Game Day

One of my favorite activities is something my friends and I call sports days, where we try and fit as many activities as possible into a given day. They are a bit like being a kid, at least if you were a kid like me, when you’d spend your summer days moving from one activity to the next and wouldn’t stop until you were summoned for dinner. Most of my birthday challenges are glorified sports days (or sports weeks/months...).

Asylum’s Game Day workout is a condensed sports day. You pretty much take the hard bits out of many different sports and combine them into a ridiculously active one hour period. If you’re into sweating and grunting you could probably say that it’s nothing but fun.

It should be noted that the sport movements are more focused on, well, training than the actual sport. It’s not a lesson in how to play a sport; just in how to get fitter for it. To exemplify the sport I’m worst at in the workout is, once again, the one I’m best at in real life.

To conclude my review of Game Day here’s an excerpt from an article I wrote for our newsletter that I hope captures the spirit of both Game Day and the entire Asylum program.

Child's Play

Hell Week was accepted, and perhaps even enjoyed, because it was preparing you to get better at a game. And Asylum is all about the game, the game of life. And the only thing that might make anyone think I need to be locked up is that it’s given me a glimpse back at my youth. In closing, I’ll leave you with an anecdote about youthening, as they say in Camelot. You can tell me if I’m insane.

My summers as a kid were spent outside. My parents, and pretty much the entire neighborhood, would throw their kids out of the house with instructions not to come back in until dark. Without video games or money we were pretty much left to make up stuff to do with what was in our garages. A day might consist of a football game, maybe some tennis, some pick-up basketball. We may head down the street to the school and jump over the hurdles or kick field goals, or head to the park for a swim. Afternoons would often feature a Little League baseball game, after which I’d often stay late to work on my hitting or pitching. Summer days would end, after dinner, feeling blissfully tired while doing my best to stay awake through The Brady Bunch.

My favorite moment doing Asylum, so far, was late in the Game Day workout while we were “playing” baseball. Baseball players have not always been a paragon of athleticism but, especially during those sports days, it felt plenty active. Asylum’s baseball movements are decidedly tiring and as I was delivering one of my many “pitches”, in my garage in a snow storm, I had an acute sensory overload of a summer’s evening. I felt the same warm fatigue those long days would provide. I could actually smell the grass, feel the setting sun on my shoulder, and hear my dad telling me to arch my back or keep my elbow up. And so, okay, maybe that is a little insane. But that’s an Asylum that I won’t mind visiting every so often.