40 Tons

I was squatting alone today; often I like that, and sometimes, like today, I don't.  I could have used a depth check, a walk-in, and a fly swatter.  Flies seem to know that I'm helpless under the bar, and all my screaming and threatening to throw the bar at them did nothing to dissuade them.

Some day this bar will go through the cinder blocks.  You'll find a flat-ass fly under it.

As compensation I had relative quiet; only Social Distortion, Monday squat music was playing, and I was able to concentrate.  The session developed so:

45 x 5
135 x 5
185 x 5
235 x 3
275 x 2
315 x 1
335 x 5 x 3
365 x 1

I had intended to hit 385 x 1, but I wasn't entirely sure the 365 was deep enough.  The golden rule of meet preparation is never to miss a single attempt.  I understand that because confidence is almost everything, but had I missed, I'd have lied convincingly to myself: I would have made that if I had purple shoe laces, I would have made that if I hadn't worn clean underwear, I would have made that without that fucking fly in my face, and so on.  In short I'd rather miss and rebuild my confidence than think a high attempt was good and so train myself to squat heavy singles high.

I made a deal with myself that I would squat squat 345 x 5 x 3, so I will, but directly after that - next week - I'll go down to triples.  The fives are heavy enough that my form is breaking down before the set ends, and I want to weed out every technical problem before meet day.  Triples should let me find where I break down technically without the interference of excessive fatigue.

I am sure that my back is relatively weak which doesn't surprise me after going two years or so without pulling a heavy conventional dead lift.  I put the conventional dead lift back in this cycle, and even though I'm now definitely a sumo-puller, I'll keep the conventional dead until my back is not the weak link.

After squatting I did some ab work then enjoyed a nice walk home uphill in the rain.

The hill is delightful after squatting.

When I got home, I decided to total my working volume of squats since surgery.  In two months, counting only my top sets of fives, I've done just over 40 tons.  If I included warm ups, it would be another 15 or 20 tons, and I've excluded all of the occasional insanity like squatting 275 x 20.

There's no telling exactly how the meet will go, but I'm putting in the work.  40 or more tons less than three months after surgery seems respectable.

Sure, some days I miss laying in bed re-reading the same paragraph six times on Vicodin and fielding calls from friends asking if I need them to come by and wipe my nose or such like I had it after surgery, but it feels ever so good to be intact and working.

Actually if I find myself missing the post-surgery days too much, I'm sure I'll need my thighs reduced soon.

Heat and Pain

"In the heat of the summer / better call out a plumber / turn on the steam pipe / cool me off" - Circle Jerks

It's July. And before July was June, and after July is August, and it's hot.

Usually I lift at 3 pm, but some days work interferes with me, so I interfere with work and lift at noon or 1 pm.  It's hard to warm up at 3 in June, July, and August, and it's tempting to cool down immediately after the warm up and leave out the lifting part.  45 x 15 leaves the bench sweaty and my shirt stuck to my body.

And there's pain.  There is the usual pain caused by walking up stairs or attempting to do an air squat.  There is the unusual pain.  I did squat my old opener for ten Friday, and I got a viscous headache.  I laid on the mats for several minutes afterwards.  Eventually I realized that I was not having an aneurysm because my senses were still on and they were telling me that my head hurt.

Now there is heat and there is pain.

I'm sure I won't remember either of them when I'm on the platform August 25th.

Progress: Comfort Inn is Down the Road

I've made some progress, and having done that I can say that it's nice to have made progress.  Making progress, however, is hard.

There is that point in the ever lengthening set of burpees when the body can do a burpee, but the mind balks.  Lately I've wondered if that happens because the mind is aware that if 28 burpees are done in one minute, twenty-four seconds, then 29 burpees must be done the following day.

I'm not sure.  I've become very attuned to how my mind tries to stop me during a 2,000 meter row, and in truth the reason I prefer 500 meters is that I have been very successful at shutting my brain off for 90 seconds or less.  But with burpees I haven't figured it out yet.  It sure seems to me like I'm not thinking about much of anything, but I suspect foreknowledge of the relentless linear progression is the culprit.




