The site Q’s of The Matrix, Base Camp and M*A*S*H decided to converge this morning to honor the service of our military men and women. We also decided we should start a little later at 7:00 and make it a one hour workout. 8 pax showed up. The first thing they saw as they pulled in were several shovel flags eloquently planted by Kid Rock…..thank you brother for the reminder of why we are here today!
After a quick disclaimer (honestly more of a disclaimer about Vet’s Day than anything else), we headed out. Hopper had the first 30 minutes and Thunder Road the last. Here is how it went:
Hopper Q:
Warm Up:
Jog to the front parking lot. Exercises included 11 counts of IW, LSS and MC’s (11 counts were aplenty today to signify Armistice Day!).
The Thang:
Jog to the corner of Strawberry and Rosecliff, but along the way, 11 merkins at each speed bump. Once we got to Rosecliff we plannked a little, then triple nickel on the hill. Jump squats at the bottom, CDDs at the top. Kid Rock and Geraldo were killing it! Plank some after, then head back toward SCMS.
We stopped on the way at Fairway Downs and partnered up. Partner 1 runs up the hill to the cul-de-sac while Partner 2 does stated exercise. Flapjack upon Partner 1’s return. Exercises included: Freddy Mercury, Heels to Heaven, Flutter. Mosey on back to SCMS for round 2.
Thunder Road Q:
Run to the track at South Charlotte for 4 corners. We did three laps with 10 reps at each corner of: Merkins, Heels to Heaven, Low Slow Squats. Again, Kid Rock and Geraldo were setting the bar high with stellar performances. Kid Rock, in Veteran Day style, honored the “no man left behind” mantra and made sure the six was supported.
Run to the main parking lot/launch site. Partner up for Push/Pull. Two rounds for the length of the parking lot, alternating positions half way.
Jog to the rock pile at the steps near the restrooms. Partner up again. Partner 1 runs the loop and down to the baseball bleachers for 10 dips while Partner 2 does curls, O/H presses and tricep extensions with a rock. Flapjack and run three rounds.
Back to the launch site for some final mary with 11 counts.
That’s a wrap!
Moleskin:
It was a fairly quiet pax today, but I chalk that up to the spirit of the day. There is no greater sacrifice and show of selflessness than duty to our country. Our men and women forfeit so very much for our freedom and I am sure that significance was in each of our heads this morning.
Thanks to all who showed up and thanks again to our brave troops, both past and present!
Announcements:
Holiday party may have been cancelled due to lack of sign ups. More info to come.
Kid Rock announced that today a running carriage will be donated to a veteran at the Hickory Tavern at the Metro building in Midtown as part of a charity he and other Waxhaw F3ers work with (apologize I did not record the name of the organization KR). Very noble!
Thanks Thunder Road for the great prayer!
We’ll launch at 0515 from the NEW Ballantyne Corporate Park parking area across from Duckworths and in front of the OrthoCarolina Urgent Care Ballantyne. We’ll be running on familiar roads that have bike lanes and sidewalks, but there are cars and other hazards so you should wear reflective/visibility gear and have a headlamp or flashlight.
We’re going to shift down in the Length of the Interval this week, but we’re also decreasing the rest to hopefully bring new levels of Fitness. These intervals will still be run at “MP-10”. This means at your goal marathon pace, minus 10 seconds per mile. If your goal marathon pace is 8:00/mile then your goal pace for this workout would be 7:50 per mile.
Don’t have a goal marathon pace? Well then use this Race Calculator (click for link). Enter a recent race effort (Distance, Finishing Time), click Calculate, go to the Equivalent tab and look at Pace/Mi on the row for Marathon.
More on Marathon Pace minus 10 (“MP-10”). If you’ve been a Swift regular and recall Threshold Pace (aka T-pace, aka Comfortably Hard, aka Lactate Threshold), MP-10 ends up being slower than Threshold and somewhere near half the difference to Marathon goal pace.
