In Defense of Checkpoint

The BackBlast:

Checkpoint is one competitive dude. He was not messing around when it came to pulling together a Dynamite Dags squad that would go on to win the King of the Queen City Hills 2021 competition. More on that later.

Roll up to the lot to find a group of 6 or 7 trying to talk to each other over the noise of Cindy blasting Billie Eilish from his 2008 Tahoe. Cindy never struck me as a Billie Eilish type of guy but I was absolutely convinced for the first 6 months of knowing him that he was a public high school vice principal. The one in charge of discipline, who gives freshmen noogies in the hallway and throws his feet up on his desk while handing down an in school suspension sentence to some 15 year old while making fun of his haircut. Which is to say, maybe he picked up modern music tastes from the kids.

We begin heading for the mutha (merkins and squats at every intersection up Trade) and as soon as the batflippers sense it, the calls for a trip to BB&T commence. For context: about half of the KOTQCH competitors ran the Sweet Six plus 2xMutha course at 7 am Sunday morning, including 5/6 of Check’s Dags A squad. That morning, as Material Girl and I run up to the Mutha, we see a frantic Thin Slice waving and pointing us away from the Mutha. We ignore him and continue on only to be faced with a large man yelling at us that the garage is closed. We head straight over to BB&T at Slice’s instructions, faithfully run 2 hard reps, and crush the final 3 miles of the competition knowing we’d never hear the end of it from CYD.

Back to Ranger. Group rolls up to the Mutha and Cindy starts running up as everyone else politely awaits instruction. “Alright, so we’re gonna give Swamp a 5 second head start, everyone who doesn’t catch him owes me 50 merkins and for every person who does catch him, Swamp owes me 10 merkins.” Swamp promptly abandons the group. One CYD member down.

From the mutha we head over to the Fourth Ward where we hit some diamonds and wide arms at every interesection. Group is staying together and even Cindy is dropping for a push-up here and there. Good stuff. Hit some core on the grass at TransAmerica because #beachszn is approaching. Start running back and Cindy decides he’s going to run 20 yards ahead of the Q and so I stop the group at Davidson, he keeps going, and we are now down 2 CYD members. Merkins at every intersection on Davidson down to Trade, run over to Lizzy Lurker, hit burpees at every crosswalk up to Torrance (starting with 1, next crosswalk 2, then 3, etc; got up to 9). Feeling adequately worn out by this point so we mosey on over to the lot, enjoy a mostly peaceful COT, and go off on our merry way.

I’m not done talking about KOTQCH though. CYD’s complaints against Check and the Dags are basically twofold.

1) The Dags are full of “strangers and ringers”. Well it can’t be Ewok, Fish, or Steroid so I guess this is about myself (writing a backblast permanently removes ringer status, right?), Terri (as consistent a PWW/Ranger/8@8 pax as any), and Material Girl (who is wearing an F3 shirt in his strava profile picture!).

2) The infamous Mutha/BB&T situation. Unfortunately for CYD, there isn’t really an argument here. Adding 4 minutes to the times of everyone who ran BB&T didn’t budge the results. Anyone who thinks the Mutha would have added 4 minutes is just plain wrong. I got up that thing in under a minute today. So even if we skipped parking garages altogether, it’s barely 4 minutes. CYD’s fastest runner was less than 90 seconds slower than MG and I on the 4th mile (capturing his Mutha trips and our BB&T trips), besides the fact that we were running 45 seconds/mile faster to begin with.

In conclusion, I hope Check is proud of this exposition. It’s his competitive fire and uplifting attitude that kept me going every time MG inevitably began to open up a gap with a mile to go on each KOTQCH course. Respect.

Disclaimer: I love all of the CYD dudes. The banter is just too fun to stop.