Adarq.org

first gym session since 2017 was a humbling experience, although a bro congratulated me for putting "big weight" on the bar. it was 100kg. smh.

- warm up treadmill run x 2km

- warm up mobilizations: hips, shoulders, wrists

- squat: worked up to 100 x 4
 
deliberately not max effort but this was challenging. wow. right shoulder a little tight.

- DL: worked up to 120 x 1
legs felt a little toasty after the squatting so i didn't push this at all. did one warm up rep at 70 and then a reasonably challenging but not ME one at 120.

- bench: worked up to 70 x 5

- pull up x 8

- hanging leg raise x 10

- stretch

i'm gonna be sore tomorrow. i knew i'd gotten weaker but this was a serious reality check. i squatted 225 x 5 the very first time i ever learned how to squat. back to square zero. OTOH, pretty sure i can still squat 1.5x bw (which would be ~112kg right now) after three years of detraining on it. so not totally hopeless.

the gym is always rammed, including lots of people very seriously using the bars, racks, and platforms. had to work in for everything, but that's okay.

lost the week to work -- especially having to recreate a bunch of work, fucking microsoft -- and then had a gnarly headache yesterday. am somewhat detrained, but that's to be expected.

- run 11.8 km in 1:01:03
deliberately slowed down but not too much, 5:10 pace. meant to run farther but felt iffy so cut it a little early. quads felt a bit stiff throughout, especially right. calves pretty tight after. did some extra stretching.

definitely seems like you made the right call. nonstop dog barking and neighbors who are unreasonable about it would send me around the bend.

^^^ that book rules.

Been off adarq for a while, just saw your 5k is 19.42 also - big congrats!

Race to sub 19?

(ps not been in London for a while but will be at somepoint in the near future if you're still up for some runs)

no doubt! just lmk when you're next in town. maybe we can coordinate with joe, as well, if he's healed up enough.

@adarq: i don't want to get hooked on max strength life. i mean to give it like two months -- the two coldest months of the year, more or less -- and see where i get to before shifting back to run focus. and i'm not planning to give up running altogether. i'll treat it more like a strength block for running than a full-on shift to powerlifting.

sub-19 would have been good for third in my last race, rather than the seventh place i got. winner ran 16:50, runner-up 17:32, both probably out of reach for the foreseeable future but that's okay.

side note: i will destroy microsoft. piece of shit company making piece of shit products that rob me of hard work. death to microsoft.

okay then.

happy new year everyone! 2019 was a good year goal-wise, in that i met my main athletic goal of running a sub-20 minute 5k. did it two weeks in a row, in fact. go me. in 2020, my athletic goals will be the following:

1. increase maximum strength. i haven't lifted for more than two years and i'm down about 10 pounds from my average weight while training to dunk (and all the other tangents i went on). the heaviest i ever saw on the scale was 183, iirc, but that was a long time ago. ~175 was my weightlifting set weight. i'm now ~165. always been lean, so the weight loss is substantially muscular and i'm definitely weaker than i was a few years ago. so goal number one will involve a few months reversing that process. not sure about exact targets yet, but it'll probably be something simple like a squat target, a bench target, and an upper pulling target. a trip to the gym will let me know what my baseline is and what i should be shooting for.

2. run 5k under 19:00. this might be a bit of a reach, given that my newbie gains only got me from 20:53 to 19:42. but i hit that goal while almost never touching the 30 mile-per-week volume that's generally cited as a minimum for a sub-20 time. so if i can push the volume a bit this year, just by adding a couple of km per run and staying consistent -- plus getting some more practice racing now that i live near a literal weekly race -- perhaps the gains will continue to come fast.

3. do a clean handstand and a barefoot pistol on both legs. these are a lower priority, i'm adding them mainly to give myself an excuse to work more on mobility and joint health (lifting will also help with that in the form of warming up, which i do not do for running). handstands i've done before but had to stop when my right wrist started acting up too much. the ultimate bw strength goal for me is still a flag. OAC would also be cool but it's distant: my shoulders can barely tolerate single-arm holds. it'd be rad to get a kip-up as well. and a backflip. would need a gymnastics gym to learn that, i think.

there's a time sequence to these, because working on strength for a couple of months will mean cutting back on running volume and probably intensity. i can consistently work out five days per week, so a three days lifting/two days running schedule seems feasible. once i've hit whatever strength goal i come up with, i'll dial back the lifting and focus again on running. the bw stuff can be thrown in around the edges, i'm not too fussed about it.

- run 8.58 km in 41:51

- stretch

been averaging ~10-12km walking each day with the fam. they went off and did their own thing today so i went for a quick run in the afternoon. good to just keep things lubricated.

"slack muscle"? what's that? olympic weight lifters have huge traps because they have to pick very large amounts of weight off the ground very fast. it's critical to them doing what they want to be good at. you can have the wrong physique for the thing you're trying to do -- those giant traps wouldn't help so much in a marathon. but there's no such thing as slack muscle.

don't worry about preventing muscle gain, man. gaining muscle is hard, although i know you said it's easy for you it's not that easy without steroids. keep getting stronger in exercises that are appropriate for your goals and keep losing fat. your muscles will grow to fit.