Split it up

I had a very enjoyable mid-week day off yesterday.  The weather was awesome with temps remaining in the 70’s most of the day. Except for a quick trip to grab some coffee I spent the entire day at the house and was totally content doing so.  The chickens were quite glad I was home as it meant they could be free ranging literally all day long.

I attended to a few minor chores including fixing the one screen door, laundry, dishes and a few other odds and ends. But for the most part I just relaxed, watching some of the huge Blizzcon feed collection and geeked out on the computer.

There was a brief period of the day where I was not relaxing.  I headed out to the bar park to get some exercise in. First I made an attempt at a timed Century circuit (40 BW squats, 30 push ups, 20 hanging knee raises, 10 pull ups) for time, something I had not tried to do seriously for around a year.  Considering the overall decline of my fitness level in 2014 I surprised myself by posting a time 15 seconds better than my previous best of 2:47.  It was encouraging.

I then got the idea in my head that I want to try something different in the tire flipping department.  I have two tires in my back yard, one is about 200 pounds and the other is 300.  Flipping the 200 pounder is pretty easy, the 300 pounder is more challenging but still very comfortably inside my wheelhouse.  Well I wanted to try something outside the box.

I got the idea in my head to try to lift both tires together which would add up to a formidable 500 pounds of rubber.  Simply stacking the tires on top of each other wouldn’t be sufficient since the top tire would slide off the bottom once the lift started.  I decided to use my ratcheting straps to lock the tires together temporarily.  My first attempts went nowhere, the weight of the tires pressed the bottom edge into the loose sandy soil, which gave me no grip whatsoever.  I got my post bar and my piece of 1″ schedule 40 pvc pipe that I use for dragon flags.  I pried up the tires just enough to kick the pipe under the edge so I at least had an edge for my fingers.

Even with the grip I still failed multiple times with my best effort getting the tires a few inches up in the air before I dropped it.  500 pounds feels heavy, imagine that.  Having two tires on top of each other made the act of tire flipping more difficult.  As you can see from the picture I had a wall of rubber to deal with. The height of the tires meant I could not get by upper body up and over the top edge of the tire to get into a better leverage position.  I was getting quite frustrated.

Finally after I don’t know how many fails I stepped back from the tires and started to get angry. Anger is normally seen as a negative emotion but when it comes to tackling difficult tasks it is a positive for me.  Anger focuses me.  After getting sufficiently pissed off at the tires I got down one more time gripped the edge and pushed up and into the rubber as hard as I could.  As the stack started to move I saw stars in my field of vision due to the strain.  The tires rose slowly past the prior dropping points and to the upright position as I grunted mightily.  When I pushed the tires back over they made a very satisfying THUNK as they crashed back into the ground.

I was pumped up after finally defeating my 500 pound rubber nemesis.  I celebrated by box jumping on top of it’s flipped over corpse.  If you didn’t see this unfold yesterday, here is the link.

I strongly support inserting one day off in the middle of the work week, permanently.