While listening to the radio recently, I heard a story about the remedial fitness training for new Army recruits. Apparently, modern American culture doesn’t lend itself to producing citizens that meet the Army’s standards - a lot to unpack there. As is the case with most things, I blame millenials. Think about it seriously, though. Pre-WWII, your average Army recruit probably worked A) on a farm or B) in manual labor and I’m pretty sure spent less than 30 minutes a week on screen time in its various iterations. Regardless, it made me curious to know what the standards were and how F3 might stack up as a “remedial fitness training” regimen. I found the specs for the Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT) here. 2 minutes AMRAP Merkins, 2 minutes AMRAP big boy sit-ups, 2-mile run. 50 points in each, minimum, to pass. 100 points each, maximum. 100 points for most PAX would be 75 merkins, 75 sit-ups, and a 6:30 mile. Seemed like a pretty good Q to me.
The Warm-up
Jog the wrong way around the parking lot and circle up in the BBall courts for:
Arm circles Forward
Arm circles Reverse
Good morning
Imperial Walker
Willie Mays Hayes
Jog down to the finest track in NW Cary on a Thursday for…
The Thang I
2-minutes AMRAP merkins - log your count
2-minutes big boy sit-ups, log your count
1-mile run and log your time. OK, this is cheating. I admit it. But I had more in store for this morning and 2-miles would have possibly taken us to COT
Alternate people’s chair to fail and plank to fail while waiting for the 6.
The Thang II
The nice thing about being done with PFT is you have 364 days to train for the next one, so we jumped right on it.
Backward run 1/2 lap, traveling lateral squats
Backward run 1/2 lab, traveling lateral burpees
The Thang III
Jog down the finest hill in NW Cary on a Thursday to a rock pile with the finest assembly of make-your-mama-proud-no-way-in-hell-we’re-traveling rocks.
A soldier always keeps his guns in good form = 25 curls
Occasionally deals with explosives = time bomb five count presses around the group
Never surrenders = 20 tricep extensions
and 20 rock-rows and ‘Merican hammers just ‘cause
Put those suckers back with just enough time left for an Andy-Hill-Billyrun up to the parking lot for COT
The COT
Count-o-rama: 11
Name-o-rama
Announcements: The Bull 14Apr18 sign-up here (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GsoPhxTdxpLNFYCLPWSVUOMNLN6w-potWpTlpaH-0-Y/edit#gid=681726350), Habitat service opportunity, sign up here (https://habitatwake.volunteerhub.com/lp/f3/)
Prayers: Kilmer’s M and Swag’s FIL, Swag’s parishioners, Moped’s marriage this weekend!
We circled up around Moped and laid hands on him as YHC took us out. A great time as always. But, don’t even get me started on the Combat Readiness Test (CRT), might have to try that as a CSAUP in the near future. But, I’d need a sled…
NMS
Biner almost smiled as he reported a 292/300 score in PFT, but then discovered he was reading the age-adjusted score for a 25-year-old, making his actual score 832/300
The marital counseling for Moped during the pre-launch mumblechatter may have concerned lesser men, but he simply smirked with a confidence born of knowledge and experience. That…or he’s just a millenial
It also made me think Smokey has his work cut out for him in this group.
Kilmer and Goose have some legit experience with PT. I can just imagine about-to-be-discharged younger versions of them laughing heartily as they received their discharge papers about never having to do PT aga…….wait, what’s this F3 thing?
Goose is co-Q-ing my CRT CSAUP
Kilmer can cadence count like a mutha. Like, if we got Samuel L Jackson to come out, and he brought his Pulp Fiction self, entirely set free from his Capital One self, and then beat the living daylights out of his Star Wars self, then meta-physically merged with his 187 self, and made you do a 1000 burpees and then thank him at the end for the privilege. Yeah, Kilmer counts like that.
Sky Blue is quick. Either that or he timed his mile run in metric. Either way, he smoked the run portion today. Oh, and he ran the Maynard yesterday…so he was probably a little off his game. However, his shoulder looked a little shaky on the time bomb presses. Not sure why that might be.
YHC needs to push harder on the Mary. I was about 40 points shy of 300, and 34 of those points came out of the sit-ups.