Week 9: The Team Gets Bigger and Badder

The team had some really good news this week. It seems that we’ve grown! The Baltimore member of the team, Brian, was chatting about what we’re up to at a family gathering, and his brother and his brother’s best friend were so interested they committed on the spot. So, welcome to the team Jonathan and James! I’ll be doing a post in the near future identifying all of the team members and talking a bit about them.


Wow, we’re more than 2 months into training for this thing. It’s paying off nicely with noticeable improvements in the core areas that I’m working on, both strength and endurance. My secondary work areas are improving nicely as well…namely the distinct lack of blisters which may be attributable at least partially to new gear, but I think mostly because of the work we’ve done up until now. The 40ish lbs. pack (35 lbs. rice + frame + water) is feeling lighter and lighter each week, and the endurance improvements are showing up on the hikes themselves and even more-so on the 5.74 mile runs into work. Over the past year, that run (with the 18 lbs. pack) has been taking me between an hour and an hour and 10 minutes to complete. On Tuesday morning this week I completed it in just under 49 minutes, and on Friday it went in about 54 minutes.

Week 9: current weight 164, +4 lbs. from Week 1
Monday: Off (needed recuperation from the 16 miler on Sunday)
Tuesday: Run to work w/ light pack, chest and shoulder weights
Wednesday: Back and arms weights
Thursday: Off
Friday: Run to work w/ light pack
Saturday: Moving day in Baltimore (Off, sort of)
Sunday: 16 mile hike w/ heavy pack

I’m not sure what to think at this point on weight fluctuation. I was right at 160 on week one of the training, and shot up pretty quickly to 168. I attributed that to the addition of the weight training, which seems reasonable. I was expecting however that that trend would continue and that I’d continue to put on weight overall…but that seems to have slowed down in the past few weeks and even begun to reverse itself, despite the fact that shoulder, back and chest strength continues to go up significantly and that I’m continuing with and increasing the weight training. I guess I’ll have to see how that plays out, but it’s interesting to pay attention to.

I found some posts on the Internet this week made by some guys on the CrossFit forums (www.crossfit.com) who have competed in the past on the Bataan Memorial Death March. And by compete, I mean compete…more than what we’re doing. They go for time. Apparently in order to do any serious time competition in the Heavy Division, you have to actually run it. The posts that caught my attention were discussing the training these guys do each year to get the best running times with the heavy pack. I can’t imagine running this thing with the pack. Just the amount of damage it would do to your body I would think would be prohibitive. I do believe that I will be more than happy to simply complete it.

Perhaps in the future, with a year of this under our belts we’ll re-evaluate and see if we’re interested in more than crossing the finish line. One thing that the team has been discussing is that in the 2009 event, we could only find reference to a single Civilian Heavy Division Team finish time. Lots of military heavy teams, but slow on civilian. Seems to me there should be some competition there for those guys. They must be lonely.

I was encouraged to see however that the main training issues that these guys were discussing on the CrossFit forums were things that we have gone over and accounted for in our training plan. The biggest amongst these is the need to train for the sand, and the uphill work. Hopefully we’ll have plenty of snow this year giving us the opportunity to do just that without too much travel. The guys on the CrossFit forums specifically mentioned using snow to train in and how helpful it was to them.

The hill work, on the other hand, I’m still pretty dubious about. Hell’s Hill is a non-issue now, but less and less I’m feeling that that really means anything for the upcoming March event. It’s just one hill, and while steep it’s only about ¼ of a mile long. The White Sands hill is somewhere around 6 miles long. Completely different kind of beast I’d think. I guess we’ll see. If lack of long hill training ends up as an issue, and we do this thing again next year (if we live) then we’ll have a solid training goal for next year’s event.