Here are some other thoughts about the target effort for this MP-10 Strength workout, “So, usually through a combination of running too fast and not maximizing the recovery jog, they get to the 3rd or 4th one and realize they’ve dug a hole they can’t get out of. Remember, speed work usually brings acute discomfort. It’s usually an eye opener from the get go. Strength workouts should sneak up on you. The same effort for the last few should feel fairly hard compared to the first one or two. That’s when you’ve done it right- think slow cooker. You are slowly building that lactic feeling. Never fully recovering from the repeat prior and letting the discomfort slowly add to each successive repeat.“
So I knew that I signed up for Q on or around Veterans Day but after doing the Vagabond on Saturday my system shut down and I didn’t want to think about moving… my plan was low mileage – but high heart rate. Between Flash and Ignition 21 showed up for some Pre-Season conditioning.
Warm up – the basics of SSH/Mountain Climbers/Merkins and Bobby Hurleys.
Station 1 – Headed to the benches in front of the middle School for 15/20/25 (this is my standard opening) Dips/Derkins/BH’s 3 sets – 15 reps of each/ 20/ 25. I found someones kryptonite – balk, balk. This is a good one to get the blood flowing. I heard some mubble chatter – time to take care of that
Station 2 – Head to the covered overhang on the side of the MS. Lunge Walk length of overhang then hot lap around to start again. We did 3 more laps: side slide right, side slide left and bear crawls.
Station 3 – Mosey to Basketball Court for 15’s, 13’s, 12’s and 11’s. Sideline to sideline for a minute. Partner up – if you don’t make the prescribed line touches = combined burpee penalty for you and your partner. We did a total of 6 sideline to sideline sprints. The with your partner under a basket – 5 merkins and 1 burpee. We in a circle hitting the 6 hoops. Not much mubble chatter – a good number of Pax did not incur penalty Burpee’s – way to go!!!!
Station 4 – Mosey to Transporter/Rudy’s Shed for 64/32/16/8/4/2/1 Apparently the methane lingers a bit at the shed or maybe there were some Pax contributing>>>> ask Glidah who politely moved away from said pax.
64 AirPress/32 Donkey Kicks/16 BH wall dunks/8 – double touch wall merkin/4 Big boy/2 Big boy/1 Big Boy.
Head back to the parking lot – mosey to first cut out – run to gravel – back pedal return. On the way back to COT – 5 Low Slow Squats at every tree. Trees on the Left – Trees on the right
Great job today by Chicken Little – as a Site Q your goal is to 1) ensure that a challenging workout is scheduled and 2) man the back of the pack and pull the six or FNG’s forward.
Turnbuckle pushed today- keep coming out brother!!!!!!
Drop Clothe continues to post in week 2. Gator Cub returning to form
Blades of Glory becoming a regular post!!!!
COT
Announcements
F3 Xmas Party this Saturday Lawson Clubhouse – Decorating Committee starts at 3PM. Burn some extra calories at Gladiator (Cuthbertson Location) this Saturday.
YHC has lived in Charlotte for 4 years. During that time blood has thinned, there has been a noticeable decrease in consumption of good italian food, and a noticeable increase in barbeque consumption. Not sure about the correlation here but YHC can say this, 40 degrees is now officially cold. That was this morning’s edition of the KB program, week 6, day 1, leg day.
You know who never skips leg day? Batman … and 6 pax.
Only 6 pax showed up this morning, maybe one of them is batman, maybe not. YHC was expecting to see a parking lot full of buff dudes pre-running, meat-running, slamming brotein shakes, and generally unable to lower their arms. Instead there were 5 reliable pax and one fat Thor (YHC will let you guess who fat Thor is). Wild theories flew across the parking lot about the missing pax including one twerking in his Ms shoes at a wedding that sparked an old football injury. #nojudgement The Wells Fargo pax must have been DR all weekend and taking advantage of the floating holiday, or they converged with MASH/Base Camp/DMZ. They were afraid of getting swole.
Thangs: You should know the program by now. plank hold x 2 for 30 seconds, hollow-body plank x 2 for 30 seconds, glute-bridge x 2 for 30 seconds. Then pyramid the squats up to 6 or 8. Pretty sure most pax went for 8. After 5 minutes of snatches, pretty sure all of these pax are secret service material by now. then back to the static holds. Endex at 0615 on the money.
