Recently in Hooverball Category

I haven’t updated in so long that the Word file I use for this was no longer on my “recent documents” list and I had to actually go and find it. I’ve been going to the gym as usual but a lot of other things have been going on too. The last Suffer on Saturday was last weekend and it involved two teams competing in wall-ball and rope climbs. I’m happy to say I climbed the rope to the ceiling twice, plus one more halfway-up attempt. After that I had to substitute 10 rope-grasping pull-ups for each of my possible rope climbs. In the end we all had to race each other through 100 air squats as a sort of tiebreaker. Our team won, but we’d been given a lot of unfair advantages to make up for the other team’s amazing rope-climbing skill. After Suffer on Saturday, some of us played a bunch of Hooverball. Tom and I and two or three other people got carried away and played on and on after everybody else was done, in spite of aching arms from the impact of the ball. It was so much fun! Suddenly everybody else was filing out of the gym, going who knows where. After a while longer, with more Hooverballs thrown, we decided to find out where they all had gone. Turned out there was a three-piece set of giant inflatable bouncy toys out in the hangar on the unused roller-hockey rink. Everybody was plowing through the inflatable obstacle course and bouncing around in the bouncy cube-room. What do you call those things, anyway? I’d never been in one so I was eager to get in and jump around. With four of us in there, I jumped a lot higher than I expected to. It was exhausting! Especially after all that other stuff. Then I went through the obstacle course and down the big bouncy slide a few times. We quit when a couple of actual children showed up and wanted to use the toys. (The nerve!) Whew… I slept in until 11:00 on Sunday after all that! Monday, we did three rounds of 1000-meter rows with 30 dips in between. My rowing times were 4:14, 4:19, and 4:24. I thought it was pretty good to only lose five seconds between each one, but Tom’s last two rows were the same at 3:48, and my teammate beat her time. Last night we did a lot of deadlifts and then some weighted pull-ups. I improved my max deadlift from 198 pounds to 220 (100 kg). For the weighted pull-ups, the guys used the pull-up bar and held dumbbells between their ankles. Three of us women used the rings and wore a belt with a kettlebell attached to it. It was gratifying to be able to pull up several times (with rests in between) with the 16-kg kettlebell. But when I tried to do two in a row, I couldn’t get all the way up.