4 hours. 18 minutes. 56 seconds.
This is how long it took Diane (not her real name) to complete the Sunday workout.
1000 burpees for time.
This was in the early days of the gym when we didn’t hold regular training sessions on Sundays. Rather the gym would open at 11AM and whoever wanted to could show up for a random, unannounced workout challenge. Sometimes they would last 4 minutes. Other times, as in Diane’s case, they could take up your entire afternoon.
We had 6 people show up that day. Five of them finished between an hour and eighteen minutes and an hour and forty-nine.
Diane was not your typical client. She had almost no strength training (or really any training) experience when she started. As you might imagine she was very regressed when she started but once she started feeling the effects of the training she started showing up every day. The Sunday challenge certainly wasn’t going to slow her down.
Diane was an Upper East Side mom. A born and bred Manhattan private school rich kid who was certainly more interested in drinking Arnold Palmers than the training of Arnold Schwarzenegger when she first started with us.
I completely understand why dyed-in-the-wool meatheads love fitness challenges like Hyrox or Murph (a classic CrossFit workout which involves a lot of running, pull-ups, push-ups and squats, performed in a weighted vest) or IronMans. When you spend enough time in the gym you a) want to express and prove your fitness b) likely have a lot of mental demons you are trying to manage and c) kinda get bored if you don’t have some type of event on the calendar to train for.
But it always fascinates me when the straights go from 0 to 100 and put themselves through something like a thousand burpees for time.
And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to this conclusion. Everyone, whether they consciously recognize it or not, desires a bit of friction in their lives.
We may lay in bed at night dreaming of days of retirement or financial freedom or laying on a beach for eternity with nothing to do but, the truth is, nearly no one would be satisfied with that outcome.
Sure, you might appreciate having money or being able to take time off or a vacation home on the shore but if your life was completely challengeless you would seek out ways to create them.
And the reason I say this confidently is because so many people who have the resources to sit back with their toes in the sand ultimately (and usually rather quickly) find other mountains to climb.
I was fortunate enough to have dinner with a few colleagues last week and two of them recently exited their companies with rather large payouts. And while that is wonderful and certainly allowed them both to breathe a sigh of financial relief, neither of them was like “well, that’s a wrap for me. See ya, suckers!”
There is a somewhat famous saying that goes something like “Don’t wish for an easy life. Wish for the capability to withstand a difficult one.”
And that is why I believe Diane spent nearly 5 hours on a Sunday afternoon banging out rep after rep long after everyone was finished. She needed to face a challenge.
She needed to create some friction.