Simple, painful stuff at the Vortex this morning. Just like the riddle of a perpetual motion machine is simple to grasp but impossible to resolve, we tried to set the bar high with some perpetual motion ourselves.

After the standard warm ups (a lap around the fields and 15 cadence-count SSHs, imperial walkers, windmills, mountain climbers, and merkins), we headed to the playground. Dealer’s choice while we took turns on the wheel of pain for two sets of pull-ups (20 or max, whichever came first). Some wise guy (Walt?) called wide-grip merkins after merkins. Nice.

Then came the perpetual motion part. We paired up and did twenty minutes of relays across the width of the soccer field and back, divided into time segments instead of number of repetitions so that no one was ever idle (in theory). In five segments of roughly four minutes, one PAX did an exercise while the other PAX “locomoted” in some way or another across the field and sprinted back. Then they switched.  The five paired exercises were: sprints/merkins, bear crawl/prisoner squats, bunny hops/Carolina drydocks, crab walk/burpees, and panther crawl/SSHs. Twenty minutes of glory. We narrowly missed having the gold star of vomit placed on the exercise.

Some particularly nasty Mary closed out the morning, with Dunphy’s bows/toes variety pack anchoring the fun. A great morning!

We have now all recovered from Draper’s maiden Q and look forward (in that perverse, F3 way) to Brick’s inaugural effort next week. Word on the street is that the guy does multiple sets of 25 pull-ups on his “off days,” suggesting that we are in for trouble…