The BeWOW Breakdown: “It Wasn’t Pretty, But We Got Through It”


This Week’s Workout: The Do-Anywhere Workout to Bookmark


The Breakdown
Total time commitment: 40-50 minutes (less if you are some kind of superhuman)
Difficulty (out of five): If we could give it a 6, we would.
Soreness Factor: If your shoulders and hips aren’t made of steel, you’re going to be sore.
Overall Grade (out of five): 5

Our first Impressions:
Oh! Like toddlers who think life is all sunshine and rainbows, we naively thought this workout would be a breeze. Alon even started thinking about what we should do to supplement the workout afterwards (maybe an ab workout?). It didn’t take long for reality to sink in. By the third set of the first pair of exercises, Rebecca and Alon (Emma was sadly absent for this one) could already tell that this would be neither quick nor easy. In truth, this workout felt like an Army recruitment fitness test and I’m not sure if we passed.

How we felt afterwards:
Somewhere in the second pair of exercises, our heart rates spiked and didn’t really let up until we were later reduced to sad heaps on the ground. The arm haulers were the pinnacle (or low point, truly) of the workout. Alon, after writhing around like a dying fish, decided that the best thing would probably be to just go to sleep right there with a sweaty towel as a pillow. It wasn’t pretty, but we got through it and we have to tell ourselves that the experience is only going to make us stronger.

Despite how tough this work out was, you should definitely give it a shot. We’d love to hear if other people found it to be as hard as we did. It could just be that we were both having a rough morning, so let us know in the comments!

About our testers: 

Rebecca Barber is the founder of the Rocky 50K Fat Ass Run, a just-for-fun 50K run that follows Rocky Balboa’s footsteps in Rocky II. She’s a 16x marathoner and 14x ultra marathoner, having started running when she was a kid. She’s an active volunteer with Back on My Feet Philadelphia, where she works to help the homeless community use running as a means to better their lives and find stable employment and housing. When not running all the miles, she is the social media coordinator for The Wharton School.

Alon Abramson is the founder of the West Philly Runners, the creator of RunPhil.ly – a web resource for running in Philadelphia – and the organizer of a number of running events in Philly, including the annual 26×1 Mile Team Marathon Relay, Beat the Bus, and Beat the Commute. Running since high school, Alon is an on-again, off-again runner with ebbs and flows to his mileage and commitment. More recently however, he’s taken a new approach to training, emphasizing cross-training and speed work as much as building up mileage and this has dramatically improved his running performance. When he’s not organizing and running, Alon works as a research project manager at Penn’s Institute for Urban Research, studying energy efficiency best practices. He’s on a number of non-profit boards and works on his whole-home retrofit project whenever there’s free time.

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