Rangeways Ruck

JT Scott | 04/05/2020 | 6

Hey CFSVillens! JT here for your Monday workout blog… and this one comes with a history lesson!

All you need for this is a backpack, loaded up the way I showed you for Sunday’s ZOOM WOD that a lot of us did together. (BTW, you should totally join our Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/CFSVshenanigans/ to stay in the loop, too.) Fill that thing with junk mail, old textbooks, that 40 pound bag of rice you bought 3 weeks ago and still haven’t cracked into yet… whatever.

You’ll be out for a run, broken up by some loaded squats. In military jargon, they call this “Rucking”. It roughly means “going somewhere with a purpose.”

But how do we know when to break up the run? Well, thanks to history we’ve got Somerville’s Rangeways to guide us. To explain, I’ll have to go all the way back to the 1600s.

See, back then Somerville was part of Charlestown – specifically, it was the pasture land for Charlestown, known as the “Stinted Common”. The first road in Somerville was our very own Washington St where CFSV sits – back then it was called Milk Row (clever for pasture land) and it was laid out around 1630.

Later on, closer to 1640, the eastern stretch of Broadway got laid out, followed by Highland Ave, Summer St, and a few others. Milk Row connected Charlestown to “Newtowne” (now known as Cambridge, specifically Harvard Square) while Broadway connected Charlestown to Arlington, just past the Menotomy River (now called the Alewife Brook).

But in between those big east-west roads, all that pasture land needed to get connected north-to-south. And so in 1685 the Rangeways were built: a set of regular north-south paths that went over the great hills of Somerville.

There are 12 of them, stitching together the roughly 3 mile length of Somerville:

• Franklin St
• Cross St
• Walnut St
• School St
• Central St
• Lowell St
• Cedar St
• Willow Ave
• …it gets a little weird around Tufts and Davis Sq, but out in West Somerville along Broadway or Powderhouse Blvd you can find College Ave, Mason St, Curtis St, and North St also form quarter-mile spaced rangeways.

What does this mean for you today? Well, it means if you live in Somerville (and most of you do, or nearby in Cambridge) all you have to do is get on one of the old east-west routes (Somerville/Elm, Summer St, Highland Ave, Pearl/Medford, Broadway, Powderhouse Blvd) and use those 350-year-old Rangeway intersections as your guide! Run one rangeway, do 25 squats with your “ruck” on. Repeat the squats as you go past each rangeway, going four rangeways out and four rangeways back in.

Much like this blog post, today’s workout is going to be a long one. 😉 Of course, if you don’t want to hang out in historic and scenic Somerville, you could find any old boring 400m course to run repeatedly, but I’d say this is a great chance to embrace a lovely day and enjoy some of Somerville’s pastoral history!

WOD:
With a loaded backpack (RX = 40/25):

8 Rounds

• Run 1 Rangeway (~400m)
• 25 squats