6:30 am Weds, July 21, 2021
Hazy, 73 degrees, dry. 10 Pax: Aviator, Thunder, Photo Finish, Dos Equis, Brisket, Mulligan, Wall-E, ScaRU, Risky Business, and Dick Clark on Q.
For a theme, Dick Clark was inspired by this week’s “Billionaires Space Race”, so the beatdown took the form of Branson versus Bezos.
Warm Up
Run in place
Stretch
Moseyed to the upper parking lot, for the “Branson”, in which Dick Clark liberally seasoned the beatdown with factoids about Sir Richard (collected here in one place). Richard Branson, 71, is now worth about $4.8 billion, but he started with a middle-class upbringing, with a father who was a barrister. Branson went to private school, but had dyslexia, about which his headmaster said he would either end up in prison, or as a millionaire. After high school, he was a squatter in London, briefly trying to sell Christmas trees, and parakeets. That same year, he started a magazine called “student”, partly to sell mail-order records, and undercut the record shops. At 20, he bought a record shop in London, but was soon fined 70,000 pounds for tax avoidance, for selling records marked for export. His parents mortgaged the house to pay the fine. At 22, he bought a mansion and converted it to a record studio, signing controversial bands like the Sex Pistols that others were hesitant about; the label was called Virgin Records, on the idea that they were all business novices when they started out. At 31, he started Virgin Atlantic airlines when a flight back from Puerto Rico was cancelled, and he got his fellow travelers to go in with him on a chartered plane. At the age of 40, he branched out into telecoms and started Virgin Rail service. At 50, he bought the experimental Spaceship One from Microsoft’s Paul Allen, and named it Virgin Galactic, for space tourism. This week he flew to a height of 53 miles on a test flight.
“The Branson”:
Gas pumps x30
Lunges x20
Burpees x10
Flutter x30
Dips x30
Slow squats x20
Merkin x30
Imperial Squats x30
American Hammer x40
Moseyed to the Pull-up bars, for the “Bezos”, complete with factoids. Jeff Bezos is now 57, and worth $200 billion, the world’s richest man. He was raised middle class, with a father who was an oil engineer for Exxon, in Texas and Florida. He briefly worked as a cook at McDonald’s in high school, but always kept up with his studies. At Princeton, he majored in electrical engineering, and was president of the space club, graduating with highest honors. After college, he spent 8 years in challenging corporate jobs, moving from telecoms, to banking, to hedge fund DE Shaw. In 1994 at the age of 30 he drove cross-country to Seattle to start an online bookseller in his garage, naming it Amazon in honor of the mighty river, and because it started with “A”, so it would show up early on nascent web searches—and the rest is history as far as Amazon in concerned. On July 20 he flew with three others on a 10-minute flight to a height of 66 miles in a rocket capsule launched by his space tourism company Blue Origin.
“The Bezos”:
**2 HIMs do buddy-assisted pull-ups for one set each, then tap the next pair. Others do:
Rosalita x10
Imperial Squats x10
Navy SEAL x10
Reverse Crunch x30
Slow squat x10
Dips x20
Bonnie Blair x20
Hand Release Merkins x30
Apollo Ono x10
We moseyed back to the shovel flag, for a final round of “Boat-Canoes”
We finished with the Name-O-Rama, and the Circle of Trust. Billionaires in space are great fun to watch, but in the meantime we all need to keep focused on the challenges and opportunities we have with our families and communities here on earth.
