With Chilly Willy and others out supporting the teenagers Qing at Gladiator, we were fortunate to get five serious dudes at Viking. We didn’t mess around. No warm-up. Just running and body-weight exercises designed to be felt the next day.
- 100 8-Count Full-Nipple-Alignment Wide Stance Merkins
- 150 Praying Mantis
- 200 Fat-Bottomed Girls
- 100 Bear Squats (too many)
- 120 Sheryl Sandberg (Lean-Ins)
- 100 Tippy Birds
- 6 Quarter-Mile Runs
800 reps and 1.5 miles in 45 minutes. A solid effort.
Nugent (still not in the computer) is training for a 26-mile multi-day hike in the Grand Canyon of the Southeast (Linville Gorge). Edsel had just finally recovered from my last Viking workout but was happy to hit the soreness reset button for another week of misery. Waffle House and Mayhem were their usual fit selves, but if they kept up their form, they will be feeling their triceps, shoulders, hamstrings and/or thighs.
Coffeeteria was enhanced by many from the Gladiator crowd and elsewhere, with Gnarly Goat and Waffle House hanging out a bit later with me. Our conversation was overheard by Random Starbucks Dude with a Laptop, who, it turns out, is F3 Domino from Lexington, Kentucky. It was nice to explore our shared culture for a bit.
It was a relatively ordinary workout day but one that made me particularly appreciative of the many benefits that F3 has bestowed upon me these last seven years. It’s not the workouts or the accountability or the opportunities to serve the community (although these are valuable and necessary), it’s the potpourri of pax, the mishmash of men, the salmagundi of supermen who keep me engaged and inspired to keep coming out. This was my first double-respect Q and my goal is to still be at it for my quintuple respect Q. See you in 30 years, gents!