Wednesday, August 17, 2011

my arms are going to fall off

Since July when I ran the Tough Mountain Challenge, I have been following this blog called Dirt in your Skirt.  She is a girl who writes about her races (like we all do), but she mostly does the mud races, warrior dashes, spartan challenge etc.  It is probably one of the more interesting blogs that you are not reading and should be.  Anyhoo--as part of her training she posted a challenge that exists at a climbing center in VT.  Here it is:

1 minute hang (I assume on the climb wall)
800 M row in 4 minutes (1000 M for men)
100 hanging knee-ups
35 physio ball push-ups (50 for men)
5 negative pull-ups (10 for men)
3 minute plank
This all needs to be done within 15 minutes. 

Initially she posted this challenge and no woman had completed it.  The other day, she was the first woman to complete the challenge.  So after reading her blog, I thought I might give it a try.  I would have to do it a little differently as our Y is set up with stuff in different sections but I could try to do all the parts.

Today was the day.  I skipped the 1 minute hang as the climbing wall is off limits unless there is a climbing class.  I easily completed the 800 M row in 4 minutes.  Yay!  I couldn't find an arm hang thing so I did the knee-ups in the Roman Chair.  I did 25, rest, 25, rest, 20, rest, 10, rest then the final ten.  I went right to the pull-ups because the bar was right there and I didn't want to waste time switching rooms twice.  5 pull-ups, negative or regular, SUCK!.  Very hard for me.  I could only do one negative, the others I could barely pull myself up.  Wow.  Hard.  Kudos to you, Margaret.  Then I moved upstairs to the aerobic room where the balls were and tried to do the 35 push-ups on the ball.  Again, HARD.  I got 10 fairly quickly, but had to stop after 5 for the next 25 and rest.  The plank was next.  That was next to impossible after doing all these other arm exercises.  I managed to get through 15 seconds at a time, but then needed to rest.  My arms and legs were shaking so bad.  I made myself do 4 minutes since I had to rest so much so that it would total around 3 minutes of actual plank.  Without the 1 minute hang, this all took me about 19 minutes.  And I'm quite sure some of my pull-ups and push-ups would not pass as correct ones if I were doing the actual challenge.

So if any of you are looking for a new challenge--here it is.  I'm quite sure my arms/shoulders will be jello for the next two days.   Oh, and read about Margaret, she's one tough B**ch!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm exhausted from reading about it! :-) Kudos to you too for giving it a shot.

Carrie said...

Geez! She's bada$$! You too!

Christi said...

Wow, that is a workout. Congrats!

Margaret said...

Thanks for posting about my workout and my blog! It's a killer for sure! Nothing is hard on it's own until you add it all together!

Thanks from Margaret aka www.dirtinyourskirt.com