In the last few months, when I am not traveling, I have been doing 6 CrossFit workouts a week at CrossFit Merrimack in an effort to achieve the above-mentioned goals of deadlifting 170# and doing one unassisted pull up. The first goal is within reach. The second one is...well...the corporate term would be a "stretch" goal, a term I always found idiotic but then I find most of corporate-speak fairly idiotic.
The first one is doable.
The second may be - or it may not. I'm 6'2" tall, female, 170#. That's a long muscled body to pull up a long way. My arms are - from gripping palm to arm pit - 2 feet long. I have to lift that straight up, no kipping, no assistance bands. .
Today was what I euphemistically term my rest day or alternatively, active recovery day. No weights. No burpees. No sprinting.
But I did spend 4.5 hours slowly walking, bending and picking up trash with the Lowell Litter Krewe. We look like convicted miscreants, orange vests, those metal grabbers for picking stuff off the ground, pulling a trash bag behind us or carrying our five-gallon plastic bucket, picking up other people's trash. For fun. For our city. Because we live here. Our vests don't say "community service" but that's what we are in the truest sense of the word. We have not been ordered by the courts, but only by an internal moral compass and a chance to give back to the community where we all live. To see an immediate improvement in our environment and our neighborhood.
Regardless, after 4.5 hours of picking up trash, I come home and sit down and will rest the remainder of the day. The most demanding activity I'll engage in is this: writing, thinking, writing, thinking. That will tire me enough.
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Hi Barbara,
That's a great thing to do for your community.! We used to have a litter picking day too, then for some reason, I think to do with Covid pandemic, it stopped happening but it was a good way to get some exercise and get out and about!
Best wishes
Gill
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What a wonderful idea! 🙂
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Hi Gill - It's surprisingly fun. I really like the people and it's like gardening. You can see the effect immediately. Some guy who lived on the street thanked us repeatedly. This started during the second year of the pandemic because it was something that could be done outside! People were happy to get out of their houses even if just to pick up others' trash.
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Hi Barbara,
I'm a volunteer litter picker too. I was out there this morning from 07:15 to 10:45.
It's surprising the things we find as well as the usual "meal deal - drink+snack+main" packaging. I've found on my litter pick walks : a broken fishing rod, a slightly damaged sun lounger, a very wet and battered samsung phone, a child's scooter (back wheel missing), a mattress (reported for the local authority to collect).
I call it cross training for when I'm not running.
Jan
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Yay! So there are more of us out there. Our big find yesterday entailed calling the police: two boxes of what looked like snub nose or hollow point bullets. I know very little about firearms, but these were short, fat unfired bullets just dumped on the side of a neighborhood street. Disturbing.
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Hi Barbara,
There's quite a large international community of volunteer litter pickers out there. One of my friends follows the Italian fb groups for litter picking. Mine is a pretty law-abiding semi-rural area in UK, so although we occasionally find used drugs equipment, anything like firearms is unheard of. Which reminds me, I must report some fly-tipping that I spotted on this morning's run.
Cheers
Jan