Six Days Out, Gauges, & Cream

I read a great quote from Dave Tate, president of EliteFTS and former Westside Barbell lifter, this morning, "The squat starts between the chalk box and the bar. From that moment on you require 100% focus. If someone approaches you during that brief time you have every legal right to punch them in the neck."

I hold that to be true, even axiomatic, and I'd add that the squat ends when the lifter has completed the immediate, short-term processing of the lift, which is why I won't talk to you when you might think I'm done.

I'd say the week leading into a meet, or even better just the last few days, is like a slow walk to the chalk box. This one hasn't been good to me probably because I'm looking not to PR but to smash my PR, and I know my focus has been narrowing for at least a week already. I'm dimly aware that almost everybody tolerates me and many people actually like me, but I'm beyond help here. Asking me how it's going just doesn't make any sense to me now. It's time to wait a week, please, and ask me how it went.

In the last week or two before I meet, I want to know all the little things I normally wouldn't think about. I know it takes me between 3 minutes and 3 minutes, 5 seconds to get into knee wraps, belt, and wrist wraps. I know I weighed 184.6 yesterday and 183.0 today. I know what my morning urine discharge weighs, unbelievably heavy, and what my morning fecal matter weighs, disappointingly light.

The last week involves a lot of mental rehearsal and a few reasonable precautions; I will continue with a very low carb intake, and I'm drinking as much water as I can tolerate in case there's an accident with my weight and I have to cut Saturday. Beyond that, I try to be alone as much as possible and read a lot.

That's how I do it. As usual, you can do whatever works for you.

To me perhaps the best part of my journey towards physical competence (athletic elitism would be overstretching it in my case) has been in cultivating the mind-body connection, essentially learning to talk to my body and listen to what it is trying to tell me. I've written before of how I watch my heart rate when I lift. An elevated heart rate while necessary and good in competition is a clear warning sign of over-training in the gym. This, though, works both ways. While the heart may be telling me that I'm about to do something stupid, I can also try breathing deeply, slowing my heart, and telling my body that it is getting a perfectly reasonable request to move a load it should find strenuous but nowhere close to impossible. Most of the time, for me, it works that way. I can have a successful training session and teach my body that heavy is not synonymous with hard.

Today teaching the morning CrossFit classes I gave a brilliant lecture on the relationship between sustained power output and stroke rate on the erg. As happens with me, I realized two hours later that I had left out critical information. In my rowing I've given considerable thought to breathing. It turns out to be an easy way to figure out what the body is doing. One breath per stroke means you can row for hours. Two breaths a stroke means that you have at most a couple minutes before you feel the lactate build-up coming on. I find that if I concentrate on my breathing, I slow down; it can cost me seconds on a 500 split. While my mind apparently is stupid enough to forget to talk about breathing, the body is never stupid enough to quit breathing, so it seems to me that a conscious attempt to really monitor breathing impairs my body's ability to row. But I do check in from time to time. Am I at one or two breaths a stroke? And again here, if you quickly notice you've gone to two, you can sometimes force deep slow breaths and go back to one, pushing away the anaerobic wall.

So heart rate and breath rate, for me at least, serve as convenient and useful gauges to monitor what my body is doing. I suspect there are many more, but I'm still looking for competence, not elitism, and I haven't found them yet. Post your ideas to comments.

I'm cat-sitting for V.P. again, and last night I went to her house to see if anything has changed since I last had the job. She had nearly a full quart of cream in the refrigerator which she was unsure what to do with. I suggested she drink as much as possible or better even more with her coffee, and I'd figure out what to do with the rest.

Today I opened the refrigerator, and found at least a half-pint.

I regarded the ivory beauty.

Weighing 183 and needing still to get to 181.75, I drank the fuck out of that cream.

I have a certain intensity, but I too draw a line between competitive results and just being an idiot.