A random slide from the early 90’s, taken at 660 Westminster street in Allentown. (Some of you may recall the big pink house with the pool?)
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Childhood winters →
Setbacks are inevitable →
Last weekend I trained exceptionally hard all weekend. Monday and Tuesday were tired, sore and broken-down recovery days (as exepected.) But by Wednesday, it was clear I was also sick. booo.
So all week I did nothing other than some stretching/yoga-esque recovery work. (In addition to moving and reassembling the scaf on my patio.) All week I was sore, achy, and just felt like there was “no gas in the tank”.
By friday, it was pretty warm(-ish) and I was getting cabin crazy with the new scaf setup still unused. So I tried to go out and do one of the full workouts. It was a planned workout, just now about a week behind schedule. It called for 70s of everything. Well, my right forearm didn’t feel up to it, and I was just really low on energy. (I’m pretty confident the forearm pain is in the muscle, very close to the tendon, but not the actual tendon nor the attachment point.) So instead I made it into a really low intensity workout of just 40 reps… Just enough to put some numbers up on the board. I also mixed in some light work, like moving firewood (in small arm loads) and cleaning up the patio just to move around and get my heart rate up.
I’m feeling better today, so I’ll see what plays out. Some friends are coming over this afternoon to play on the scaf.
In my worksheet, I’ve just been “pushing” the workout numbers forward rather than spend time juggling all the rows in the future. Once I have some idea how long it’ll take to get back up to speed, then I’ll rework the schedule. So I’m not actually going to try to do all those every-day workouts that seem to be scheduled for next week. (All the columns are identical now, so I just snapped the pushups.)
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Good and bad →
A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both charity and love.
~ Eleanor Roosevelt
slip:4a74.
Scaf v2 →
Thanks Kristen! We finished the assembly. Now I have rails, corners, and more.
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Hellebore →
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Reset →
Had to completely break it down to get it back to my patio. I was going to just reassemble what I had before, but now I’m wondering what new shenanigans I can set up… I recall some cool railing-esque stuff I wanted to work on.
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Choices →
One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; It is expressed in the choices one makes.
~ Eleanor Roosevelt
slip:4a51.
Couples knitting →
Idea plus knitting guru leads to an experiment. knit 7 purl 2 knit 11 purl 3 . . .
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Haulin’ the mail →
Whatever it is that you think you could NEVER do, figure out how to make a small step in the direction of your goal. Take that first step. Then look back and say, “well, now that I’ve come this far, I may as well go a little farther.”
I hope someone reads this, gets riled up, and thinks: “YEAH! I want to go for a walk!” …or a run, or a 5k, or swing on some bars, or walk a flight of stairs without gasping for breath, or lower my cholesterol, or be alive to play with my grand-kids. Whatever your goal is, GO CRUSH IT!
I remember when doing ONE STINKING PULLUP was inconceivable. Now I’m doing 70 — yes SEVENTY — per workout. The things that used to CRUSH me in class? …that stuff’s now my WARM-UP. Here’s a part of the worksheet that shows what’s going on with the pullups odometer. 3,000 reps is in the past (again, INCONCEIVABLE!) 4,000 is right on the horizon. Every workout through 4,000 is planned. A few more of the workouts are an identical, “all 70’s”, setup. Then, there are three weeks of bumping everything up +5.
In this screenshot, I’ve just completed January 27th/Day #190. The yellow block is the next planned workout; an exact repeat of today. There are more columns for the other activities, but now that all the activities’ numbers are in sync, they’re all the same. The pattern of workouts-to-rests is work-rest-work-rest-rest so that I have a regular, two-day rest over and over. Also, that’s a 5 day pattern so my workouts do not have the same weekdays — that’s really important to keep things from turning into “Monday’s suck” if I had a fixed weekly pattern. The double-rest also gives me a space to pull a workout one-day-earlier if I need to rearrange things, without making it into a killer two-days-in-a-row. (The things you think of when you do this for six months. D8 )
If anyone wants the details: The workouts are a ~45 minute circuit, based around 5 sets. Pushups, squats and bar-precisions are 5×14 (that’s 5 sets of 14 repititions.) The pullups are 5×6 (5 sets of 6 reps) plus 8×5 (8 sets of 5). So I do a set of pushups, squats and bar-pre’s to get really warmed up, then do a set of pullups between each set of everything else:
SET 1
14 pushups
14 squats
14 bar-precisions
SET 2
6 pullups
14 pushups
6 pullups
14 squats
6 pullups
14 bar-pre’s
SET 3
6 pullups
14 pushups
6 pullups
14 squats
5 pullups
14 bar-pre’s
SET 4
5 pullups
14 pushups
5 pullups
14 squats
5 pullups
14 bar-pre’s
SET 5
5 pullups
14 pushups
5 pullups
14 squats
5 pullups
14 bar-pre’s
FINALLY
5 final pullups (but sometimes I just wedge this in somewhere above)
40 second handstand (against wall)
30 second handstand
When I do a +5 bump, I just turn all those “14s” into “15s” and the 5-set layout makes a tidy +5. For pullups I can add a separate set of 5 at the end, or turn 5 5s into 5 6s, whatever — I have to see what I feel like in a few weeks.
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Washington’s Cherry Trees →
Photos from a trip to Washington D.C. (about ten years ago) to see the cherry trees in bloom. It was a blustery, cold day in April!
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