I really wasn't sure how to begin lifting after my surgery, but I decided to try a very basic linear progression.  Supposedly I'm too advanced to get much if anything from a basic progression, but I liked the idea of starting way too light and working up 5 pounds on the squat and deadlift every session, and two and half pounds on the bench and the press. Foremost I thought a linear progression would allow me to work up without pulling any titanium anchors out, but I also wondered if after a month lay off preceded by weeks of sporadic and relatively light lifting before the surgery I could perhaps squeeze some progress from a basic lifting template.

I'm not giving any numbers here.  Those who know what I used to lift would be unimpressed, and those who don't know what I used to lift would be impressed.  Both of those miss the point: I have taken my best guess at what I should be doing, and I'm working it like a maniac.  I will say that over eight weeks my work sets of five in the squat have increased 75 pounds.  Exactly how that translates to a 1rm will be seen August 25th when I lift again.

Yes, I remember I wasn't going to lift until November, but I didn't plan on feeling so fantastic.

Of course feeling fantastic enough to make progress on a linear progression feels pretty terrible.  It's painful to climb stairs again. for example.  And yet the progression is relentless.  On Friday morning I was demonstrating the step-up, and I was having trouble executing with a pvc simulated barbell.  All the same I knew that in a few hours I'd be back in gym squatting a weight I would have opened with not so long ago for a solid set of ten.

I made it because to me it feels better to have made progress than it hurts to make progress.

And if my mind can fuck with me, I can fuck back.  I've convinced myself that surgery itself had nothing to do with my swollen, purple groin.  No, that must have happened because the surgeon left a liter of testosterone in my scrotum by mistake.

Insane yes, but I never question working placebos.

Cookies

Lately I've been screwed.  Until today I had been getting up at 4 am and getting to sleep at 10 pm or later.  I realized that: 1) I should really do the "What to do When You're Screwed" blog, and 2) I should really do any blog before I lose relevance and along with it the possibility of gaining sponsorship from supplement hawkers and overpriced shoe walkers.


I thought about this and decided to just tell the story.  Feel free to insert and extract your own profound morals.

Tuesday some cookies, actually a whole lot of cookies, appeared in the break room at work.  Among them were oatmeal raisin cookies which I haven't had in quite a long time, and which I remember I used to like quite a lot.  Yes, I'm sure hydrogenated palm oil kills you, but it takes a long time, and it tastes great in oatmeal raisin cookies.

As I said it was Tuesday which means I had trained hard the previous day, and barring death or dismemberment I would train hard the next day.  But it was Tuesday which means I only did some burpees.  Still I figured that on average I'm a very hard training guy, and while by my own standards I'm slightly fat now, I'm at the level of slightly fat that I consider acceptable and even necessary when I am really trying to push my lifts up.

So you know, fuck it, I'm going to eat some cookies.

So there I am, a guy who doesn't eat cookies who is now definitely going to eat cookies, and around the cookies I see the people who are more than slightly fat and who are not currently pushing their lifts, and while they're the kind of people who definitely eat cookies, they're pretending that they don't eat cookies.

So here's what I do.  I walk up to the cookies, I say apologetically, "I got to quit fucking around; I;m getting visible abs again," I lift my shirt, and then I take as many cookies as I can fit between my thumb and middle finger and walk out.

"Mostly paleo all the time"

Pain Quantified and Progress

And this morning, Monday July 2, I really thought some Advil would be nice.

I didn't take any because I didn't have any, and between 5 and 5:30 am when I conceivably could have gotten some, I'm generally more interested in getting my second coffee and venting my first.

But I really wanted some.

Yesterday, a rest day, and the first day of July, I decided to count how many burpees I had done in June: 1,534.  I might be off by ten or so since some days I lose count like the day I became aware of the rowing-like nature of burpees and then became obsessed trying to figure out if it's correct to breathe twice per burpee.  Usually when I lose count I adhere to the CrossFit ethic of counting from the last one I remember, but this is going to be a lengthy project, and I admit some days I have said to myself, "fuck that."

