Beyond The Whiteboard user Kie Drea tried his best to get in a score for 14.5. To date he is recorded over 1600 workout sessions on beyond the whiteboard. None more epic then this. Below is message Kie sent me about the video.
2 years ago my friend Kyal and I were on gear crew at the Asian regionals and only 6 teams turned up. We thought “All we need to do is make a team and we can get a regionals ti-shirt each”. So we persuaded our wives to start at Chikara CrossFit And we made a team. We came 40th and made it to regionals on the 2nd round of invitations.
This year we made a bigger team with all the leftovers from Chikara. A mixmatch of all the guys who have no chance of making it onto the main box’s team. We’ve been doing well, each week someone different contributes to the score because we have a lot of athletes who are good at one movement but lacking in another. As with any weak team though, by week 5 you’re running out of athletes. We had 3 good scores on the women’s side but we needed my score on the men’s side to stay on page 1 of the leaderboard.
I’m in Bhutan though, so before I left I prepared a number of guesses at the workout. My closest was AMRAP 10 of 3-6-9…etc thruster and over-the-bar burpees where I got to the round of 18. When I got wifi in Bhutan on Friday I was disappointed to find out I needed a barbell and set about looking for a gym.
The nearest gym to Trashiyangtse where I was is in the capital; Thimpu. That’s 4 days drive away. I got so e help from locals and we asked at schools if they had fitness equipment. But all they play is a kind of darts and archery. We had the idea to use a rock from the river and weighed some up by hand but we had no idea how heavy they were so have up. One guy had the idea to use two sacks of rice suspended from a bamboo stick. We went with that but could only find 25kg bags. That was measurable though so given enough time, at least I could register a score. A 25kg bag of rice is very cheap here at $15. The exit morning we drove 3 hours from Trashiyangtse to Trashigang in the hope we might find some bathroom scales to weight the barbell on video. 4 of is went shop to shop in the town asking for “Balance” (Set of scales) and “Scale” (ruler). We found a 30cm ruler quite quickly but nobody had a set of scales. Then we found hand scales up to 26kg and had a discussion on if we could weigh stones individually and keep the video rolling as they were attached to the bamboo barbell. One of the last shops we went to had an electronic hand scale that went up to 40kg so we decided to buy that. The. The shopkeeper said she had a 100kg hand scale that she used to weigh bags of rice. We talked her into selling it to us for $35. That’s the price of a drop in at Chikara so I figured why not.
We drove back up the mountain and found a space to put the barbell. Ole up some Indian construction workers loving in corrugated iron hits to get rope and wiring. Then weighed stones using my messenger bag. We wasted time looking for the right stones, then one worker turned up with a mallet and had the bright idea to nock chunks off a big stone until it weighed in at 21.5kg.
While 2 guys attached the stones to the bamboo I explained the video rules to my Bhutanese judge and cameraman.
The light was fading so as soon as we were ready we started recording.
The rest of the story is the shambles you can see on the video! haha!
in the morning the workers were up early for work at 8am making a parking area. So try lined up and I tried my best to explain how to lift the bar. We all had a good laugh at each other attempting to clean it.
I think it would be fun to do the whole open here, scrambling together equipment from Thursday to Monday, video the workout, then leave behind a makeshift gym for the locals spreading the word of functional fitness.
Maybe we’ll come back and do that in March 2015! Hahaha!
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