We did a thing!

I've talked some about fitness on here but it would appear I haven't written anything about Couch 2 5K. Normally its written as Couch25K or C25K for short. Its a program to help non-runners to learn to run. I've started the program many times and last year finally finished it. Unfortunately life got in the way as it does.

This year I restarted with renewed vigor because some friends invited us to participate in a Spartan Race with them. Spartan is just one of a stack of obstacle course runs. Specifically in Spartan you run a 5k with 22 obstacles. Heck to get to the start line you need to cross a 4 foot wall.

The obstacles include monkey bars, (nope, no chance) rings, (again, no chance) a spear throw, (harder than it seemed like it should be, I didn't even see anybody complete it successfully) and a bunch of wall climbs.

Its hard to say what my favorite obstacle was, I liked a couple of them, like the bag lift where you drag a weighted bag into the air with a rope that goes up over a pulley.

I also quite liked the A-frames pictured here. The netting in the distance in the picture is the outgoing run. By that point you've completed (or taken penalties) on a couple obstacles and are just finding your rhythm. The netting in the foreground is the very last thing before you leap over fire to finish.

Least favorite was the Atlas stone. The stone is really a concrete sphereoid (not really a sphere) about 75 pounds. I could pick it up but I couldn't then stand up. My friends had to help pick it up. Carrying it was no real issue but dang it was demoralizing not being able to pick it up.

Lesson learned, I need a lot more upper body strength and especially grip strength.

The joke is that you spend $100+ to punish yourself and get a medal and a t-shirt.

Another lesson I learned is that I didn't need the hydration pack. It was just one more thing to drag around. We were only out for 2 hours and there was water available. I'm not sure I really even needed a snack although I was starving and thirsty when we finished.

10 years ago I would never have considered such a thing but now we're already planning for next year. I'll try to update on training progress, I've got some ideas. We finished in 2:06, the goal for next year is to get under 2 hours. If I can get my mile run under 10 minutes we'll be pretty much there...

We built a gym!

 COVID has been hard on everything and especially places like gyms. I started going to the gym in January 2020. You know what happened next, they closed down in March, reopened in July and closed for real at the end of June.

With the closing one of our friends stepped up, he's got some commercial property that wasn't being used so he bought some of the equipment from the old gym and converted that space to use it in.

First we had to take down a wall.

A sledge hammer and a lot of trash bags...

Hauling out of the old place. This isn't all of the equipment, we filled my pickup and the one towing the trailer too.

The new place is a second floor walk up, it was all hands on deck, well 7 of us anyway, to move in. I don't have any pictures, it was a pretty rapid process.

Getting set up. The hardwood floor is covered with a sheet of plastic to protect it, then a layer of interlocking mats. This has made for an excellent surface to exercise on. Notice also the fans and new lights. There are actually 3 fans, they move a lot of air. Not pictured is the tiny little air conditioner which isn't really up to the task. We need to tint the west facing windows, solar gain on a black floor is substantial.

The weight rack, more recently this got cut back to just one side and slid to the left side of the door. We didn't really need the whole rack as we didn't get all the weights. The room is really just a little too narrow for where it was sitting, I think it works a whole lot better in it's new space.

So now Angie and I are on the "board of trustees" for "an elite fitness club". It's a private club and the only way to join is to know somebody who is already in. We're limited for the number of members because of space restrictions capping class size. For now there are only 6 classes a week which may expand in the future.

We do circuit training, the instructors set up 12 stations, each with one exercise and the students cycle through the 12 stations doing each one for 45 seconds. I know 45 seconds doesn't seem like a lot but if you've ever done burpees you should know better. We go through the set of 12 three times, it takes just a bit over an hour when you add in warm up and cool down.

The students range in age from early 20s through mid '60s, maybe into the 70's in the fall if some of the oldest students come back. Mostly I'd say mid thirties and mid forties.

So what will the future hold? I dunno, but at least for the short term it's nice to have a place to workout. I know that personally having a place to go and going to classes with other people makes me much more likely to attend. I also know that I'm a lot stronger than I was before I started going a year and a half ago so I hope we continue like this into the future.