Tuesday: Squat, Erg & Ice (7th OLAP)

Today was light squat day, and I was thankful that it was light because I'm starting to hurt.  The hamstrings are still complaining, and the right knee has been painful since heavy day.  I really don't want to back down before the Masters Nationals, so I rolled out the hamstrings on lacrosse balls and coated both legs from butt to patella with Blue Heat.

Blue Heat and balls powerlifting porn.  Actually if you imagine this several times smaller
and with the balls also blue, that's pretty much what my genitals
 looked like after today's ice bath,

After getting all my parts mostly working, I did squats:
5 x 75 (75 was on the floor after the 5:30 class, and if it's going to be that easy to be lazy, well...These were also the most painful squats of the day, but now everything was really working.)
5 x 135
8 x 170
6 x 210
5 x 250
4 x 265
3 x 285
3 x 305
3 x 305

I'm sure I need to remember metabolic conditioning work, so I looked into the Max Effort Black Box and found:

40 Squats at bodyweight
1,000 meter row

With 185 pounds on the bar, I finished in 7:58.  I was disappointed that I had to break up the squats since I've done 33 at 185 before.  I will remember to try this again on fresh legs; it was fun, and I can probably break 6:00.  I also think it would be fun to do this weekly over a month and wave the squat intensity up to 75 or 80 percent while trying to hold the row constant.  185 is less than 50% of 1rm for me, and while it's no joke for forty repetitions, I'd like to see how far I can push this.

If you're counting, today's squat volume was16,065 pounds, just over 8 tons.  All of this was under 80% of my competition 1rm, but it felt heavy to me, so I thought I should be proactive and take an ice bath.

Ice

I tried this last summer after doing a squat cluster, and it seemed to work.  The ice bath on a March morning seems worse than on a July afternoon, but I did ten minutes with twenty pounds of ice.  Bad though it might be, it's better than forgetting to wash your hands before going to the bathroom after applying Blue Heat.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll find that it was effective.

All I could tell this morning was that it gave me cold feelings.