Cold Moleskinny: Yeah, it was cold. Until set 3 or 4 of squats and then the blood was flowing and the top layer was shed.
Header was flexing his shoulder muscles today trying to imitate Stone Cold. Don’t worry, a few more bowls of Wheaties and you’ll get there, little one.
Chin Music protested when Purell turned off the Taylor Swift. As usual, he and Header were paired up. Maybe this is our Batman and Robin?
Piggly brought the smorgasbord of iron today and made friendly with Chin Music and Header. Someone finally broke up the dynamic duo.
Stone Cold has been keeping his bells in his freezer. Consuming all that high quality protein between sets has left the freezer empty. So fill it with some iron, the M will never notice. But your partner will when lifting ewith no gloves on. By contrast, Purell snuggles with his in bed. that’s how they keep that warm glow by which we can all huddle around to stay warm.
Purell had the Q, the playlist, the speaker, and the stopwatch, but not the backblast. He claims he doesn’t have Horsehead skills to pull it off. News flash: none of us have the loose screws, marbles, and small critters living in our heads that Horsehead can boast.
YHC pulled out the barbell and plates. No one was interested in partnering up. It’s all good, got 3 sets of deadlifts in and some curls-for-the-girls while waiting.
Thanks to Header for taking us out.
Announcements:
There is a holiday party, you might still be able to beg Mighty Mite into a sign-up.
Thursday is shoulder day, come out and tell Header how good his shoulders look.
A bunch of pax are running a bunch of races around town. Get out and support them.
Thank a veteran today. In fact thank a veteran everyday.
OMG, it was cold! 29 degrees, meaning it was the coldest morning of Fall 2019 to date. Nonetheless, 7 absolute, undeniable studs showed up for this week’s episode of Rock Zero. Important stat……4 dudes wore shorts. 3 dudes wore tights. I’ll be honest, I only wore shorts because I couldn’t find my tights and didn’t want to wake up my M by searching too much….we’ve all been there.
I offered an iron clad disclaimer….we would have a mix of on campus and off campus adventures today. Iron Horse told me this better be a boot camp as his right knee is nursing an injury. I respect IH because he is my elder, but mainly because I am pretty sure he could crush me…..so I quickly thought about how I could balance this workout. Keep reading.
Warm-Up:
We immediately jogged off the Calvary campus to The Carrington Swim Club parking lot. The jog helped produce some body heat, then we warmed up with:
IW, LSS, MC
The Thang:
Jog to the Windswept subdivision across from Davies Park. We did some Parker Peter and Peter Parker to help us gather our wits (Gummy did them in reverse by mistake….he went to Clemson, after all!). Partner up. Partners run to opposite cul-de-sacs and do 10 merkins OYO. Come back to launch point and do 10 derkins off of your partners’ planked back. Run to the opposite cul-de-sac, do another 10 OYO merkins, and flapjack on the decline merkins upon your return.
Jog across 51 to Davies Park. Wall work for a little while. Partner back up. Partner #1 does stated exercise while Partner #2 runs the parking lot lap. Flapjack upon return. Exercises included:
Dips, step-ups, incline merkins
Wall work again. Let’s mosey back to Calvary. Stopped on the way at Carrington for some Mary (LBC and American Hammer).
Once we got back to Calvary, we ran the North Face three times with 10 CDDs for working recovery at the top (I missed North Face).
Mosey to open area of Calvary parking lot. 4 sets of Mary (freddy mercury, heels to heaven, flutter, rosalita). Then, 10 gassers with various merkins and 10 counts in between.
Mosey back to launch for some quick LBC’s. That’s a wrap.
Moleskin:
Good times! Gummy and Geraldo led the Windswept merkin/running activity. Iron Horse said his sprinting was not impacted by his knee injury and he proved it during the gassers. He and Skipper led all of them (Gummy challenged Skipper to one of the gassers and after 10 yards yelled “OK, that’s too fast”……see title). Boerewors and Levi cranked out the Davies circuit activities like the exemplary veterans they are…..speaking of Veterans……thank at least one this weekend! There is no more significant and selfless act than defending your own country!
