Mountain Athlete Seminar Day 1, 9/13

Warmup:

KB complex, don’t set the kb down the entire time, 35#

• 1 minute around the world
• 1 minute right arm one hand swing
• 1 minute between the legs
• 1 minute left arm one hand swing
• 1 minute clean and press right hand
• 1 minute between the legs other way
• 1 minute clean and press left hand
• 1 minute lunge right leg
• 1 minute slasher into halo
• 1 minute lunge left leg

Training:

• Find One Rep Max (1RM) front squat: 133#
• 4 rounds:
  • 3 front squat 85% of 1RM
  • 7 Ankles to Bar (A2B)
  • 10 elevated pushups
• 4 rounds:
  • 6 goblet squats (45# kb)
  • 6 jumping squat
  • tire drag forward down; backwards back
• 4 rounds:
  • 3 Curtis P (65#)
  • 1 rope climb
  • 10 slashers (45#)
• 4 rounds:
  • Jingle-jangles 30 sec on/30 sec off

Mountain Athlete Seminar Day 2, 9/14

Warmup:

• 5 rounds
  • Row 250 (faster than the time before)
  • 3 TGU per side

Training:

• 4 rounds:
  • 10x Mr Spectacular, 2x 35# KB
  • 10x Russian Twists per side,55#
  • 10 Weighted Situps 35#
  • 6 60# ball squats, carry down and back
• 2 rounds:
  • 1 minute 2 hand swings (35# KB)
  • dumbbell crawl (20#)
  • 10 A2B
  • 10 slashers per side (35# KB)

The effing birds are going into the effing chimney at the effing school now and it’s attracting all sorts of effing people to the effing hill across from our effing house. They block the effing street and they leave all their effing trash and its an effing pain in the effing ass. I mean, this isn’t even the peak of the people and look at them all.

The city won’t pave the street in front of our houses because they say it’s a “private street”. I wish we could just block outside people from parking on the “private street”. That would solve most of the problems. The trash they leave on the hill can be someone else’s problem. I wish the stupid Audubon Society would quit promoting this as an “event” if they’re not willing to help us out with the trash and the parking. Fortunately, it’s only for a few weeks out of the year.

Today I attended the first day of a Mountain Athlete seminar. I really enjoyed it. The guy explained his methods for training after a slightly toned down version of his workout. Most of his clients are mountain climbing guides, so they’re pretty darn fit and each one of his workouts is like a week of workouts at my gym. Plus, the seminar started at 7:30AM and I’m usually not even up that early on most Saturdays. But the exercises were unique and some, like the tire drag, were pretty fun and my front squats are looking better.

When was it that I complained about my work laptop dying? The hard drive died and they had to get me a new one. Well, now I’ve had it a week and IT’S DEAD. Well, not completely dead, but when I try to log in it tells me that there aren’t any passwords set and it turns itself off. I’m guessing it’s not a hard drive problem, but then again what do I know?

One of the gym old-timers (she started last year when the gym first opened) moved to San Diego and was back in town today. We all went out to dinner and she looked great. She’s on the 5-workouts-a-week schedule like me and I think she’s lost more weight than I have.

Thing is, she’s doing the Zone diet and I’m still eating fairly awful cheeseburgers like the one I had today at the Twin Oaks Bar & Grill for lunch. It was almost good but certainly not worth breaking my month and 10 day streak for. There was no menu there, just three specials on the board:

• cheeseburger, fries, and clam chowder,
• bacon cheeseburger, fries, and clam chowder, and
• fish and chips and clam chowder.

On the plus side, the clam chowder was great. The burger was OK, as were the fries. The Diet Coke, however, tasted like detergent and hair tonic and, being a bar, the place smelled of stale beer and cigarette smoke. It wasn’t quite worth the 8 mi drive but it is Hillsboro after all. The really good hamburgers are all back in Portland.

OK, so to recap, 18 rounds of Cindy. Just pullups, pushups, and squats with no weight. I’m incredibly sore today as is everyone except for one of the women at the gym who is built like a fireplug and is probably lying. Who makes it through Cindy without some residual pain?

I’m signed up for a “Mountain Athlete” seminar this weekend where the guy talks about training for climbing. I signed up just because it sounds interesting, not because I’m a climber. We’re probably doing a grueling workout to begin with, but I figure I can always play the age card (I’ll probably be the oldest guy there).

