I awakened this am to nice quiet peaceful bedroom with the soft whispering snore of our dog. My M rolled over and said, dang, can you hear that rain? I didn’t hear a thing. I’m sure it has nothing to do with me being 51 years old. It’s probable from listening to Rush all those years as a teenager. Ahhh, the memories….so then I got up and checked my phone and saw it was raining and there was a wind advisory. Oh well, back to reality and time to get dressed and get to GasHouse. I pulled up a little early and saw Strog’s car there. He’s getting over some sinus-type infection. So much for getting some rest. He and the rest of the guys eventually get there about the time I am dozing off to sleep. We started talking about Q School which was planned for right after this workout. To be honest, there was not a lot of excitement….from me or anyone else….even with Tube offering to make a coffee run to entice people to stick around. I really didn’t have any interest in sitting in the wind advisory cold weather to listen to some bone head speak…..oh wait, I’m one of the boneheads so maybe I should take a different approach. In my head I though about what my M often does in situations like this. She looks at me and smiles and says “We can talk about that later.” This is code for STFU, I’ll decide, and you won’t remember we even had this discussion sort of like a Jedi mind trick…..Note to self, when I hear the M say “We can talk about this later” I need to think “These aren’t the Droids you’re looking for. You can go about your business. Move along.”
Start with the WU then split with PainLab heading 1 way and 5 bootcampers headed up to Grier Middle School parking lot. Last week Boudin did some suicides and I liked it so much I planned for some more of the same with a twist: new exercise called IndianRunPlankJumpSquatSuicides. Everyone lines up on one end of parking lot in plank position. Guy on far right jumps up and runs to first line, jump squat and runs back to start. When he does jump squat, next guy jumps up and runs to first line, jump squat…. on down the line. When we get back to first guy, he can move to next line. We did a bunch of these so we got our plank time in for sure. I liked this, but burpees or merkins might be better next time. Next we moseyed to the track for some leap frog stuff. We split into 2 groups. Group 1 did exercise while group 2 started to mosey around track. Whenever group 2 wanted to stop and yell, then group 1 would stop the exercise and mosey past group 2 as far as they wanted then stop/yell/start exercise while group 1 repeated same until we got around the track back to start. We did 3 laps with Merkins, SSH, and Squats. There was only one puddle at the track so we were all VERY CAREFUL to avoid splashing in the puddle. I think JJ might have stepped in the puddle so we chastised him severely so he would be more careful.
Next came a bit of a decision for me. My plan was to go to the grassy hill near the famous Long Baseball Field, you know, that famous field with the pitcher’s mound built with the blood and sweat of our own Stroganoff BACK IN THE DAY. However, the grass was a bit wet, and all of you know how much I really don’t like to get in the water while exercising…..well I didn’t want to let the guys down so we did it anyway. We did Hillevens (elevens on the hill) with Imperial Walkers at the bottom and (I think) plank jacks at the top. Apparently Gator and I cannot count and got in some EC. That has never happened to me before. I checked my watch and figured it would be cutting it close, but thought we should follow the Weinke anyway. We moseyed to the steps at First Presbyterian Church for what ended up being almost my favorite part of the morning (favorite part was dodging the puddles of course). We got to the steps and I “splained the plan: start at the bottom and hop up touching each step to the top then mosey back down to bottom for 5 merkins. Repeat and add 5 merkins until we hit 20 merkins. After quick time check, I figured we could bring it back down so we kept this up but worked the merkins back down to 5. Part way through I got a 10 count from Capt Stubing to let me catch my breath-the legs didn’t get too tired, but the hopping really worked the cardio and breathing. That will be on my list of things to do next time-I think the pax really liked it as well. There were lots of happy faces while we were doing this. I had some other stuff planned for the trip back home, but I forgot to get the sandbag out of my truck on the way in so I will have to save that for later. We moseyed back to start with a quick stop for some wall sits and hip slappers before a few minutes of mary at the end.
No FNG’s but we finished COT and had another discussion about Q School. In the end, I don’t think anyone wanted to let the guys driving in from other AOs down so we fired up the grill and got started. Bubba Sparxxx jumped in on the teaching and Sargento came in strong with condiments and supplies then handled the grill like Chef Ramsey. We chowed down on some good burgers while getting some good learnin’ in. A few others arrived and think we had a total of about 15 guys for Q school with a lot of input from new-ish guys and veterans along the way. In the end I think it turned out better than I expected even if we had good weather.
You can find a lot of F3 info including what we discussed at Q school today if you google “F3 the steve.” The one thing I would add is what we talked about at the very end: Know the power of the shovel flag. If you don’t know what I mean by this, ask me or anyone else that was here.
One more thing…..those burgers were really good and we will be doing this again sometime soon. Gumby knows a thing or 2 about breakfast.
Whoopee