My thighs are absolutely on fire, and any time I try to stand, sit or bend down, pain shoots up my legs.

My arms and chest hurt too, but not like my legs.

But, as Jean said, at least I don’t have IEDs exploding near me on my commute to work.

When I should have been at the lake, or at least poolside, on Memorial Day, I was instead participating in CrossFit Athens’ Trevor Win’E Memorial Day Challenge. Money raised from the event – sponsored by CrossFit affiliates across the country – goes to buy cooling vests for soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’ve been to lots of physically challenging charity events over the years. There’s the well-known Relay For Life up-all-night-walking-on-the-track fundraiser; there’s 5K fundraisers; there’s a rocking in a rocking chair for the OCMS band fundraiser; there’s jump rope for heart fundraisers. There are also golfing charity events that some might argue are not physically challenging, but I would argue that if you’ve seen me play golf you would understand why I categorize these charity events among the physically challenging.

But, you understand, I don’t participate in these fundraisers. I take pictures and print them in the newspaper because that’s my job.

Monday I participated.

Tuesday, I was sore.

The Trevor Win’E Challenge – named for a soldier who was killed in Iraq – involves teams of four competing tag-team style for time to finish the workout known in CrossFit circles as “Trevor.” And Trevor is this: 300 pull-ups, 400 push-ups, 500 sit-ups and 600 squats.

Our team was me and Jean, Rebecca Rose – a reporter at The Oconee Leader – and Alex, a recent high school graduate.

Jean, Rebecca and I had tried to recruit a number of people to join our team, but our “friends,” upon hearing what the workout consisted of, all suddenly and mysteriously had other “obligations” on Memorial Day. So Alex – who didn’t bring a team with him – was unfortunately placed into our team. Unfortunate for Alex who goes through CrossFit workouts like an automaton, often doing two or three in one day, but fortunate for us.

I am the old, slow guy at CrossFit Athens. Though there are older people working out at CrossFit Athens, no one is slower than I am. Our times for the Workout of the Day (WOD) are posted on a white board each day, and Rob always takes the longest.

Rebecca and Jean both post pretty impressive times, though sometimes Jean will slow down a little to make me feel better. But going into Monday’s Trevor Challenge, none of us had any illusions about where our team would finish. Until Alex was put on our team, and then we had 32 minutes of believing we could win it.

CrossFit Athens had four teams of four competing Monday morning. Two teams went at the same time, and our team was among the first two.

We pushed hard, just keeping ahead of the team going at the same time as us. Alex was the workhorse, knocking out 20 or 30 reps of any given exercise when the rest of us were doing 10 or 15.

At just over 32 minutes, we finished the last of the squats. Rebecca and Jean were both sweating and exhausted, I fell on the floor because I couldn’t hold myself up any longer. Alex, though, looked like he was ready for Round 2.

For the next 28 minutes or so, we were the team to beat. The next two teams smoked us by several minutes – putting us in third place – and Alex, Jean and Rebecca got to see what it’s like to be me.

Tuesday morning, Jean and I moaned our way out of bed. We were so stiff and sore we could barely move. I called Rebecca to make sure she’d gotten the time and place of a story assignment first thing Tuesday morning. “I’m so sore,” she said when she answered the phone.

Even coming in third, we couldn’t feel bad about what we’d done. We didn’t keep track of individual reps, but I figure in the space of 32 minutes I did somewhere around 60 or 70 pull-ups, 100 push-ups, 100 or so sit-ups and probably 120 or 150 squats.

And besides, we’d helped to raise money for cooling vests for soldiers who, on their commute to work, face IED explosions and work in temperatures that hover around 130 degrees.

But the personal payoff came Tuesday afternoon. Adam Head, who writes a fitness column for The Oconee Leader Online Edition and the owner of CrossFit Athens, posted on his website a video of what Trevor looked like Monday morning.

Tuesday afternoon, Jean, Rebecca and I gathered around my computer to watch the video. There’s a horrible shot of Jean and I doing push-ups that look less like push-ups and more like slow collapsing and another of me, as I did actually collapse, lying on the floor. Adam, running the camera, says: “How you feeling Rob?” I mumble something in response that can’t be heard in the video, probably because I didn’t have breath to actually vocalize my response.

But at the conclusion of the video, there’s a shot of our team gathered together just after we finished (and they’d picked me up off the floor) when our team sill had the fastest time (of the two teams that had completed the challenge so far). With our team lined up in front of the camera, Adam says: “Number one team right here,” and to prove it Jean and Rebecca both hold up their index fingers to indicate that we are the best.

There’s no clarification on the video, nothing to suggest that in fact our team was third of four, so we’ve agreed – as a team – that when people ask how we did on Monday we’re just going to point them to the video without confessing our actual results.

Call it cheating or lying if you like, but at least we were cheating and lying for charity.

If you’d like to donate money without the pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups and squats, you can go to the website established by his mother, click the contact button and get an address to send a check to.

If you’d like to find out more about the pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups and squats, you can visit the CrossFit Athens website .

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Rebecca Rose   |74.224.203.xxx |2008-05-28 16:25:09 If I didn't have to get up and walk into your office (ouch), I'd give you a high five right now! Just wait until you start today's WOD! I don't think our soreness is going to subside anytime soon.

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