Have you ever worked out so hard you puked? It’s a bad feeling, but also a good feeling. For me, the first time it happened was on a fitness test at a boot camp to become a wildfire fighter. Young and eager to impress, I decided that I would get the best time out of the whole boot camp—odd, since I’m not the most competitive person on earth. The time needed to pass the test was 14 minutes, and (although my memory may not serve me exactly right since it was approximately one hundred years ago), I told myself I’d shoot for nine.
It consisted of a half-mile run with a 50-pound pack, followed by a 500-foot uphill run with a 60-pound pack. Afterwards, we did a 300-foot run with a Wajax Mark3 pump—maybe 60-pounds), then had to pull a charged fire hose for 250-feet. I had just returned from a trip to three-month trip to Indonesia and Thailand, where all I did was sleep, surf, smoke clove cigarettes, and drink myself into a stupor. While I did not get the best time, I was very close. Soon after I finished, lying there in the grass with a bunch of other kids in the same condition as me, I realized I would need to join the other pukers at the edge of the field. Since I was violently puking through a chain-link fence in full view of the entire boot camp, I felt embarrassed. Turns out, though, it proved that I would work stupidly hard and I got a job.
Anyway, Nathan Florence recently designed a workout that was sure to be a very difficult one. With a time goal of under an hour, it made at least one of them throw his breakfast in the bushes. “This was an absolute cooker,” he writes. “We wanted to run, we wanted to row and we wanted to see how we could handle weights in the middle. Designed this workout for a hold-on-for-dear-life-kinda-feeling and that’s what we got!”
Here’s what they did, just in case you’re the type who likes the pain:
1 mile Run
100 KB Swings
1K Row
75 Wallballs 20lbs
1mile Run
50 Push Press 95lbs
1K Row
25 Burpee Box Jumps
1 Mile Run
