I left work a little early on Friday so I could head home to start getting things in order. Randall and Jeremy were supposed to show up around 6:30 and I had a bunch of stuff to get together for Ali’s race. Randall was going to carpool with Jeremy.
All week I was in communication with Jeremy. He had indicated he was going to leave his house around 4 pm to pick up Randall and head over my way. Jeremy is chronically poor at executing stated goals and this behavior once again came to the surface in this situation. Instead of arriving at 6:30 he pulled up around 8 pm.
I had told Randall I was going to penalize Jeremy one pull up for the bedroom competition that was scheduled to take place for his blatant tardiness. Earlier in the week Randall had challenged Jeremy to a pull off to decide who gets to sleep in the luxurious guest bedroom versus sleeping in the exercise room on the floor.
Randall has been working diligently on his chin ups the last few months and he thought he might actually be able to do more than Jeremy who has been woefully inconsistent in his pull up training, despite the weighted pull up challenge he had committed to.
We didn’t waste time before we headed out into the darkness to decide the outcome of this challenge. I brought out two of my florescent lamps and a flash light. It was getting chilly outside once the sun dropped, the temps were solidly in the 50’s.
Randall offered to go first. He did 10 quality chin ups and surely could have done a few more but he dropped off the bar confident that double digits would be enough to take the title.
Jeremy hopped on the bar and shocked Randall netting a total of 13 chin ups. The punking was intensified when Jeremy produced a card that was already stuffed in his pants, which he presented to Randall, duplicating the sympathy card stunt we pulled on him after we beat him at a vball tourney last summer. Jeremy included a glossy 3 x5 picture of Randall as well in the card.
Randall was frustrated by falling prey to Jeremy’s chin up bluff and even attempted to hop back on the bar to try to beat 13. Unfortunately for him he could only manage another 10 chins before the lactic acid took over. Randall was getting the floor. Of course the entire episode was on video tape, watch it here.
After the chin ups we headed inside where Randall and Jeremy feasted on a Hungry Howie’s pantangle pizza. We spent the rest of the evening competing in various Kinect sports events. Over an hour of it was broadcast on Justin.tv. There is some very funny footage sprinkled in there. I only had a chance to pull out a couple highlights at this point, here and here. We were up late, much too late considering I had my alarm clock set for 3:45 am. I think my head hit the pillow shortly after midnight.
Despite the lack of sleep, I drug myself out of bed. It was my job to wake up Randall and Jeremy. Randall was particularly difficult to get moving. I let the dogs into his room with squeaky toys in tow and even put the singing birthday card he gave me next to his “bed”. Jeremy was easier to get up as Sadie jumped up on his bed and startled him.
It was chilly out in the morning with temps in the 40’s. I had three layers of clothes on. We took the truck and the van to the race site since we had extra equipment and bodies along compared to a normal race.
Everything race related went very smoothly, despite having our largest turnout ever with 640 registered participants. We had about 150 dogs on site which made for lots of fun. It was great seeing them come across the finish line with their owners. This was also the first year that we actually had a close finish at the end, first and second place was decided by a mere second or two.
After the race was all cleaned up we headed up to the Humane Society to visit. We spent a ton of time visiting the various dogs there. The shelter currently has a ton of puppies, so many that they were doing two for one adoptions of them. Words can’t really describe just how cute these puppies were. Ali latched on to a little brown puppy that was getting bullied by the other dogs in his room. She held him like a baby for a loooong time.
In addition to the amazingly cute puppies there were also many adult dogs that pulled at your heart strings. One in particular was a dog that Ali witnessed being returned to the shelter on Thursday or Friday.
Her name was Twix and she looked almost exactly like Nicki. Evidently she was returned for excessive barking. Well dogs bark, wtf do you expect? She looked so sad laying on her little dog bed. I encouraged Ali to go in and interact with her.
Ali knelt down next to the dog and started petting her. Twix seemed very gentle and passive, similar to how Nicki acts most of the time. She let Ali pet her without protest, even allowing Ali to hold and rub her paws, something many dogs won’t let you do. Twix gave Ali several dog kisses.
Of course Ali’s instant inclination is that we should adopt the dog, hell if it was up to her we would probably have a half dozen dogs at this point. I was not immune to having the desire to bring Twix home and provide her a loving home where she could enjoy lush accommodations and room to roam. However the logical side of me knew that logistically it could be a huge problem.
Nicki and Sadie have finally achieved a decent balance of give and take when it comes to who gets what around the house. Adding yet another dog to the mix would once again muddy the situation. Even so I told Ali we can monitor Twix’s adoption status. Hopefully a nice family comes and picks her up.
Jeremy took a bunch of great pictures from the day, if you would like to peruse them go here.
Even though it was lunch time when we got home, none of us were really hungry since we had a bunch of food forced upon us post race by the Civil Air Patrol who was running a pancake breakfast. They had a bunch of food left over and they didn’t want it to go to waste. Jeremy was the top dog when it came to food intake. He probably ate enough to feed a family of six. I was no slouch, I probably had a dozen pieces of sausage when it was all said and done.
I had a bunch of post race work to do. I encouraged Randall and Jeremy to go take naps if they felt like it, surprisingly neither of them took me up on it.
