September 11th, 2019 By Exit54

13 men braved the hostile conditions of the downtown parking deck to see what your old estranged comrade @Exit54 had in store for them…

WARM-UP:

Mosey to the new parking deck, run up the ramps stopping at each level to do one of the following:

• SSH x 20 (IC)
• Windmills x 15 (IC)
• IST x 20 (IC)
• 10 Burpees (OYO)

At this point, the Q noticed only two stairwells in the new deck, and audibled to the old deck.

THE THANG:

Divide into three groups –

• Group 1, run up the northwest stairwell (the really disgusting one), going up two flights then down 1 flight then up two until you reach the top. At the top, 10 Clapper Merkens or 15 Hand-Release Merkens.
• Group 2, run up the Cabarrus Ave stairwell, up two flights, down one, up two. When you reach the top, 25 Smurf Jacks in cadence.
• Group 3, run up the southeast stairwell, up two flights, down one, up two. When you reach the top, 35 Freddie Mercs in cadence.
• On completion, each group rotates clockwise to the next stairwell and runs to the bottom (down two flights, up one, down two). Then do the next exercise at the bottom.
• REPEATO until time is called.

Time to head back to Mary – Bear Crawls and Crab Walks around that church on the corner. Watch out for the cat who had no interest in moving out of our way. Mosey the rest of the way to OCT.

MARY: 

412 seconds of Planking

MOLESKINE:

Your Q was long overdue for a return to OCT – while it’s not the Coal Train, it’s still the best launch location in all of MECA. Several things came together to make this an ideal day for me to not only post but lead the workout. First of all, I got that minor event known as the Blue Ridge Relay out of the way last weekend, which finally freed up my Wednesdays for something other than running hills. Then, my boy @Scooter was/is set to close on the new house right next to OCT some time today. Wanting to give him a familiar face on his first post, I grabbed today’s Q.

I was glad to see so many familiar faces this morning, and to see that very little had changed. @Skinner’s still banging out the pre- and post-run on Wednesdays. @Luthor’s still fretting over his Panthers. @Anvil still sweats like a Woolly Mammoth. The OG parking deck is nastier than ever. It’s hard to believe but I’ve now been in Harrisburg for about three and half years, far longer than the time I was an F3 Concord regular. But I still feel as bi-PAXual as ever every time I make it back to the 25. You guys did a lot of good for me in the early F3 days and that still continues today. And you’ll like @Scooter… he’s gonna give you quite a boost in the distance running category.

With it being such a weighty date on the calendar, I knew the parking decks were the ideal destination. As I mentioned this morning, the WTC towers had 110 flights of stairs, with FDNY and NYPD men climbing nearly all of them that morning. We didn’t have time to do 110 today but we left a lot of sweat in those stairwells. Same theme for Mary – there were 412 emergency workers (firemen, EMTs, police) who lost their life at the World Trade Center that morning. To honor all of them, we did a variety of planks for 412 seconds. That’s six minutes and 52 seconds – hopefully long enough to give us all a better appreciation of the sacrifices that were made.

I’m sure you’re all like me (unless your under the age of 25), in remembering almost every detail of that surreal morning. While it was awful in every way, it also galvanized this country in a way that I’ve never seen in my lifetime, before or since. I’d like to think that we’ll get back there some day, not on the heels of an historic tragedy, but because one day enough Americans will simply stop seeing half the country as their enemy.

As always, thanks for the opportunity to lead.

/Exit 54

“If we learn nothing else from this tragedy, we learn that life is short and there is no time for hate.”

– Sandy Dahl, wife of Flight 93 pilot Jason Dahl

Concord

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