Indigenous Ability

The Michigan Assassin’s Unlucky Meeting w/ Mr. Royal Burpee Belly up to the bar my stalwart ones, today’s challenge is a combination of a hypothetical meeting between Stanley “The Michigan Assassin” Ketchel and Royal H. Burpee, the man purported to have contributed to the world the compact evil that bears his name. Mr. Ketchel [as we have documented elsewhere] used to throw boulders to build wind and explosive punching power. Seems to have worked for him. So, who are we to argue with old school true? The Gear ·         You ·         50-lb slam ball, rock, cinder block, or some other heft worthy stand-in. ·         Space to fling and break stuff. The Protocol ·         Drop and hit 13 of Mr. Royal’s invention. ·         Then pick up your “boulder” and hurl it for all you...

Oh, Crew, looking to get outside the comfy smooth gym and test your real mettle with activities and objects that haven’t been designed to make hefting them easier so you can skip grade-school reveling in the WOD participation trophy hamster wheel? Then, belly up to the bar for a PT Challenge from ye olde days of lumberjack and woodsman prowess. Pulp wood was a designation for bucked lengths not quite up to par for lumber use. For our purposes, and those into Woodsman and Lumber Sports Competitions, grab yourself 4 lengths of log four feet in length with an approximate weight of 30-40 pounds per. If you don’t have logs available, you can hit the resource that is Home Depot and pick up a couple of 6 x 6 pressure treated timbers. They come in 8-foot lengths so a wee middle cut to each gives you a PT resource that will last. [They’ll be a bit on the light side but they will serve the log-bereft.] The Course ·         Lay out...

This offering is an Old-School PT Challenge, a mini tutorial on form, and a bit of a finger wag at an aspect of “functional” training. First the PT Challenge: The Lumberjack Tabata Gear ·         You ·         An Eastern Single-Bit Ax [you can go double-bit but you won’t be shifting surfaces.] ·         A downed log to work [or if you’ve got a tree that needs to be felled, you’ve got a twofer—conditioning and chores—you’re welcome.] ·         A timer set to Tabata Intervals. The Protocol ·         Hit that timer and chop furiously for 20 seconds. ·         Rest for a strict 10 seconds. ·         Then back on the stick for 20 more seconds. ·         You do this for a t...

Setting the Scene ·         You’re on the 33-mile Chilkoot Trail winding through the Coast Mountains. ·         The temperature is dropping, through more than a few mishaps you’ve lost your sled-dogs like a cheechako [Greenhorn/no account rookie.]   It’s either sit and freeze or get back on the stick. The Gear ·         Your own bad self. ·         A drag sled, or a fine stand-in. ·         Weight to fit your grit. [Me and my 6-weeks out from knee-surgery went with 125#.] ·         Choose terrain with hills if you got it. The Protocol ·         Lash yourself in like the lead dog you are and… ·         Mush that sled for ½ Mile at your fastest pace, we’ve got to b...

In August of 1937 lighting struck some dry tinder in Yellowstone National Park. The fire started small but via a long slow crawl eventually grew to become known as the infamous Blackwater Fire. The Blackwater Fire eventually consumed 1,700 acres and took the lives of 15 firefighters. After Blackwater the US Forest service came to the conclusion that the only way to combat such fires was to somehow get an advance team to the fire before it grew to monumental proportions. The ideas was to take an elite cadre of firefighters who not only knew the ins and outs of dealing with conflagration, but who had skills in backcountry survival, woodcraft, and who could parachute from a plane.  After the planning stages were thought over and a few initial trials were made these small units were tested in a literal trial by fire when on July 12, 1940 the first official aerial unit of firefighters were employed on the Marten Creek Fire in Idaho’s Nez Perce National Forest These sma...

Fighting, to a firefighter in the early US was literal in two senses of the word. A)   You fought fires and… B)    You were often a fighter expected to literally “fight” other human beings at the scene of the conflagration. Let’s turn back the clock to early America when practically all dwellings were made of wood, patched with pitch, illuminated with open flames or rickety vessels of coal oil.  Let’s add cigarettes and cigars and pipes and a lucifer [striking match] in most every hand.  Let’s add open flames being the primary source of warmth. With all of these additions I think we might see just how dangerous early incarnations of the firefighting job were. Now about that fighting other humans bit of the early job description. Let’s have a look at the why. In the early days of the firefighting game the “fire departments” were, shall we say, competitive. They earned according to the number of fires doused. This quot...