Once I finished up we headed outside to begin the various physical challenges. The first thing we did was the weighted pull up challenge. Jeremy agreed to do it now that his lesser punishment of eating a quart of ice cream was in place instead of the greater one gallon of whole milk he would have had to consume. He secured this lesser punishment by officially forfeiting earlier in the week.
We did a pre-event weigh in. I tipped the scales a bit lighter than I expected, 186 pounds fully clothed. Jeremy hit the scales heavier than expected at 161 pounds. That number seemed big since Jeremy told us he weighed as little as 155 pounds the day before. That big breakfast must have been just laying in his gut.
I agreed to go first, Jeremy always prefers to go last so he knows the number to beat. I have been training pretty consistently for this challenge since Jeremy offered it to me. When I first started doing 50 lb weighted pull ups I struggled to get two. After a few months of training I have been able to get 4 of them with a 5th rep being borderline. I was quite surprised when I managed to get 6 reps, a personal best, on Saturday after three hours of sleep and a morning filled with race activities.
Jeremy was impressed with the effort and hopped on the bar for his own attempt. He was feeling a small burst of confidence based on the 13 chin ups he did the night before. He decided to try an awkward close grip attempt that supposedly would utilize kipping. Well it didn’t work out very well, Jeremy faltered after two reps wearing a lighter, 42.5 pound vest based on his lighter body weight.
Randall even gave it a go even though he wasn’t officially in the contest. He managed to squeeze out 3 reps with the 50 pound vest using a mixed grip, a solid showing.
Jeremy admitted defeat and crowed it was a smart move on his part to take the early forfeit option which had a less severe penalty. i guess that is hard to argue. If you would like to see the video of this event you can go here.
We had several other physical challenges including sawhorse jumping and weighted box jumps. if you would like to see these events, click the links.
Once we got back inside it was time for Jeremy to receive his punishment for forfeiting the challenge, eating a quart of the highest calorie, most fat packed ice cream I could find which happened to be Hagen Daz chocolate peanut butter ice cream. In one serving (1/2 cup) it packs 350 calories. Jeremy’s 8 servings would add up to 2800 calories, ouch. Keep in mind Jeremy had already consumed at least a couple thousand calories during his monster breakfast sit down.
Jeremy had 30 minutes to down the ice cream. I was unable to find a quart size of this flavor so I had to get 3 smaller containers which was a bit problematic. In order to get the full 4 cups he would have to eat a portion of the third container. This measurement turned controversial at the end.
At first Jeremy had to laugh at this being a punishment at all, the ice cream tasted great and was going down easily. That started to change once he hit the second container. Slowly the ice cream no longer tasted good. The container was making Jeremy’s hand cold, he requested a towel to hold it.
Somewhere around the 15 minute mark he started to get up and walk around as he ate in an attempt to keep his body temp up. As he was getting close to finishing the second container I measured out 1 cup of ice cream into the first empty container.
Even though Jeremy was getting delirious from eating so much ice cream, he did some quick math and protested the amount of ice cream I scooped into the container. He said it looked like way too much. I told him it was a cup of ice cream which should give him the 4 cups required to fulfill his punishment.
Jeremy continued to gripe as he hurried to get down the partial container before time ran out which he failed to do. After time expired we continued to debate what I put into the partial container. After getting four people with relatively strong math backgrounds involved, one of them being an accountant, we finally all agreed that actually Jeremy should have only had a 1/2 cup to eat at the end instead of a full cup.
It is debatable if he even ate a half cup before the timer sounded but he surely was close. Jeremy felt pretty disgusting by the end of the challenge, who can blame him. If you would like to watch the calorie stuffed footage of this food stunt, go here.
We decided to go to Iguana Mia for dinner, ironically because Mr 6000 calories consumed so far said he wanted Mexican food. Ali is a big fan of Iguana Mia too so it was an easy sell. We decided to wait to go there until later to avoid the crush of snowbird’s, we arrived a little after 8pm. Even with our late arrival we did have to wait briefly until they seated us.
We enjoyed a nice meal. You would have never known that Jeremy had already consumed enough calories for three days, he pounded his food like the rest of us.
On the way home I was so tired. It literally felt painful to keep my eyes open. There were no Kinect shenanigans that night, I went right to bed and fell asleep almost immediately.
Jeremy and Randall stuck around until mid-morning on Sunday. Most of that time Randall and I spent trying to knock out the sole remaining achievement in South Park Tower Defense, defeat the Mountain level using nothing but snowballs and walls. We tried multiple times but didn’t get the achievement. After our final fail I realized I misread the requirements. I thought you just had to not use any towers on the very last level. Actually you can’t so much as build a single tower in all 3 stages. Later in the day I worked on getting the achievement solo which required many attempts but I finally pulled it off by the skin of my teeth.
The rest of Sunday I worked on various things around the house, nothing too spectacular. It was a beautiful day to have the screen door open to allow the cool breezes to flow through the house. It was a great weekend overall, exhausting as it was.
Last night I had a nice harvest from the garden that included lettuce, beet leaves, swiss chard and a perfect head of broccoli. Ali created quite the tasty salad from our home grown ingredients.
