The BeWOW Breakdown: “Our Arms and Legs May Have Already Fallen Off”

Philly runners test our Be Well Workout of the Week — a.k.a. the BeWOW — and (barely) survive.

Rebecca tackling this week's workout at a hotel in San Francisco.

Rebecca tackling this week’s workout at a hotel gym in San Francisco. Now, that’s commitment!

This Week’s Workout: Opposite Exercises Attract

Testing date: Monday, November 9th. See the workout here.

The Breakdown
Total time commitment: 45 minutes to one hour.
Difficulty: 5 (out of five).
Soreness factor: Our arms and legs may have already fallen off. Rebecca’s legs wouldn’t stop shaking after the workout.
Overall grade: 5 (out of 5). Remember last week when we said the workout was “missing something special”? Well, we think we found it — and that something special turns out to be a butt-kicking that this week’s workout was more than happy to deliver. 

First impression: 

Alon: My first thought was, “Wow, this looks so insane that I must just be misunderstanding it.” Then after rereading it a few more times I convinced myself — with the expert denial of a seasoned runner, who is used to convincing himself that a 12-mile run or speed workout will be totally easy — that everything would somehow be okay. But in the back of my mind I just kept thinking, “Fifty burpees, 500 jump ropes, 30 pull-ups, 50 push-ups …” My subconscious knew this was not going to be good.

Rebecca: I was out in San Francisco for work, so Alon and I realized we would have to do our own bi-coastal workouts. I saw the workout the night before I was to get up to do a November Project San Francisco workout (meaning, I’d be doing the BeWOW workout directly after it) and I will admit, I was scared. Did they really want us to do THAT many decline push-ups? Burpees? Oh man, I was scared.

How we felt afterward: 

Alon: This is one of the hardest workouts I’ve done in a long time. Ever, maybe. The variety of exercises really brought out all of my weaknesses, and then crushed me until I was limply hanging from a pull-up bar trying to make my arms work in vain. After struggling through these exercises for an hour (with many, many breaks to get my heart rate down), I feel incredibly humbled. I have still got plenty of room for improvement. I’m keeping this workout in my back pocket as a fitness test to try again in six months.

Rebecca: Holy heck. I ended up with six miles with November Project San Francisco, which included hills, stairs, burpees, tricep dips and box jumps. So let’s just say, I wasn’t exactly coming off of fresh legs. That being said, this would have been a crazy-hard workout even if I’d come into it fresh. I found a lot of the jumping workouts hard. (Burpees into jump rope? Lunge jumps?! Ack!) Being in a hotel gym, I didn’t have access to a pull-up bar (nor could I have done them without assistance), so I made do with a lat pull-down machine instead for the pull-ups. Overall, I think this workout isn’t one I’d suggest to beginners (or if so, don’t do five-times through all of the pairs), but it is awesomely tough for more advanced exercisers.

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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