Used and Abused: The Essentials

My body hates me. There isn't a day where I'm not nursing some type of sore muscle, blister, injury, or rash of some sort (yum). If you know me, you are quite familiar with the fact that I am a certifiable gearwhore. So it makes sense that I'm also a certifiable product-whore as well: if it could potentially make the pain go away, speed recovery, or prevent the pain in the first place, I'm on it. So when I pack my bag for, say, the Death Race, these are the essentials:*

Everyday I'm Shufflin'

I posed the question this past weekend: "Which is harder to describe, the Death Race or a GoRuck Challenge?"

Obviously, to the average person, both seem certifiably insane:
The Death Race: you basically do whatever they tell you to do for 48ish hours, which likely involves chopping wood, running up and down a mountain, and carrying heavy and awkward shit.
GoRuck: you run through a city at night for 12ish hours with a backpack full of bricks and stop and do push-ups, bear crawls, crab walks, and any other stupid exercise you can possibly think of (see, e.g., monkeyfuckers; little man in the woods)

After giving it some thought (ok, WAY too much thought), I think I'm going to go with GoRuck being harder to explain. Why?

Winter Death Race: FAQ's

Post-Winter Death Race, I've received tons of questions about the race, my experience, and life in general. I do not claim any special DR knowledge--hell, I'm still a rookie myself. However, I love a good FAQ section, so I thought I'd recreate that here, Death Race-style.

(1) Did you really do 3000 burpees? God, that's dumb. 

The burpee board, Sunday morning

Yes, all finishers were required to do 3000 burpees. And yes, it's totally dumb. But that's the point. Their goal was to break you mentally (well, and physically). 3000 burpees is utterly stupid, but you do them and you move on. That's the Death Race for you--some things are going to suck. Or all.

(2) Can you give a play-by-play of the race?

Nope. Not my blog style, and I find it rather boring to tell it like that. But at the end of the race, the finishers had done 3000 burpees, 3 mountain loops (25+miles with some other running), chopped and stacked wood, completed two bikram yoga classes, carried and rolled logs, carried snow, carried buckets of river water, and done a water submersion in a frozen pond.  The rest you can figure out--it's part of the Death Race mystique.

32 hours and 21 minutes

A stump almost broke me.

I was finished chopping my wood and stacking it, except for this bastard of a stump about 3 feet in diameter, knotted to hell, and frozen solid. The thought entered my mind "there's no way I can chop this up. There is absolutely no way."

And at that moment, I knew I had to snap out of it. Because that's exactly what they want: once they have you mentally defeated, you are toast. Might as well throw in the towel and call it quits.

And snap out of it, I did. We were only 12ish hours into the race, and a piece of wood wasn't going to break me. I would get it done. So on the advice of a wise DR veteran, I started hacking around the outside. Slowly, over the next half hour, the stump came apart.

These races should be everything I hate

T-minus one week til Winter Death Race. And I feel like I'm missing something. It's this weird nagging feeling, that something isn't exactly right.

So as I've been fighting that, I've realized that it's a theme that I've come back to time and time again: preparation.

Confession: I'm about as Type-A as they come.

Adventures in Urban Training: Wood Chopping

The Winter Death Race is three weeks away.

I have never swung an axe.

Now would be about the time to panic, no? There is one thing, and only one thing, that you know you will be doing going into the Death Race or Winter Death Race: chopping wood. For a race where virtually EVERYTHING is unknown, you would think it would behoove me to train for the one thing that is. Yet I have fully neglected this critical skill, mostly because I live in the middle of freakin' downtown Chicago where carrying an axe and chopping down the park trees is, I imagine, some type of crime.

Cashews, Leadership, and Lessons Learned

[Fair warning: this post may be full of typos and grammatical errors. I'm tired. I'm freakin' tired. 15+ hour work days, pre- and post-S.E.R.E., have left me running on empty. So bear with me.]

RP1

When I arrived this past Friday in D.C. to for the inaugural S.E.R.E Challenge, I really had no idea what to expect. And I was excited by that. As the members of Class 001B gathered at our RP next to the Washington Monument at 10pm (or 2200, if I want to go all military on you), I was ready for unknown. But what I didn't realize was that, before all was said and done, the most important thing that I would take away from S.E.R.E. were the lessons that I would learn--about myself, about others, and about life in general.

But because I hate being too serious, I'll give you the "fun" lessons first: