The BackBlast:

WIB is back.  Though it never really left.  A few of us would do WIBish things on Tuesdays in the general vicinity of Freedom Park while WIB was on an official hiatus…. #SIPO #69R #compliant #ofcourse…..whatever any of that means.  I swear there is an intern somewhere in F3 who spends his whole day creating new #acronyms.

In today’s official, on-the-books version of WIB, 8 PAX (Curly, DIB, Gentle Ben, Fake News, Maybe, Chairthrower, Doobie, and Steroid)  ran some miles, mostly up steep hills, and periodically did merkins and LBCs.  If you ran hard, you got ~5 miles, 240 merkins and 360 LBCs and it sucked.  If you cheated yourself and stayed home because of the rain, well that’s on you.  Do better next time.

The real news of the week is Redd Foxx’s CSAUP which, shocker, has been made into an #acronym – #KOTQCH.  3 of Metro’s best known, most awful routes.  Total of 18.3 miles.  Run them each within 36 hours.  This terrible idea is exactly what we needed right now.  Competitive events have been canceled since March and there doesn’t seem to be anything on the books until September *at the earliest.*   Lace ‘em up.  Push yourselves.  Lay down your best time.  Have fun.  Thanks Redd.

Here’s the thing though, somehow our 6-man BRR team turned into a 12-man #KOTQCH team.  Is a 12-man team really a CSAUP?  Running each of those routes TWICE in 36 hours would be completely, stupidly, unnecessarily pointless and awful.  But that would be badass.  That would test a man.  Somewhere between an errant text message to an unknown number of recipients and a group facetime call, we decided to halfass this thing and run a 12-man.  We almost locked in a 6 man team when we realized that CMD was one of the people on the group text chat.  CMD has been on this group chat for 2 years but hasn’t responded to anything since Nov 2018.  Dredd tweeted a mustachioed picture of CMD last week which was welcomed proof of life.  Even with CMD DQ’d, but thankfully alive, we still limped our way to a 12-man.  Checkpoint was trying to deflect the excuses, “I have to bake a sourdough loaf that weekend,” or “I’ll only do it if we can spend the 36 hours as a team in a creeper van,” or “I don’t eat pickles on my Chic-Fil-A sandwich.”  It was tough to watch.  CP had that disappointed dad look – “I’m not mad at you and I still love you but I can’t look at you.”   The only way we could make it up to CP was to put together a “fast” 12-man.  We hit the recruiting trail.  Thinslice recruited Snots.  Subway locked up Ewok.  Lee got Gisele.  I got 1099.  CP settled for Swiper. And Fishwrap secured…..let’s just say Fishwrap is on that Nick Saban/Dabo Swinney/Urban Meyer recruiting level.

So instead of grinding out 36.6 miserable miles we’re going to race the shit out of 18.3 miserable miles.  Either way, the reality is that I run as fast as I can for as long as CP tells me to.  6-man or 12-man doesn’t matter to me.  The chance to compete, in any way, shape or form with this squad, is all I need.  Game on.