Tunnels of Doom

Tunnels of Doom – February 19, 2012

Things that may appear normal to most people turn into training opportunities for people that are training for Death Race. Earlier in the week I had spied a construction site that had a lot of site work going on. An workout was created.

I told Bill to meet me at a four story parking garage near the Rio complex in Gaithersburg. We were each to bring a 50lb bag of sand and a roll of duct tape. 

We began the day by running up the ramps of the garage; doing push-up, crunches or burpees at the top; running down and then up the stairs, more push-up, crunches, or burpees and the top; and then running back down the ramps. Repeat several times. After a good warm up, we returned to our cars.

We took out the bags of sand and wrapped them completely in the duct tape. They looked like gray eggs. With a Sharpee, I wrote “I May Die” (the Death Race disclaimer) to which we both signed our names. Of we went on a hike with our “eggs”. We soon entered the construction site, went up and over large dirt mounds, through storm water management gullies and soon arrived at our playground, an area filled with concrete sewer pipes of various diameters awaiting installation. Our mission, to go through the sewer pipes carrying, pushing or pulling our 50lb eggs.

The sizes ranged from 30” down to 24”. The larger ones you could crouch down and carry the egg through. It was uncomfortable but do-able. Unfortunately, there were not many of these. Most were the smaller sizes, which you had to belly crawl through moving yourself forward on your elbows and toes, pushing the egg ahead of you. I was surprised at how much core strength this took and would have loved to have heard the comments from the people driving by watching us.

After several hours of this we had made it through 82 pipes. Bill followed me over to a small area where I pulled two bags out of my camelback. Each one had a 100 piece puzzle in it. We had 30 minutes to put the puzzles together. However many pieces were left un-attached after the time would result in 5 pushup penalty each. I started the watch and we began. After just a few minutes, I noticed muscles tightening up big time. I was struggling to put the pieces together on the dirt ground. At the conclusion of 30 minutes we counted the un-attached pieces. I owed 290 push-up, Bill owed 400. Puzzles suck.

When we finished the push-up penalty, we headed back through the site towards the garage. We decided to leave the puzzles on the ground thinking some construction workers may want to take a break and finish them for us. At the garage, one more run up and down the ramps and stairs for old time’s sake.

Puzzles suck.