2007 Arnold Pump and Run in the Books
Well another year, another Arnold Pump and Run is in the books. I convinced my buddy and cross country teammate at the University of Michigan to come down and participate this year. Scott is a hard core marathoner who will be competing at the Boston marathon this spring. He’s placed in the top 15 in the Detroit marathon. Despite the Arnold Pump and Run’s short distance (at least for him), 5k, he decided it would be a nice shot at avenging a few lucky wins that I had against him in our college days.
The Arnold Pump and Run consists of (for men our age) benchpressing your body weight as many times as you can (a limit of 30 reps max) followed by a 5k race. For each time you benchpress your weight, you subtract 30 seconds off your subsequent 5k time. Maybe they are still tinkering with the rules but they changed things up from what I remember. You weigh in and they assign you to a weight class. Each weight class is at 5 pound increments. This year they assign you to the nearest 5 pound increment. So if you are 167.4, they round you down to 165. In the past, they would round you up to the next highest 5 pound increment. So if you were 167.4, you would go up to 170. It would’ve been nice if I had been aware of this beforehand. Suffice it to say that if you ever compete in one, it causes a bit of obsession with your weight.
With that said, on to the action. After much consternation about our respective weight and attempts to modify our weight, I weighed in at 179.4 (180 weight class) and Scott weighed in, if memory serves, around 147 (145 class). After the weigh-in, we took part in some well deserved nourishment while waiting in line for the bench press.
Here, we are post bench press and feeling strong.
Despite his rookie status, Scott entered the fray first in the benchpress arena. Clearly invigorated by the most excellent news of qualifying for the 145 weight class, he proceeded to destroy previous personal records and press his weight 16 times, resulting in an 8 minute subtraction.
For those of you new to this event, there is a bit of a psychological challenge to benchpressing a relatively heavy weight for several reps, and I am amazed by those able to do so for 25-30 reps. I entered the benchpress arena hoping to get at least more than last year and maybe 20-21 reps. I’m happy to report that I finished with 2 more reps than last year, finishing with 18 of 180.
Here’s Scott on the bench press. We didn’t get all of his reps on video but he did do 16.
Scott on the bench
Andy on the bench. I kind of regret not trying at least one more even though it doesn’t look like I would have gotten it.
From there we had a little over an hour to the start of the 5k race. Here’s a shot of us waiting to start the race.
Below that is a shot of Arnold, himself, getting ready to start the 5k race. He is the one with the cane and the white shoes. You may have to look closely to see him. I’ll try to enhance the picture later.
Scott went out to the front and never looked back, finished 2nd in the 5k race with a time of just under 17 minutes. I held my 6:15 per mile pace for two miles and then struggled home to finish well over 20 minutes.
Overall, because of the frigid cold weather, I think that times for everyone were relatively slow. From what I could tell, someone mentioned that I was around 77th place in the run portion. They will post final results soon and I will update when they do.
We headed over for a well-earned hearty meal at Cup O Joe which happened to be serving an excellent breakfast buffet spread. Scott’s running/lifting prowess may only be overshadowed by his deft skill with the fork and knife. What did J.R.R. Tolkien say – The greatest feats at the dinner table are often accomplished by those of small stature (or something like that). Scott did not make a liar out of the man, and I think if he would have known earlier about the breakfast buffet, he may have cut another minute or so off of his 5k time just to get there sooner.
Two hours later, we pulled ourselves out of our seats and headed over to the Arnold fitness expo which was jam packed. I had accidentally neglected to tell Scott that our fitness test was not quite over. The U.S. Marines always have a booth at the fitness expo with my favorite torture device, the chin-up bar. What better way to celebrate our complete lack of energy and utter exhaustion with some chinups. Again, age before beauty prevailed and Scott went first (we also have video of the benchpress but the camera is not cooperating yet – I’ll get it online soon). Here’s Scott wrestling with the chin up bar and probably wishing he had stopped at 7 trips to the buffet table (just kidding, Scott!) By the way, these chinups were much harder than they appear because the entire chinup apparatus was unstable. You couldn’t just drop down because the bar and supports would be wobbling which caused your body to move with it. So you had to go down slow to keep the thing from feeling like it was going to fall over.
Here is a link to the Scott chin up video – http://www.onehandchinup.com/scottchin.mov
Scott proves his manliness and refuses to let the bar get the best of him. Be all that you can be (oops, wrong service branch). Here’s yours truly taking the same challenge. One more and I could have hit 20, not bad after a hard day’s work. I lost my grip on 19 and couldn’t recover. Alas!
http://www.onehandchinup.com/andychin.mov
Next year we will see you again Mr. Scharzenegger.