Boot camp – the one with birthdays

Larry and Jenny are no-shows so there are just three of us at the car park on Monday morning. I don’t mind training in the car park. We’re working out before sunrise and this is the best lit (I’m paranoid about falling over when I run outside) of the places we train. It’s a bracing 13 degrees.

Warm up

An indeterminate number of laps of the car park (turns out to be 5 or about 15 minutes of running). We’re on a very steep slope, so the homeward leg of the lap is a hill run.

Interval

Hill sprints and push-ups. Jog down the hill, sprint up, 10 pushups. Repeat with 8, 6, 4, 2, and 10 pushups.

Cardio

Four sets of 10 burpees, with about 30 seconds rest between sets. At the end of the last set we’re asked to call out the day of our birthday. Sam doesn’t know it at the time but his date of the 24th buys him 24 hill sprints. Fortunately, I only have to do six.

Strength

I finish the hill sprints first so I get the most strength work.

Shoulder press with the rifle (my small wooden ‘log’). I lose count at around 120 repetitions. Bicep curls with the rifle as a ‘bar’. I don’t even bother to start counting these there are so many. Mark joins me for the last 50 or so after he finishes his hill sprints.Tricep extension using the rifle. Again, there are so many repetitions I don’t bother to keep track. It feels like about two minutes or so of work.

Monkey grip. Arms extended holding the rifle, one hand above the other. Top hand moves to the bottom, repeat until you run out of rifle and then reverse to work your way back up to the top. Don’t tip the rifle over, your hands should stay in essentially the same place with the rifle moving up and down. This is so much harder than it sounds.

Wrist rotations, another exercise that looks easy but is fiendishly difficult. Hands extended, holding the rifle in an overhand grip. Roll the rifle forward for 10 counts and then backwards for 10 counts. Try not to lower your hands and feel the burn in the forearms.

Legs

Walking lunge to the top of the hill. Sam is feeling a bit eager this morning so he holds his rifle across his chest for a bit of extra weight while he’s lunging. It takes abut 60 lunges to get up the hill.

Shoulders

One hundred shoulder presses to finish. We are told that this is the last exercise for the day so it’s approached with quite a bit of gusto.

Surprisingly, that’s it (Sgt Pain is usually quite flexible in his interpretation of ‘last exercise’). A shorter session than usual, mostly because there are only three of us. We seem to get through everything a bit quicker with the smaller group.

Tomorrow will be interesting. I slipped on the way to the train and have gouged three chunks out of my right foot and nicely bruised my knee. I’m really hacked off because I was wearing flat shoes instead of high heels for a change – I never fall over in heels. I’d love to ice my foot at work but we won’t have a freezer.