So I did about 1,534 burpees in June, and there is some cumulative pain.  It's not all from the burpees.  Yesterday for instance I was rolling relatively hard at Dark Horse Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and I got caught in a bicep cutter.

Ah, the old bicep cutter

If we exclude the incidental stuff, then, 1,534 burpees left me wanting to eat Advil. 

I know now that on average, one burpee hurts enough to take 130 micrograms of Ibuprofen.  Of course my math is suspect, and nobody eats just one Advil, so it's really either 26, 260, or 2,600 micrograms per burpee - in any case a much smaller amount than one lowly milligram.



I've seen lately that some people are doing a 1,000 burpee challenge.  They're sometimes taking over two hours to do this, and they're sometimes going to the hospital with cramping although none of them have gotten rhabdo yet.



I don't know exactly my cumulative time for 1,534 burpees; it's about 90-100 minutes, and that includes 30 or so minutes of rest.  My volume is down, and my intensity is up.

Also in June I did both 100 burpees for time and the 7 minute burpee test.  I did 100 burpees a little bit faster than the last time I tried, and I did a few more burpees in 7 minutes than I did the last time I tried.

Small improvements, but when I express them as a percentage, they come out as whole numbers greater than one.

I'm going to keep my volume down, my intensity up, and my Ibuprofen under three-tenths of a mg per burpee and see what happens in another half year or so.

Of course, I'm a weirdo.

Pre-Post Workout

I know a guy who sells sugar powder with some whey protein in it.  I see he has invited a guy who sells sugar pills to give a talk on post workout nutrition.

Post workout needs are the same as pre-workout needs: oxygen, water, food, and a body temperature around 98 degrees fahrenheit. 

It might be you're already on top of this.

Possibly you wish to optimize things.  In that case make your food animals and vegetables.  Maybe, like me, you take things to extremes.  I sometimes supplement grass fed whey protein from All-Pro Science.  Sometimes I take creatine ethyl-ester.  If you're into that sort of thing, I recommend you try creatine monohydrate first.  It's cheaper, and some bodies - unlike mine - assimulate it fine.  Sometimes I take zma which is great for putting me to sleep, but I've found it's cheaper to get your own zinc and magnesium.  BCAA's are probably good; I haven't taken them long enough to form an opinion.

Of course sugar powder and sugar pills have their place.  They will continue to have their place until US Anti-Doping tests for placebos.

Placebos are great.  I wish I had some that worked for me, and if I had not disposable, but flushable, income, I'd be all over it.  But what I worry about with the sugar pill guys is that they miss the esential point of post workout nutrition.


You have to fucking workout first.


And I understand the aversion to doing the work.  I finally got my 69 burpees done on time, which means I reward myself by adding one per set for three sets, 72 now.  Progressions work, but they're never fun.  If 69 burpees was a battle, you can bet that 72 will be a war.

I knew nothing great would happen the first time I tried 72, and I was reluctant to start.  I watched the incredible effort the 5:30 am class at TwinFreaks CrossFit put into their workout, and I knew there was no escaping my attempt.

Still, they had been gone for some time and I was still standing around in fear after doing an ultra-slow warm up.

And then the "Pepsi Song," Suicidal Tendencies "Institutionalized" came on Pandora.  I listened to the opening line:


" Sometimes I try to do things but it just doesn't work out the way I want it to, and I get real frustrated               and then like I try hard to do it, and I like, take my time but it just doesn't work out the way I want it to"


which perfectly fits my burpee experience so far.  So I did what I have to do when this sort of thing happens.  I hit the start button on the timer, watched in terror as clock counted down from ten seconds, and then flung myself on the floor.


72 burpees in three sets is 24 a set of course.  Now as I said the overall burpee regime does not get any easier, but after doing this a month or so now, the first few burpees are easy.


