Thursday 101209

Skill

Kipping/kipping pull-ups

If you are proficient at your kipping pull-ups, today is the day to work on those chest-to-bar pull-ups. Your chest comes in contact with the bar at the top of each rep!

WOD

3 rounds for time of:

15 burpee box jumps, 24"/18"

50 double unders

 
November PR board. You guys amaze us every day!

There are a lot of reasons to work out. Some of the pretty obvious ones are to feel good, strong, happy, and to look good. Sometimes people will work out knowing that the time the put in now will benefit them 20, 30, or 40+ years down the road. By taking good care of our bodies and minds now, we can prevent a very long list of chronic conditions like obesity, type-2 diabetes, heart disease, etc. Sometimes this isn't always in the front of our minds, but we've probably all thought about it in those terms. Well here's another benefit that I know I never thought about until very recently. Fitness can help us survive a severe traumatic injury. Much rarer than the chronic diseases that impact our population, but it can and does happen.

I just finished a book titled The Long Run by Matt Long. Matty Long is an FDNY firefighter. One day while riding his bike to work he was struck and subsequently run over by a transit bus. His injuries were incredible, and initially doctors believed he maybe had a 5% chance of surviving. The backstory is that Matt was not only a firefighter, he was an endurance athlete. Two months prior to the accident Matt ran the New York City Marathon in 3:13:58, qualifying him for Boston. He was also an Ironman competitor. He had learned to push himself to his limits both physically and mentally, and at the time of the accident he was in the best shape of his life.

His doctors attributed 2 things to his surviving. The fist was that he was transported to New York-Presbyterian hospital, which is known for it's care of trauma patients. He was brought where the doctors had the best chance to fix him. This he couldn't control. The other factor they attribute to his survival was his level of fitness, which was entirely in his hands:

"His body was conditioned to withstand a huge metabolic insult," the doctor explained. "Even though his blood pressure is low and he's having very low amounts of organ perfusion for extended amounts of time, those organs aren't suffering because they've been conditioned to deal with plenty."

When I read that, I realized that I had never really considered that perspective. We say we train in here for life out there. Here's a rare but dramatic example of how that really can be true. His desire to return to the training he loved provided him a constant goal throughout his recovery. There's no doubt that the mental training he had to go through to perform the events he did helped with a long recovery as well. The book goes on to detail Matt Long's recovery and his attempt to return to running marathons and competing in Ironman triathlons. It's a great book if you're looking for a little inspiration!

Although incidents like what Matt Long went through are rare, you can chalk this up as another benefit of doing what you do every day you walk through the doors!