Written by Dick Clark
6:30 am Monday, March 8, 2021
Clear, 25 degrees, dry.
Who (7 Pax): Dos Equis, Mountie, ScarU, Mulligan, Photo Finish, Brisket, and Dick Clark on Q.
Dick Clark couldn’t resist doing a bite-sized version of the Iron Pax workout called Keep It Simple Stupid, and basing it on the eponymous 70’s band KISS—the whole morning just wrote itself (and had a playlist ready made to go with it).
We started in the parking lot with simple warm ups:
Run in place
Circle Arms
Imperial Walkers
Stretch
Then we moseyed to the pavilion, and started the workout. Along the way, Dick Clark brought out the key facts about the costumed, face-painted, fire breathing, blood spitting, fireworks shooting band, founded by Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss. A key theme was that the band “kept showing up”, as we say in Princeton F3. Kiss has toured and recorded continuously since their founding in 1973, and when they complete their End of the Road tour in 2022, they will have been playing as a band for 50 years.
That got us going on the Thang.
THANG:
Run 1 lap before each set, then do OYO, with Kiss music playing:
80 merkins
70 squats
Kiss fact: The band’s name has repeatedly been the subject of rumors pertaining to alleged hidden meanings. Among these rumors are claims that the name is an acronym for “Knights in Satan’s Service”, “Kinder SS”, or “Kids in Satan’s Service”. Simmons has denied all of these claims. In reality, Stanley came up with the name while he, Simmons and Criss were driving around New York City. Criss mentioned that he had been in a band called Lips, so Stanley said something to the effect of “What about Kiss?” Frehley created the now-iconic logo, making the “SS” look like lightning bolts, … because they had a single lightning bolt in the name of their previous band, Wicked Lester.
60 merkins
50 squats
40 merkins
Kiss fact: The band worked hard in the beginning, and just kept going. The first Kiss performance took place on January 30, 1973, for an audience of fewer than ten people at the Popcorn Club (renamed Coventry shortly afterward) in Queens. The band were paid $50 for performing two sets that evening, following a cold-call Simmons had made to the venue, convincing them to hire the new band for a three-night stand. The first tour was a year later starting fin Edmonton, Alberta. As Simmons put it: “The early years of Kiss were far from glamorous. We rode in a station wagon hundreds of miles every day. We would take turns driving and sleeping in the back. We ate burgers at roadside taverns. We stopped and peed on the side of long stretches of highway when we couldn’t find a town anywhere near. We ate beans and franks, because we couldn’t afford better food as we were on a $85 a week salary! Becoming a rock star was better than anything and beyond anything I ever imagined. There were moments of doubt for me that we were gonna make it.”
30 squats
20 merkins
10 squats
** Run 2 laps at the end
Totals: 200 merkins, 160 squats, 2.5 miles running
We did alternating-one-hand planks waiting for the six, then got our last Kiss fact during the cool-down stretches:
Kiss Fact: According to Wikipedia, Kiss has the highest number of gold records of any recording artist or group in the world: 50 gold records—despite not being in the top-50 ranking for total record sales. How? The albums were rarely mega-hits; they were good enough to be gold. And then they’d make another one.
We turned off the music and got serious: a COT about the importance of “keep showing up”. The Pax got a good workout along the way, and Dick Clark gave every Pax a real Snack-Pack pudding cup at the end, to mark another workout that is not only good for you—but tastes great too.
