10/21/21 BCA -- Everybody Fights (or alternatively, Push Responsibly.)

[Robert Guterma]

Everybody Fights (alt version: Push Responsibly.)

Date: 10/21/21
AO: #ao_best_chest_award
PAX: @Blowout @Commando @turtle @Gumby @moses @bauhaus @Chairman @Blister @playboy @
FNGs: 0
Q: @Chairman
Total: 9
Conditions: Dark, nipply, and nice
Warm-Up: 3 lapsNMS:  Workout got off to a pretty normal start. At one point during the merkin/superman break between sprints, YHC encouraged the team to "really push on those sprints. You should start to feel the "sprinting chills" a bit, maybe like you're about to shit your pants or throw up."At that moment, a young woman who had just arrived at the track walked past about 5 feet away from us.YHC therefore added dutifully, "We don't actually want to achieve those outcomes, the point is just to make sure you're...pushing yourself."To which my companion @Gumby added solemnly, "Push responsibly."The Thang:

• Tempo run out back gate of track to bus circle -- 25 merkins -- run back (total ~800m)
• 4x of: 800m sprint the straights jog the turns (i.e. from start line jog 100m, full sprint 100m, jog 100m, full sprint 100m) + 25 merkins + 25 supermans + 60 seconds recovery
• 1x 400m tempo run to finish out

Mary: 15x of each: wheezy jeffersons, boxcutters, angle grinders + 60 seconds side plank on each side + 20 American HammersCOT: YHC is currently reading Starship Troopers. I have been enjoying many aspects of the book, and had prepared to laud some of the experiences and thoughts of the main character before learning (mid-COT) from the pax that it's actually a satire of authoritarian fascist government. Whatever, a-holes. Way to ruin a man's COT. I'm not even sure I agree with that take on the book, and in any case the things I had planned to share and laud about the book still stand. Do I resonate perhaps too much with an officer in a distant future, dystopian, fascist army in outer space fighting giant bugs? Maybe so. So here it goes (bolding by me for emphasis):

• But you can't buy fighting spirit.
  
  It's scarce. We use all of it, waste none. The M.I. [mobile infantry] is the smallest army in history for the size of the population it guards. You can't buy an M.I., you can't conscript him, you can't coerce him--you can't even keep him if he wants to leave. He can quit thirty seconds before a drop [into battle], lose his nerve and not get into his capsule and all that happens is that he is paid off and can never vote.
  
  At O.C.S. we studied armies in history that were driven like galley slaves. But the M.I. is a free man; all that drives him comes from inside--that self-respect and need for the respect of his mates and his pride in being on of them called morale, or espirit de corps.
  
  The root of our morale is: "Everybody works, everybody fights." An M.I. doesn't pull string to get a soft, safe job; there aren't any. Oh, a trooper will get away with what he can; any private with enough savvy to mark time to music can think up reasons why he should not clean compartments or break out stores; this is a soldier's ancient right.
  
  But all "soft, safe" jobs are filled by civilians; that goldbricking private climbs into his capsule certain that everybody, from general to private, is doing it with him. Light-years away and on a different day, or maybe an hour or so later--no matter. What does matter is that everybody drops. This is why he enters the capsule, even though he may not be conscious of it.
  
  If we ever deviate from this, the M.I. will go to pieces. All that holds us together is an idea--one that binds more strongly than steel but its magic power depends on keeping it intact.
  
  

There's a lot about this that for some reason did resonate with me. I love the idea of being a "free man" -- doing whatever I do because I choose to. I may work "to pay the bills," but I do the specific work I do because that's the work I chose, and I will (try to) never complain about my work as if I'm a victim -- if I don't like it, I'll do different work. I love the idea that one of the strongest motivators in the world is being in something together with your peers, all of whom are also free men, and none of whom are angling for a way out, knowing that the older or more senior they get, the earlier in the "drop" they end up going ["the drop" in the book being battle, "the drop" in our bourgeois lives maybe being maybe service to the community or something, whatever].

A lot of it reminds me of playing team sports in high school, and I gotta say -- it also makes me think of, you guessed it, F3!! It may be a bit self-aggrandizing to compare our men's group workouts to any form of military real or fictional, but suffice to say the fact that we are all out there in the gloom by absolute and pure free choice and all doing the exact same thing come hell or high water, well I think you get the point.