Geraldo and Hoover….thanks for letting me lead today! I love that AO!
Gummy, thank you for the prayer, man!
Hopper, out!
Announcements:
Sign up for the A51 F3 Holiday Party!
Convergence this Monday for Base Camp, MASH and Matrix. 7:00 at SCMS.
Every day, we each get an opportunity to step up and help someone whether it was the great group of guys who stepped up to load the Christ Closet Truck, Volunteering for setting up the Holiday Party or simply filling in when Popeye was stuck in New York. For the unfortunate 13 people who decided Commitment was the place to be this Saturday, I had been wanting to try a 60 minute coupon workout to see how it would go.
The Thang
Run up to the entrance of the school to get a view of what you will be seeing all morning. Run back down to the circle to start the workout.
Circle up around the Coupons with one man between a block and one man on the block. Do a Merkin, rotate to one hand on the block, merkin, both hands on the block, merkin, one hand on the block, merkin. Keep rotating until we completed 21 Merkins.
Grab a Partner and a Coupon
Now for some wonderful upper body exercises
Circle up for a calf Web
COT
Everyone got a full body workout with coupons. Everyone pushed it and will be feeling the calf raises for the next week. Six ounce curls will be difficult for the remainder of the day. I always love the opportunity to lead a great group of guys and find joy in the conversation and challenge. Shout out to the CSUP group for taking on the 6 mile or 13 mile challenge.
Announcements
Picture this:
Three clowns driving away from Watchtower after a pretty solid beatdown.
Clown one: “Man, this knee injury isn’t all bad, I told Chicken Little I couldn’t commit to Q’ing because I’m not sure if it will hold up.”
Clown two: “Aren’t you Q’ing Impromptu on Friday?”
Clown one: “What are you talking about? Wouldn’t I know if I were Q’ing?”
Clown two: “That’s what I read.”
Yada yada yada……..clown one checks back through groupme and his text messages to find out he committed to Q’ing back in like June. And here we are. I am Clown One. From that moment on, I spent my time preparing a weinke like no one had ever seen. By that I mean I moved on with life and forgot about it again. Good news, crazy rain coming through I’m sure not many will show. Have some ideas on how to keep dry………No rain? Like a hundred PAX pulling up one by one….what could possibly go wrong? DiCCS given, we got what we need and I’m going to keep us out of where they’ll be traffic alive? moving.
The Thang
And they’re off, the three horse is in the lead with Gerber and Deadwood right beside him. Opening mosey at a 7 minute mile pace….oops….circle up at Rudy’s Rumble Room the bathroom house…..not enough room….do better
Circle at the circle, imperial walker, Jimmy Dugan, calf stretch, and dry docks…..mosey
Head to the stadium parking lot, LBC’s ……mosey
First alcove, grab some wall. Air presses in cadence and Mike Tyson’s on your own……mosey
Front of the high school, dips on the benches…..mosey
Now let’s run around the high school drop off with parents and their children walking up right to where there’s no path and it’s either wet grass (uh oh Moneyball) or jump in front of cars to the side gym entrance. We’ve got calf raises then more Mike Tysons……mosey
Heading back toward Rudy’s Poop Palace the bathroom we stop for LBC’s again and squats until the 6 and Zinfandel because he always circles for the 6, why can’t you all just get this part right? We’re here for ourselves and each other so circle back and be a better person catches up. We do the squats in cadence then….mosey
Head toward the middle school, grab some wall and do air jabs. Heading towards the front of the school we stop at the alcove and…..MORE MIKE TYSONS. Yes, Banjo I under stand we’ve done these already….thank you …..mosey
Step ups at the picnic table then LBC’s until we’re all done…..mosey
Out to the front of the building we find some bench for incline merkins, ok and more dips. Ugh forgot there were a thousand of us and there clearly isn’t enough benches. Channel your inner Deadwood, AUDIBLE …..mosey
Head towards COT, a sharp right into the alcove closest to it. Let’s do some air presses and you guessed it more Mike Tysons note to self, maybe come back to this because I’m not sure it’s true I may have blacked out by this point of the Q
Back to our original starting point for a variation of the Paula Abdul going three lights forward and one light back three steps forward because opposites attract on the way to Rudy’s Stool Saloon the bathroom we did speed skaters and on the way back LBCs is that right? are people still reading this?
