Badger
A Hero WOD honoring Navy Chief Petty Officer Mark Carter, killed in Iraq in 2007. A punishing combination of squat cleans, pull-ups, and running.
- Format
- For Time
- Level
- elite
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Badger is a for-time workout by Fiz, built from 3 movements. It is set at elite level.
About Badger
Badger is three rounds of thirty squat cleans, thirty pull-ups and an 800 metre run. It honours U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Mark T. Carter, a SEAL killed in Iraq in December 2007. Badger was the nickname his teammates gave him, and it is the name on the workout.
Ninety squat cleans is the whole problem
Read the workout again and notice what is actually being asked. Ninety squat cleans at a moderate barbell is a volume nobody accumulates by accident, and they come first in every round, before the pull-ups have taken your grip and before the run has taken your legs. Athletes who treat this as a three-round conditioning piece find out in round two that it is a barbell workout with conditioning attached. The run is not the rest it looks like on paper either: you are running on legs that have just done thirty front-rack squats.
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Singles from the first rep
The strategy that survives is fast singles on the cleans from rep one, not from the point where touch-and-go stops working. Touch-and-go feels efficient for the first fifteen and then costs you the entire second round. Drop the bar, reset your hands, pick it up. On the pull-ups, break early into sets you can repeat rather than going to failure once and then grinding out ones. Use the run to actually recover, because it is the only place in this workout where nothing is being asked of your grip.
What's a good Badger time
Badger is usually described as a twenty minute workout, which is true of the people who own the barbell and wildly optimistic for everybody else. The fittest go inside fifteen. Twenty-eight to forty is where most athletes who finish it as written actually land, and the spread is wider here than on almost any other hero workout because the cleans sort the field so ruthlessly. Use that as your scaling test: if ninety reps at the prescribed load is more than three or four unbroken for you, take weight off. A repeat-effort workout you can only single from the first rep is a different and worse workout.