My brother-in-law just turned 45 yesterday (HAPPY BIRTHDAY PETER) and he was telling me that he feels old. I know old. I was talking to one of the women at the gym and her mom is my age. Of course her mom is an ultramarathoner and runs more in one weekend than I do in a month or maybe even a year but that’s beside the point. Maybe I’ll just show up to the seminar eating a corn dog and spend the day brushing doughnut crumbs off of my workout clothes.

So my sister thinks I’m overdoing a little in the bathroom and the contractor’s wife (my sister’s friend Wendy) was looking through the pland and was wondering why I was getting such a nice shower. Tile? Fancy faucets? She thought I should go for the fiberglass unit with the cheap motel fixtures. But it’s my bathroom and I doubt I’m moving out soon. Sure there’s plenty of other things I can spend my money on, but why not splurge?

Today at the gym we did the “Cindy” workout. I’m pretty good at pullups, pushups, and unweighted squats, but who wants to string together 5 pullups, 10 pushups, and 15 squats for TWENTY MINUTES? The last time I did it, according to the big board, I did 13 rounds. This time I did something like 18. I say, “Something like 18,” because I’m so tired that I can’t remember what I did exactly. I know the fastest guy at the gym did 28, but he’s a nutbag. I think I was able to do it because of my diet: I had a salad at lunch on Monday and Tuesday but today I had a taquitos plate. I had a hard time staying awake in meetings after that and I had a lot of meetings this afternoon.

Oh, and just to make things interesting we decided to bet on the outcome of one of the couples in the gym. They’re a new couple and much more fun to tease because of it. We spotted the woman 4 rounds because she’s only been coming in a month or two and the guy has been in since I started back in January some time. So I bet on the woman. THMFIC bet on the guy. If I won I got a ride home (which I always get anyway) and if he won I had to mop the floor (which I always do anyway). I WON. So, the woman is now my favorite nurse. I’m sure this will get me the stink-eye from the other nurses in the gym, my neighbors the nurses, and probably even my ex-girlfriend, but none of them ever won me a ride home (which I always get anyway).

Somehow I started looking for things on YouTube. Stupid, stupid, things. First I started with, “Lazy Sunday,” and for that I blame the person who is always giving me the stink-eye at the gym. Then I looked up, “More Cowbell,” because we’re always using kettlebells at the gym and I keep thinking of cowbell when I hear that. And finally, I got stuck watching, “Celebrity Jeopardy.” Now my stomach hurts from laughing.

I got to work late today because I had to meet with contractors today. A tile guy, the furnace guy, and the main general contractor. Later on in the week we’re going to have guys come in to look at demolishing the chimney and getting rid of the asbestos in the basement. I also played telephone tag with the gas company because we need a new gas line to the house for the new heater. Even if everything goes well, we’re going to be without heat for the first week of October.

I also heard from the contractors that the chimney demolition is going to be messy. Contractors are messy to begin with, so this has got to be similar to taking all the dirt from outside and just shoveling it into the basement. But I suppose that’s the cost of progress.

I could sort of blame the gym for my level of tiredness, but really I had a hard time sleeping last night. I kept waking up and feeling quite awake. I knew sooner or later I’d be feeling it and today it was sometime during the workout. We’ve only been doing sprints on the rowers of 250m or so but today we did 500m, 3 times. My sister laughs at how short we row, but she was just a coxswain, so what does she know?

Even worse, I had a “special” salad in the cafeteria which meant it was smaller and more expensive than the usual chicken caesar I have. The caesar tastes like they use collard greens or something equally bitter and I’m just hoping it’s good for me because it surely doesn’t taste very good. In any case, I was hungry for the rest of the day.

Since it’s Monday, I’m still up watching Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives of course. Mmmm, hamburger.

My mom was telling me about a dream she had where my dad was outside cleaning up the yard and burning the yard debris. We wee both happy that he seemed to be doing well even if it was only in her dream. That’s probably where we’d like him to be, puttering around in the yard, not sitting in front of the TV all day watching M*A*S*H. I’m not even sure M*A*S*H is on all the time like it used to be.

Right now I felt a sense of loss for something which matters a lot less: my bathroom. I was just thinking about how nice it would be to spend some quality time up there by myself, away from everything else. Also, how nice it would be to stumble out of my bed in the middle of the night and to be only a few feet to the bathroom rather than down a flight of stairs and through an obstacle course of a hallway.

