Tuesday has become my “Wildcard” workout day. I always want it to be cardio-based and involve a small amount of running, but I don’t structure it. Sometimes it is Insanity or Asylum. Sometimes it is variation of Spartan workouts of the day (WOD). Because I am still away on a trip, I actually just made this one up as I went along.

I started with about 5 minutes of jumping rope as a warm-up. I intended to go longer, but the hotel gym’s rope was shoddy and kept twisting on me. I abandoned it quickly because I couldn’t keep my heart rate up. I then transitioned to an elliptical machine, which to me is only slightly less boring than a treadmill. I put it on the hill program and ramped the level to it’s max setting. I took off “up the hill” and soon found out that level 25 could get really tough. At times, it was all that I could do to keep it moving (that was good). After 1 mile of that I was sufficiently bored out of my mind and moved into another room to perform a set of moving push-ups with jumps into a squat position.

The cornerstone today, was stair run repeats. I climbed 10 flights of stairs on high throttle and then jogged back down. The stairwell was suffocating so I exited each time and cooled down with 50 walking lunges. During 1 set of lunges a security guard came down the other end of the long hallway. To illustrate how my mind thinks, I pondered what I would do if he questioned my hall lunging. The first thought was that I could head into the stairwells and outrun him. I quickly nixed that idea because it was just dumb, for the lack of a better term. He went the other direction and that thought string ended. I completed 5 sets of the stair runs / lunges and decided to finish off the hour with a run to the Alamo. I made it there quickly as I was running for speed. I paused at the shrine entrance because no one was around and it was a solemn site. I read the William Barrett Travis “Letter from the Alamo.” One statement from that desperate plea struck me hard and energized me for the final sprint back to the hotel. “I will never surrender or retreat”. Commander Travis, that is now my motto for Beast training.