For the last month I have been working as a mover at Gentle Giant Moving Co. here in Somerville to keep paying the rent and put some money back in the piggy bank for Budd Bike Works. Its brutally hard work and my pipe cleaner arms have already gotten stronger, the legs and core are feeling pretty good from running up and down stairs with heavy boxes as well. We’ll find out once I can finally afford my USCF license but I feel like I’ll have more top end on the bike than I have in years.
Cross Training with hard manual labor isn’t even the absurdly brilliant part though. Gentle Giant has in its posession the one of a kind Speed Stair mobile training apparatus for the next 4 months. (www.speedstairs.net). Did you ever see the season of Arrested Development when Michael has to drive the staircase? That, with a sliding board attached is the basic idea, I’d of thought I was making it up too if I weren’t trying to prepare myself to drive the thing in 15 minutes.
Gentle Giant has always prided itself on the athleticism and hustle of its movers and the Speed Stair is to be a test of the mettle of potential new hires as well as being a rolling billboard for the company when this wide load is on the road. My job will be to find venues to get this thing out there to have people try it out and see how they stack up against Gentle Giant’s Movers with The Gentle Giant Challenge (www.gentlegiantchallenge.com) My guess is that cyclists will have the advantage in this test, even far out of shape I am able to complete reps on the stairs faster than the ex-football players and thick necked strongmen at the company.
I’d love to get some competitive racer types on this thing to see how they do and I’ll be making calls to try to get it out to some local races.
As long as you’re not taking yourself too seriously running up stairs and going down a sliding board is pretty fun and before you know it your thighs and lungs are burning.
Give me an e-mail at work here at mbudd@gentlegiant.com and I can set you up with a little workout on the most absurdly brilliant training device I’ve ever seen.
