April has become OCR training month at AO’s across F3 nation leading up to the Spring Mud Run. This past Saturday, Geronimo and Bolt invaded Alcatraz with an OCR-type setup.

12 Alcatrazians arrived in the brightness of the Gloom. Yes, brightness, as the baseball field lights were on for the entire hour. While only 3 were headed to the Mud Run, the rest were willing to take on the course we had laid out.

The Thang

While we could not duplicate mud, the goal was to get a similar feel of an OCR event which consist of shorter runs or sprints, followed by an obstacle/exercise, then a short run, and so on. Some refer to this as a brick workout…each run/exercise is a brick. Elite OCR’ers train in this fashion to get the body used to the many, quick transitions.

The lap around the baseball fields was used as the loop. 5 stations were implemented as below. The PAX broke into teams of 2 and were instructed to push themselves and push their partner on the run portion the best they could. Stations were alternated by adding 2 to a completed station (ie. 1 followed by 3, 2 by 4, etc)

Following an initial group stretch to loosen up:

Station 1 – playground area, max pullups followed by 20-40 merkins
Station 2 – lunges up the hill behind the fire station
<part of the course after the lunge station was a zig zag up and down the hill on the far side?
Station 3 – 15-20 box jumps behind the backstop on the far field
Station 4 – 20-30 burpees at the basketball courts
Station 5 – on the main open field: 5a – one partner pulls 35 lb sand bag about 20 yards, partner farmer carries 45 lb dumbells, then switch
5b – head across field. one partner throws/pushes the 20 lb weight ball about 30 yards; partner carries mulitple choices of weight bags and sand bags ranging from 20-50#

At the :30 mark, the PAX was called in for about 5 minutes of core exercise, then back to the loop. This time adding 3 stations to increase the run distance. (1 to 4, 3 to 1 etc.)

The last 20 or so minutes of extra running was pretty relentless.

NMM

This backblast was written about 3 times some of which were eaten by the website, some copied and sent back and forth via e-mail. With some cooperation between Bolt and I, this backblast, like the US mail, will get through to the PAX.

The bad news was I've been fighting some kind of insidious chest cold, and my mud run training has been suffering because of it (sorry Bolt, MaryLou and KidRock). The good news for everyone is that this workout was 60 minutes long. If everyone were to push as hard during a race like the USMC Ultimate Challenge as they did today, they'd only have about 15 minutes left and they'd be doing some kind of AWESOME for their teams.

It took a lot of work to get out there and get this course set up for the PAX, but in the end it was totally worth it. Thanks to Bolt, who did most of the planning, and especially to all those brave souls that came out to do burpees and drag or carry heavy stuff around a field in the early morning.

Bolt and Geronimo!