The old bathroom, if you can imagine it, had a bathtub in the back. The purple towel is plugging up the drain for the toilet. The hole in the floor where the board is was where the sink was against the right wall. There was a cabinet that stretched back to the door.

The new imaginary bathroom is going to have the shower in the back left corner with expensive tile I picked out. The window is going to be much smaller (see where the tape is?) The toilet is moving closer to the door. The sink and the cabinet are going to be on the left side and the door is moving to the right side of the room. Holy crap I bet this is going to be expensive.

I was reading blog entries from some of the gym people and several of them were busy surfing today. Another guy who swears he isn’t a lazy load slept in until noon before hanging out with an ice cream man.

I can tell you how boring my life is. I got up and watched some football until I couldn’t stand it any longer and went and took a nap. Then I went back into my old room which is filled with cardboard boxes and looked for a book I was supposed to lend someone but all I found were countless boxes full of books that I haven’t thought about for years. Every box was covered in dust and was greeted by my exasperated blaspheming. “Jesus Christ! Another box full of books!” And except for my early engineering text books, I’ve read them all.

I’m glad I went from being a slackass student at MIT to a semi-conscientious one at Portland State because you know where that got me: to a job that is basically customer service. It’s not a bad job, but aren’t I supposed to be an investment banker or something by now? I guess it’s just not in me. Like my neighbor suggested, I’m going to set all the books free. Well, not so free, but probably to Powell’s Used Books. Too bad I can’t convert them directly into ice cream or fried chicken.

I’m trying to think of why I have this headache today and I was blaming it on my sinuses. But I remembered that I forgot to take my contacts out last night and even thought I did replace them with new ones, those could be my biggest problem.

Not that I don’t have other headaches.

I suppose the workout at the gym could have dehydrated me and that might be why my head hurts. Or maybe it’s because of the weight of the world. I think it’s much more likely that I forgot to drink enough water. That, at least, is much easier to take care of.

OK, so then why am I still up? Playing games on my iPhone of course. I can barely see the computer screen.

I got a new computer at work today, which means I was a big mess and wasn’t able to do all that much real work. But I was busy trying to get SOMETHING done with my new misconfigured computer.

My doctor yesterday was worried that I was going to obsess about my Body Mass Index. I told him that before I started worrying about that I’d have to start eating better. You can probably guess how likely that is to happen. I mean I had dinner and already I’m daydreaming about fried chicken. Sheesh.

I had a doctors appointment today and instead of taking a book I took my iPhone and played a game on it while I was waiting. And then when I got home, I played some more. I can’t see a darn thing now. It’s probably just as well.

Here’s another story of how computers suck. I try not to screw with my work laptop too much but I install things to get my job done. I’m also required by IT to install their special patches. Today when I installed some required patches, my computer wouldn’t boot up any more. I’d get a Blue Screen of Death. I took it to IT, who blamed me for all sorts of things, but we found out what happened was that my disk was dying and that the new patches had written important files into bad parts of the hard drive. So I get a new laptop tomorrow. It may be a dusty relic covered in other people’s finger grease, but it’ll be new to me.

In the mean time, nothing happens in my job that isn’t done on the computer, so as you can guess I’m kind of hosed. I guess I have even more time to play that game on my iPhone.

I had to work most of the day without time to sit and stare at the walls or even just surf random sites on the intarweb today. Since I don’t like to write too much about work here, there isn’t much to say. I went to the gym, felt real puny, and went home. Honestly, that doesn’t make for a very exciting day.

Really, I’m just sitting here surfing the web and thinking how nice it would be to have the upstairs toilet back and wondering how nice the dual-flush Toto Aquia® II Dual Flush Toilet will be.

The only horrible thing I may have done is to eat Huevos Rancheros for lunch (3 eggs, tortillas, rice, beans, and hash browns) and a cupcake after dinner. I think I’ve eaten 4 or 5 eggs today. Pretty soon I’m not going to be able to take my shirt off at the gym, which I shouldn’t do now for aesthetic purposes but for thermal purposes it’s too warm to wear a shirt there sometimes.

Obviously I think it’s too warm but the dude behind me is wearing long sleeves. There’s an obvious disparity in temperature perception. I’m an Oregonian and find it hot when it’s over about 65°F.