Saturday evening we finished off our high intensity week with a session of absolute strength. This was my first experience with absolute strength and most of the time I spent practicing my incredulous/skeptical face. Let me describe the workout to you. The point, I think, is to execute several absolute maximum exercises to help clear lactate and refresh the muscles. Or something.

We started with a typical warmup, about ten minutes on a cardio machine in the MTU weight room. I chose to run backwards on the elliptical machine; it's not every day I get to run backwards. We finished the warmup with some medicine ball throws. Then we had our workout -- only three exercises, 6 sets of 1 rep. The first thing we did was leg press on the sliding machine thing. Totally normal, we just did so much weight that we could only barely do one rep. Then we moved to pull-ups. It gets a little weird here because we're supposed to do Russian pull-ups. Russian pull-ups are when (so they tell me) you start with a normal pull-up but then continue to raise your body above the bar. So your hands go from arms extended straight above your head to arms straight down by your sides. Yes, that is hard work. Since I am not very good at pull-ups, I just did normal pull-ups with enough weight so that I could only barely do one. Then, and this is when I started laughing uncontrollably, we went out to an empty corner of the MTU parking lot with our flavorful van and pushed it for 8-second intervals. Cook, Compton & I were on a team while Kuzzy and Gregg were on the other. It was about 8pm by this point and there seemed to be something a little wrong about hanging out in a dark parking lot, pushing our van. If you ever get a chance to watch Kuzzy try to push a van (Kuzzy & Gregg couldn't actually get the van to move, which made it even more funny), you should because he manages to contort his body in an entertaining manner.