Dufisthenics

My girlfriend Cindy is very athletic and strong, so much so that in certain athletic activities she can give me a run for my money.  This weekend was one of those examples.  On Saturday we went running at the local school track.  We talked loosely about running possibly as far as 10 miles.

Well I felt pretty miserable the entire time and tapped out at 7 miles.  Cindy ran an additional half mile and then just for fun wanted to see how quickly she could run one 400 meter lap.  She tore around the track in 1:37, at one point maintaining a best pace of a 5:43 mile.

On Sunday she made her first ever official attempts at a Bar-barian challenge and did great, holding a static pull up for 22 seconds and a one arm dead hang for a very long 43 seconds.  I don’t think I can hold one handed for that long.  I’m almost afraid to find out.

Don’t get me wrong, I love that she is so athletic and competitive.  I just don’t like to lose. 😉

We followed up with a 20 mile bike ride on Sunday.  Yes, Cindy is a faster biker than me too…..

So today was a big day, I finally legitimately completed a Ray’s Way (15,8,20) for quite possibly the first time in 2013.  To be honest I am surprised I pulled it off.

This time I went back to conventional tactics, using the extra long breaks in the beginning to help me at the end.  Even with doing so, after round 4 I thought I was toast as I squeezed out the 20th push up, I felt spent and highly doubted I would be able to complete round 5 either with unbroken sets or within the 3 minute time allotment.

To help the odds I did my last round in the back of the gym on real dip bars.  I did my first four rounds on the dip/pull ups bars that are part of the assisted dip/pull up machine (no assist of course).  The problem is the machine has some give to it so when I am trying to dip explosively on it some of my energy is getting consumed by the extraneous movement of the machine.

I also did my last set of pull ups on the smith machine bar instead of the split grip, wide diameter, rubber wrapped bar on the assisted pull up machine.  The venue change helped me on both of those exercises.

The last set of push ups was just brutal.  I only repped the first 8 consecutively.  The last 12 were excruciatingly slow.  The last 5 reps took roughly 35 seconds.  My chest was burning as I stopped Round Timer with 10 seconds to spare.

It felt good to complete the challenge after failing repeatedly but it is only the first step in getting my endurance back up to higher levels.