Thursday, April 10, 2008

A duel

I was in gymnastics swinging rather aimlessly on a bar when this little Asian girl whose name escapes me walks up and says "I challenge you do a duel" Not being one to back down from such things I say "sure, what at?" "pullups" she says. Now, as exercises go thats probably as high a probability win for me against a girl I can find. Few girls have a lot of upper body strength, and while my body fat percentage isn't terribly low for a guy, for a girl it is world class athlete level though. Both of those two things mean probably no more than the top 2% of girls can compete with me, as opposed to say running where I bet the number is closer to 10-15%, or cartwheels where the number is more like 60%(the only real numbers I found were for high school students where the 85th percentile girl can do 3 pullups).

So, I go first. I was messing around with the bar for a while, and this was the end of class. I still pull a respectable 10 pullups. No gain on a year ago, and not the 12 I have done at my best, but I was tired so I won't dwell on that. I am confident I won off of that showing.

She doesn't look phased and proceeds to go and do 12, almost 13. Remind me to fear little Asian girls

1 comment:

Jamie said...

Given the unconditional probability distribution of girls pull-ups, you were right be be confident. However, conditional on the fact that she challenged you to a pull-up duel, you should have been a little more worried... I would guess the mean pull-ups for girls who challenge athletic looking guys to a pull-up duel is fairly high (sorry for the econ-speak).