Fit Is The Goal

Going out to the Hollywood Reservoir with theskinnyveg.

Kind of regretting my morning run.
Kind of.

Oh well.

And I made lentils for lunch! Pictures possibly later. If I get myself to lug around my camera. 

One: I hate alarms. My body is a switch, everything is either on or off. I am either awake or asleep. So when the bloody alarm goes off, I freak out, my synapses fire like crazy and I swear I have a heart attack.

Two: Autocorrect, I hate you. So damn much.

So tired. Long, exhausting day of event things and people dancing and lots of drunk people.

I’m finally settled, freshly showered and ready to sleep, but I wanted to write my morning workout in case I don’t have time to and I do have to catch a train.

Running on the beach, because, why not?
No clue how far, but the time will be an hour and a half.

Swim for an hour afterwards, surfing counts.

If upper body still isn’t tired, use balcony for pull ups and chairs for dips.

My friends, the ones who woke me up the other morning, want to go grab lunch and then try out the Osage Orange bows I’ve just finished up and take them to the range in…Pasadena?
I’ve never been there.

But yes, bows. I’ve had a fascination with wood working lately and actually have been working on these for months now. They’re hefty bows, thick to give them strength, and tall to cut down on the mass needed for their pull strength. I started them about 7 months ago, drying the wood then cutting it down then drying it again. Then it took a while, given their girth, to bend them and set their ends, I made them recurves because I wanted the maximum pull strength.

And now they top off somewhere around 85 lbs for the heaviest one and about 79 for the smallest.

I’ve read that most medieval English long bowman would have bows above 100 pounds pull strength, so I’m eventually working up to that.

Ever read The Odyssey? At the end when Penelope tasks the men who would have her to try and string Odysseus’s bow and no one can?
I want to make and be able to use that bow.

One day.

Well, I’m off! Thank goodness for distractions from work! 

While brushing your teeth you accidentally poke yourself in the face with the toothbrush.
And by face you mean eyebrow. 

This is a very odd post, I’ll admit, but it explains a lot about me as a whole.
I find myself appallingly boring, and this next sentence might actually persuade you to think likewise.

I can’t listen to music. 

Really, I’ve tried. Sure, I like playing my violin every once and a while, but I can’t listen to music as any sort of background noise. When I’m working on something and need background noise, I put on an audiobook or a podcast about something I’m interested in, I like listening to something that I can absorb something through and music just does nothing for me these days. 
It’s been a steady decline in the last two years or so, I just don’t care for anything.
Even things I once loved I can’t listen to anymore. For the longest time it baffled me as to the reasoning to my sudden change. 

Tonight I figured out why.

I was lifting tonight as my workout, pretty much decided to tone down the Hulk workout a bit by subtracting about 20% of the weight on everything, but I couldn’t get into it. My body was tired, sure, I had a full workout this morning, but I was looking forward to lifting. I kept trying but my head wasn’t in it. I was fighting a wall of do not give a damn and I was losing. I stood there for a moment and I put my hands on my face and was rubbing my eyes when my arms accidentally knocked my headphones out.

Suddenly the world felt right. There was a complete lack of sound and it felt good.
I turned off my Mp3 player, tossed it aside and began working out again. I popped off the rest of my workout with a determination I didn’t know I had in me.

Afterwards, I decided to do this:

It’s about 10.5 miles or 16.9km for all of you on the metric system.

I did that after my heavy lifting and still felt like I could keep going.
And it was all done in silence.

Now, here’s my reasoning why.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a very emotional person. Comparatively to any of you, I could pretty much be categorized as Vulcan.
Sorry, my geek is showing, let me try that again.
Logic has always been my strong suit. My head likes solid facts, numbers, statistics and sets of data. It goes along well with my love of books and knowledge of all the things.
Emotions as a whole are something that I’m pretty much a toddler with. Base reactive emotions are there, but everything else feels very far away, kind of like remembering an emotion. It’s there, but not really.
Music is a very emotion based thing.
You listen to it and it will express something. Maybe a love song has you thinking of that significant other or make you pine for the feeling of another person at your side. Some music may incited you to emote things you’ve otherwise held inside, like punk music does for some and slow ballads does for others.
Whatever it it’s a feeling, and I…don’t really want that during my workouts.
When I work out, I want to feel nothing. At that point, I’m a machine capable of doing x amount of these movements with a ±y based on fatigue levels and time.
If anything, music is detrimental to my workout because it causes me to try and reach around inside my head in hopes of associating the song to something that is taking me away from my goal.
It’s kind of like…finding a light switch in the dark while in a room you’re not familiar with.
Make sense? 

And so, I am removing music from my workout.
When I ran, I actually didn’t even notice the miles going by because I went into my zen mode. I just did things and they were done. I knew where I was going and my body got me there. No thoughts no feelings. Just action.

So yeah, that was weird. I’m actually falling asleep at the keyboard as I type, so this probably isn’t the most coherent thing ever. But I wanted to say that this works for me. 
Because I’m weird.
Really weird.

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Going to admit, I’m tired. It’s been a long last couple of days and I’m kind of beat.

So, the meditation has been going well, I’m trying to keep focused, or unfocused, depending on your view, more and more with every session.
Last night I sat there for about ten minutes before I snapped back into reality.

Something I must comment/ask, I have no idea if I’m doing this right.
Clearing my head while silent feels odd to me. Sure, it seems easier to relax and drown out the world when you’re sitting somewhere quiet, but I’m a being of chaos.
My meditation is when I’m slamming my fists into a heavy bag and suddenly I’m on auto pilot and I don’t realize I’ve been punching away for the last half hour non stop.

Sitting quietly…I don’t know, it feels wrong. But I may need to get used to it, I haven’t been doing it long, after all. So any input would be greatly appreciated.

Umm, so last night I did what I’ve decided to call my Hulk workouts. It seemed appropriate after my gym buddies described what it was like spotting me and ensuring I didn’t kill myself doing my workout last night.

• Another question. Deadlifts. For a set, I’m not supposed to drop the weight until I’m done, right? I watch some people say they do 5 reps but they drop the weight every time.

Ugh, deadlifts are the reason my body hates me right now.

So, here was my hulk workout:

Sets 1,3,5:

• Deadlifts 270lbs x 4
• Bent over row EZBar 110lbs x 15
• Hammer curl 45lbs x 20
• Dumb bell front raise 40lbs x 20
• Renegade push ups 20lbs x 30
• Dumb bell squat 50lbs x 25
• Squat, rotate shoulder press 20lbs x 25

Sets 2,4,6

• Bench press 190lbs x 8
• EZ bar curls 110lbs x 20
• Shoulder press 50lbs x 15
• Dive bomb push ups x 30
• Dumb bell side raise 40lbs x 20
• Dumb bell squat 50lbs x 25
• Hanging reverse sit ups x50
• Barbell military press 80lbs x 10

8 min of heavy bag in between sets

So, yeah. I pretty much accomplish each weight set in about 8-10 minutes and my rest really come from my heavy bag time. I take water breaks when I need them and my friends poke me if I haven’t taken a drink in at least 10 minutes.

I feel good. My body is getting stronger, which is what I want.

And now, I sleep. I’m beat.

And then a bout of heavy lifting.

I’ve become quite fond of massive heavy lifting, along with sprinting while carrying sand bags.
Which makes me curious as to why.

I’d like to blame testosterone.
But I really have no clue.

I should also possibly start taking photos of my progress.

Maybe. 

Next post in 3 hours! 

Oh, and TMI Tuesday! How about…
For every ask I’ll add a whole set to my lifting workout.

C’mon, people, push me!