posting at a bootcamp AO in Area 51 again.”

– Horsehead

“Should have gone rucking with Lucy instead.”

– Geraldo

“The New Management has really taken this place downhill.”

– Queen and Marge

“He wasn’t like this at Base Camp.”

– Leprechaun

Serious Stuff:

I didn’t mention the “Intermission” activities yet. The MECA pax started a 19 for 19 challenge a while back (as I understand it). Poutine brought it up the mountain to Boone last month and some of us have been (very loosely) trying to participate or keep up. The challenge was started in honor of Chowder who lost his young son. His birthday was July 19th, so they do 19 days of merkins of increasing intensity. Tomorrow is the last day of the challenge. 

I wanted to use this as an opportunity to remind ourselves that everything we know and love could be taken away from us in a heartbeat. You never know when your time is up. Cherish every minute. Hug your kids. Raise them right. This isn’t about you. 

Full 19 day challenge here: 

Thanks again to Gummy and Sprockets for the opportunity to lead and for accommodating my scheduling challenges. As always, I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope you all did as well. See you next time……