Six, in fact, were easy, and that's perfect.  Not only is six one quarter of 24, but you only have to do two more to get to eight.  Anyone can do two, and when you're at eight, you only have to do half again as much to get to twelve, which is halfway.  Of course you can do four, because you've already done eight, so now you're halfway, and the second half is easy because it's downhill.


Anyway, that works on the first set.


On the second set, I pretended it was working, and it almost did.


If the second set didn't work, you know the third set won't, but you do it anyway because then you're done, and you've finished the thing you set out to do.  Besides, you have to show the clock that you'll be back tomorrow ready to go, and it's going to have to get through its seconds faster if it thinks it's going to catch you so far behind next time.


So that's the workout, and I don't worry too much what happens after that.  I've eaten a few times since this morning.  I'll eat again before I go to bed.


Fuck it, I might have another half-and-half.


I don't know what the sugar pill guys are doing tomorrow.  I'm not thrilled, but I'll hit the button and throw myself on the floor.

Pain

Lately progress on the burpees has stalled.  I'm stuck at 69.

Yes, I do 69 burpees a day now, and I have for many days in row.  I'm aware there is something about 69 everyday that could be funny, but my humor would have to be much less mature.

After going into overtime Monday to get 69 done, I felt a little like the bird who flew into the window a couple minutes later while I was still panting, head hung.

One fucked up little bird.

At first I thought the bird simply had a great workout trying to fly through the window, so I took a picture - thinking, I suppose, that perhaps he could post it on beakbook later.  But I as I watched I realized the poor guy was seriously fucked up.  He was feet up, and he seemed to be in the midst of the bird equivalent of convulsions.

I wasn't happy about this, but I thought I should go out and mercy kill him rather than let him slowly die convulsing under the already brutally hot Sun.  That though would have been hard for me to do, so I had a back up plan to put him in the shade and give him a chance to either recover or at least, hopefully, expire from something other than dehydration.

But as he heard me approach, he righted himself and began staggering away, so I did what coaches do: I said, 'that's right, walk it off."

I'm pretty sure the little guy made it because I didn't see him when I drove off some minutes later.  And I thought to myself maybe I should be more like the bird.





It's not all burpees of course.  I lift three days a week, and I don't write about it because I use what for me are pretty light weights.  There's nothing exciting about the programming either.   I do two work sets of five, and on my last work set I supposedly do as many reps as possible.  In reality, I decided to stop with the press and the bench press at 10 because my shoulders start to feel sloppy, and I don't want to make them any worse than they are.  That has been working for me, so I decided I'd cap my deadlifts and squats at 10 also.

Last Friday I squatted 270 x 5 x 2.  On the third set I felt good and Motorhead was playing so I went to 13.  Afterwards, I wasn't sure why I stopped there.  I didn't feel great by any means, but I was sure I had left a lot in the tank.  So I began to think that just maybe on Monday when I would squat 275, I should take the last set to 20.

Here's the thing with 20 rep squats: they're only worth doing if you use a weight you damn well know you shouldn't take to 20.  Usually around 13 I start thinking there is no way I will survive, and the most I've done before is 255.  I was wondering all weekend if I had any business 20 repping 275.

But then it was Monday and I didn't finish my burpees on time, and the bird smashed his head into the window and walked it off.

Syn Martinez, owner of CrossFit Harlem, recently posted that he was going to do 1,000 burpees because, "sometimes you have to man the fuck up."

I'm not sure about that.  It seems possibly even a little immature to me, but I needed redemption, so I did what I do that is unquestionably mature.

I looked at myself in the mirror and said, "I GUESS YOU REALLY DON"T WANT TO PLAY IN THE NFL, NOW DO YOU?"  Besides, what would the bird do?

I knew that this was going to hurt much worse than the burpees, but I twenty-repped 275.

I was correct in thinking that if I could pull off the squats, the burpees would never hurt as bad again.

They don't hurt as bad as they did before.

Now they just suck, and I'm still stuck at 69.