Tomorrow begins an exciting and tough stretch of challenges around The Standard. Each day, we work our way through our daily training sessions with the intent of improving our skills, strengths, mental fortitude, and so much more. This assessment season is to see where we are at. To take our fitness temperature. It’s like a fitness check-up. “Hey, last time we got together, you were Orange and purple, and blue all over… now the oranges are gone, and some purples have emerged.” If we aren’t testing, we’re just guessing!
So, let’s see where we are at. Let’s see how much we can deadlift tomorrow. Let’s see how much we can press or how many pushups we can do. Let’s run as fast as we can.
Let’s NOT GIVE A CRAP about what we did last time!
Let’s put forth our best effort and that’s all that can be asked! MANY of you will level up. This is so much fun and addictive; to do something you’ve never done before. Many of you will establish a first initial overall level. Many of you will level DOWN and I NEED you to be ok with it. I need you to understand that fitness fluctuates. I need you to respect the impact COVID had, the impact your crappy nutrition has had, the impact of working from home or dealing with homeschooling your kids, or whatever. Those are all worthy variants that DO IMPACT your performance. Leveling down is not a failure. It’s just an indicator that tells us we need to address an area.
We’ll work through all 15 categories over the next three weeks. If you miss a category, you’ll be able to catch it later or come to Saturday class times, which will always be set aside as make-up times. If you have already tested a category and don’t want to retest API to see if you can get an extra rep or two (I understand :)), there will be an alternate workout. ALWAYS talk to your coach; we will give you something to do. We will not be allowing people to do different tests than what is assigned for that day during class times (example: Class is doing Fran, but you missed Diane last week… resist the urge to ask to do Diane). Come for Open gym (each evening it’s available!) or wait until Saturday’s make up day. This will help minimize the load on your coaches, who already have an increased workload during these weeks.
Please pay more attention than normal during the whiteboard meetings. All of your coaches have been through this process 3 times, so we’ve learned some things along the way that will make your experience better and your performance higher.
If you typically come on a specific schedule (M,W,F), consider deviating from that schedule if possible to make sure you get to work through each assessment. If you typically come M-F, you may consider taking a day off in there to recover and subsequently maximize your performance.
Labor Day is a week from tomorrow and we will have 9AM and 10AM classes only. We’ll be doing lactic tolerance (FRAN) and a 1 mile run. LT only takes 6ish minutes, so we’ll have multiple heats and a long rest time between efforts.
I’m really excited to see the progress you’ve all made! It’s going to be a lot of work, but so so so worth it. :)
