“The purpose of life is to stay alive. Watch any animal in nature–all it tries to do is stay alive. It doesn’t care about beliefs or philosophy. Whenever any animal’s behavior puts it out of touch with the realities of its existence, it becomes extinct.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo
In his novel on the search for diamonds in the lost King Solomon’s mines and the Lost City of Zinj, Michael Crichton creates Amy, a female gorilla trained to communicate with humans using American sign language. It turns out Amy is critical for the team to communicate with the kakundakari – a new, vicious human-gorilla hybrid species (with human-like height and weight, grey hair and exceptional strength and speed). The novel (and later movie) ends with Amy helping the team escape during a volcanic explosion. The newly identified species of kakundakari was completely lost under hundreds of meters of hot molten lava.
Or so it was thought….
Nearly three decades later, in a small, mountain city in southwest Virginia, a single kakundakari emerged from the mist on a crisp fall morning. So human-like was this kakundakari that he apparently had existed in plain sight and yet his true nature remained hidden. While he assimilated with normal human behaviors (adapting to bipedal walking, driving an enormous truck, wearing a hoodie, sporting grey facial hair, participating in F3), deep inside him were his true gorilla instincts waiting to be evoked. On that crisp morning, faced with the desire to stay alive, these instincts emerged and the kakundakari’s true colors shown bright. Abandoning his false bipedal motion, the kakundakari resorted to his more natural quadrupedal motion. His limbs moved in concert at lightening fast speed, propelling him at a blistering pace. When obstacles inhibited his path, he simply bounded over them, effortlessly, as if the burden of his false bipedalism had finally been lifted. He was once again in his natural state. The kakundakari had re-emerged. His foes lay in waste.
You may call him Cake….but make no mistake, that is merely a short form of Kakundakari (because who the hell could pronounce this anyways).
OK, rewind…here’s what actually went down…..
14 PAX showed up for an early morning work-out (Pinky, Dunphy, SpaceJam, LegZ, Kakundakari, Jimmer, Glee, Charlatan, Prince Tuesday, Seabiscuit, TollBooth, HC3, Conrad, CaliD).
We warmed up…pretty standard stuff (except CatScratch hit snooze, so Dunphy took over with the complaints and mumble chatter)…25 SSH IC (see how easy I go when you sleep in CatScratch!). A few WMHs….then we hit the Arm circles for a while (we did 80 IC, but at forty we moved to a low squat hold for the second half – No Dunphy! this is not how Pinky uses the toilet, but thanks for asking)…then we do a little Crawl DJing…in a circle we crawl forward for a while, then we crawl back…for example we do bear crawl, then we do crawl bear. We did gorilla crawl, then we did crawl gorilla. We did broad jump burpees, then we did burpees jump broad. Last part of warm up was a merkin-squat escalator. Start at 2 each, and increase by 2 each parking spot.
Dunphy calls for recover, recover….not yet Cat Scratch Junior!!!
Now on to the thang….We played Sharks n’ Minnows behind the school. Shark catches minnows. When caught minnows do 10 merkins and then become sharks to help catch minnows.
The “catch”….1). the grass is wet and cold. Frost bite / hypothermia was a worry.
2). The Q called out modes of travel…and as BlindSpot noted pre-workout (and then didn’t have the balls to show up!!!) it was all crawling.
3). Winner of each round became the shark at the start of the next round.
We did 2 rounds of bear crawl, 2 rounds of crab walk, 2 rounds of gorilla crawl (see editorial comments above regarding Cake’s re-emergence of his inner gorilla soul), 1 round of broad jump burpees.
With just a few minutes left we did the shortest Mary ever – 50 LBCs IC.
Recover, recover.
Kakundakari took us away with a prayer