This brought us back to COT with a minute or two to spare. And that was for all of us because here in Waxhaw we circle for the 6. Why do I have to keep telling you people this?
We did some Mary and called it a day.
Moleskin
Thanks for letting me lead. Strong push by all involved. Welcome to the FNG, Flip or Flop. And thank you to Dough Boy for taking us out.
Announcements
4 Prerunners on the hills, 2 on the flats. Shout out to One Niner and General for pushing me to run the hills, and One Niner for slowing his pace to roughly half his regular and running with me. I PR’ed the damned thing and he was barely even breathing hard. That hilly prerun is something else. You’ll get about 250 ft of elevation in the mile down and back Point Carpenter.
Back for the main event YHC popped the tailgate to reveal several stacks of pavers, roughly 10 pounds each. PAX grab a paver each and make sure to treat it nice because you’re spending the next 45 minutes with it. Disclaimer given and we’re off.
Warmup
A mosey to the basketball court. PAX are thinking, “These pavers aren’t so bad. This will be a piece of cake.” At least that’s what I think they’re thinking. So, on my call we lift them above heads and hope nobody drops them on their skull. We’ll pull this trick for every mosey during the workout. Arrive to the courts and the first 3 exercise are the only time that paver was put down.
The Thing
Mosey to the front of the baseball field, alternating pavers overhead and held in front. 7’s on the hill with
Mosey to the playground, with a little backward running with a paver overhead, and partner up. Dora with running PAX holding the paver overhead, and exercising PAX using the paver for core work.
We had about 5 minutes left so a mosey back to the launch, picking the pavers overhead again.
Finish time with 4 rounds of Jack Webb with the paver.
COT & Announcements
Moleskine
This might have been my most fun Q yet. I feel like I say that every time, but this one I prepared for with practice laps and exercises with the pavers around my hood the night before to tweak the beatdown just right. The Newton’s cradle was a tough one and worked well for 7’s because you do max 6 of them. I’m glad to be able to give back to this group with not only this Q, but taking over as site Q as well. Thank you all!
Moleskin:
A moleskin is a fabric that’s used to prevent or treat injury. In the backblast its an opportunity to wax poetic about the events of the morning; kind of like a moleskin for the soul. Generally we put the moleskin last but today I wanna put it up front for anyone that gets bored easily and quits reading.
For those of you unaccustomed to gear workouts, they’re a bit different than your typical bootcamp for a variety of reasons, but a big one is how much time you need to set up and tear down. Between the coupons, dumbbells, tire, slam balls, etc. it takes a bit to lug it over to the workout area and arrange it for the PAX. So I’m always impressed by the guys that get there early and stay late to help set things up even when it isn’t their day to Q. This isn’t to call out anyone who hasn’t done that, but rather to thank those that have. It is noticed and it is appreciated. Plus, it’s a nice little bonus workout you didn’t know you were getting!
The Thang:
Typical Diesel station-based workout, done with a partner for the mumble chatter:
We did two rounds each of the timer then moved on to the Coupon Webb. Lots of groaning…before, during, and after.
1 Squat Thruster / 4 Bent Over Rows
2 Squat Thrusters / 8 Bent Over Rows
…
10 Squat Thrusters / 40 Bent Over Rows
Back to the station work from above for another two rounds. A little slower on the Farmer’s Carry this time for some reason…
Did I mention the groans? Big 10 was excited when I described round 2 of the Coupon Webb:
1 Merkin (on the Coupon) / 4 Calf Raises (on the Coupon)
2 Merkins / 8 Calf Raises
…
10 Merkins / 40 Calf Raises
Back to the station work where I’m pretty sure everyone intentionally tanked to make sure we didn’t have time for another Coupon Webb.
Gonna feel it tomorrow!
Moleskin:
Wait, another moleskin? Well, it’s best to apply before and after to minimize injury and speed healing.
Thanks Catfish for taking us out
Announcements: