Upon hearing Rambler’s rallying cry to fill in an empty Q sheet, YHC decided answer the call and change his SC to a HC by placing his name upon cell B49. Where there was once white, there was now FUCKING SLAYER to VQ this fine AO. Now all he had to do was get a decent night’s sleep…or not…

0530 comes quickly to this typical night owl, but an HC is an HC, so the show must go on. With 7 PAX in attendance, the time had come to shake off the shuteye and get cracking.

Warmup

Stupid shit like walking around with ridiculous amounts of weight on your back requires a solid core and strong back. Preferring static over dynamic stretching any day of the week, YHC led a warmup targeting the lower back and associated muscles with static good mornings. With proper form being crucial, I reminded everyone to keep an arched back and to stick out that posterior end as far as they could. When Germ whined about his hammies, I knew my mission was accomplished. Now on to…

The Thang

While we could have just packed in the miles, it seemed remiss of us not to take advantage of the lovely coupons on our backs during our trudging, so I quickly demoed what we’d be doing upon completion of each mile; a new exercise later deemed the “mank,” was born…oh, and some squats.

We set off at a healthy clip of ~15 min mile which brought us to mile 1 in short order. Time to put the mank into action:

• Mank x 10 (alternate slow merkin and plank IC)
• Rucksack Squats IC x 10

Miles 2 and 3 went by without incident and replete with lots of mumblechatter…until the manks were deployed, which incidentally reduced the chatter to mostly mumbling. This, by definition, is what good livin’ really means. With Wreckless peeling off, we were down to 6 to tackle Bennett Mountain. Try as she might, Bennett Mountain could not keep these PAX down as they plodded up her back. Mile 4 came more quickly than YHC realized (likely due to his incessant chatter), but thankfully Rambler reminded us all that it was time for the fourth and final (or so the PAX thought) round of PT.

Shortly thereafter, Quark was called back to his hadrons and then there were 5. Luckily, mile 5 ended at Stinky Pete’s abode who noticed our ragtag group and walked out to greet us. Not to be rude, we invited him to join us in our (surprise!) legitimate final round of good livin’ PT. 50 manks and 50 rucksack squats in the books. BOOM.

Closing in on the AO a bit early, but seeing how close we were to 6 miles, we circled the AO a couple times to eke out the finale mile. No time for a sixth round of PT or Mary.

Announcements

• Something about a picnic? I think RG3 knows something about this…

COT

Sometimes it helps to be reminded of the basics. In this case, “just show up.” We’re going to be faced with challenges, new experiences that scare us, etc. in our F3 lives and beyond. The hardest part is often just showing up. Everything after that often just falls into place. So, when in doubt, just show the fuck up.

NMS

• Rambler has an interesting definition of “taper.”
• Someone should design a patch with Enigma’s mug superimposed with DFQ.
• Germ likes ham…er…hammies.
• Manks will assuredly make a future appearance, but they need a new name. Ideas welcomed.