My second Q in three days (and only third overall) gave me the great opportunity to a) lead an awesome group of men and b) use some Mother’s Day-themed material I’d cooked up for Saturday’s Thin Blue Line but couldn’t use because I had 90 minutes of material for a 60-minute ME. I hate to waste material. Thus, Mother’s Day Part II.

Warmup

SSH
Willie Mays Hayes
High Knees: 45 secs
Arm Circles, forward and reverse, keep arms up
Overhead clap, keep arms up
Seal Clap
Plank: right arm high, right leg high, then left arm/leg, etc.
Slow merkins: heck, we were already in a plank

Main Event

First, we rolled out my patent-pending B-I-T-C-O-I-N.

B: “B” stands for “Bear Crawl.” But Funny Money guessed burpees, so first we did five of them. Then we Bear Crawled to the top of the hill.

I: We Imperial Walked, but literally walked as in covered distance, to the gate entering the track. You could also call these “Traveling Imperial Walkers” if you like. I’m not the boss of you.

T: “Tunnel of Love.” The PAX lined up side-to-side in the plank position to form a tunnel, under which a PAX crawled on their forearms, then the next PAX, and so forth. Lots of predictable mumblechatter.

C-O-I-N: We didn’t have nearly enough time if I wanted to get to the Mother’s Day bit that I couldn’t bear to leave on the cutting-room floor once again, so I tried to play it off that we were skipping the “COIN” part because it’s only a “virtual” currency. A bitcoin joke, get it? But there really is stuff for C-O-I-N that now I can save for another time.

Telephone Relay Race

To honor the phone calls that hopefully a number of us made to our Moms the day before, we played a game of telephone as part of a relay race around the track of 400 meters per runner. Here’s how the absurdly involved event worked:

– We broke into two teams. I told the first runner on each team the key phrase to be repeated: “The woman who started Mother’s Day also later tried to kill it.” (That’s true, by the way.) Each succeeding runner needed to repeat the phrase as best he could to the next runner. At the end, any mistake from the original 12-word phrase was a five-second penalty.

– While waiting to run or after finishing, the PAX completed 15 reps each of merkins, alternating jump lunges (single count), and WW IIs. That was later cut to 10 each because it was easy to lose count.

– Team 2 had one fewer person, so one PAX on that team had to run twice. Jeeves volunteered to do so, and I think he might also have been wearing a weight vest. I greatly respect his determination and step-up-iveness, but frankly I questioned his race strategy.

– Team 1 won handily, with Coxswain and OPEC smoking the last two legs to fully lap Team 2. Team 2 joined Jeeves for his final lap, and Team 1 also joined the lap for some fellowship. Oh, did I mention that the teams ran in opposite directions on the track? Yeah, I said it was complicated. Anyway Team 1 also missed just one word from the original phrase in the game of telephone, dropping the word “also,” while Team 2 dropped about a half-dozen of the original words while adding like five new ones. But they’d already lost by so much that it seemed churlish to actually add up their full penalty time. Let’s just chalk it up as a Team 1 win and be done with it.

By then we were pretty much out of time, which means that I can save the postscript to the race challenge that I’d cooked up for another Q; no spoilers. We hustled back to the Devil’s Ridge parking lot and did a quick American Hammer while waiting for the 6.

There were some announcements that frankly I was too tired to focus on. We named FNG Hanging Chad, because he’s from Florida. I do remember that he’s 23 years old. Jeeves took us out. Amen.