August 22, 2020 – Week 1, Day 3

5 Minute Walk (.25 miles)
 
Mobility Prep
 
NY Barbell Yoke
180x50’ in 5.38 seconds
270x50’ in 5.48 seconds
350x50’ in 6.16 seconds
400x25’ in 3.56 seconds
450x25’ in 3.86 seconds
500x50’ in 7.10 seconds
500x50’ in 6.44 seconds
500x50’ in 6.80 seconds
 
Sandbag Rows
175x5
225x5
 
Stone of Steel Loads (62”, tacky towel)
138x1
182x1
225.5x1
257x1
257x1
257x1
257x1
257x1
 
Stretching
 
Comments: Still got baggage apparently. It hurts to realize the measures I took over a month ago and relented on out of pressure and reconciliation appear to have been the right decision from the get go. I wonder if this is my life now. I don’t like that I’m anxious a lot more than I ever was. I don’t like that it has power over me right now. I have to get over this. An incident resulted in delaying my plans for the day by several hours. I ended up training a bit emotional because of it. Like, anger and sadness type emotional. Worried that I’d get caught in a thunderstorm due to being paralyzed by my thoughts. Walking and warm-ups felt good. My lower back was stiff and knees ached. Elbows and shoulders ached too. I know that bands on deadlifting may not feel bad in the moment but they are hard on the body. And it has been so very long since I’ve done band work. I wore my knee sleeves for today as it was going to be an effort on both. My new ones on my knees, the old ones on my biceps. Today was low intensity like the other days and the rest of these next 3 weeks of training but that doesn’t mean it won’t be tough. Yoke up first. Plan for today was warm-up to 500lbs for 3 runs at 50’. I knew that with the thunderstorm on the outskirts of the area, that I didn’t have the luxury of resetting the yoke to be uphill the entire time. That eats up time and my hand truck has a flat tire so makes it more trouble than it is worth. I was initially going to do plate jumps to 450lbs and do 450lbs for just 25’ run. But I reconsidered that. I didn’t have to do 50’ runs for all the work up sets. If I did just one 25’ run, it would mean I’d have to move the yoke 25’ to get ready for the 50’ runs. So I did plate jumps at the start and then did an 80lbs jump for the last 50’ run. So that way I could do 50lbs jumps for the 25’ runs. This seemed to be ok. Got used to the pick and work on a quick start. I felt slow that first run. I can usually tell when I’m faster but I’m terrible at guess baseline. I knew the numbers would be a little skewed today as I was alternating uphill and downhill. I just knew that my second run was a lot smoother and faster than my first run. Started to get sprinkles of rain right before the last set. I knew it was slower than my second set but it felt ok. After the workout I was able to check times and my “slow” run was almost matching my best run with this yoke with this weight. My second run crushed it. In fact, it is the fastest I have recorded on any yoke since 2016 with 500lbs. This is good. I felt like other than that 2^nd run they were slow. My hope is that with a few sessions on a good yoke, that I can move with this kind of speed and purpose with 100lbs more. I say this as I’ve done 900lbs for a pick on this yoke many years ago and it felt harder than 1000lbs I’ve done on other yokes. It only sprinkled rain a little bit so not much got on the plates as I moved them back into the garage. The cold front did make the temperature go down like 7 degrees so can’t complain about that. But my shirt was soaked so I got a new one. Not that I needed a dry shirt for the next exercise but I didn’t want to dilly dally and take another break. So sandbag rows. Got to try out my new bags. They look slick but they grip good. I unfortunately didn’t give these much respect today. Unexpected mood swing. I just had distain for the sandbags. 175lbs is a floppy mess but I can’t really make it any firmer because I’m essentially ½ filling a 300lbs bag for it, even with the tightening method. So it became like fingertip grip after the first two reps. Just kind of throwing it down each rep really. I didn’t really rest before moving on to the 225lbs bag. I just kind of didn’t care. Much more firm to grip. But I couldn’t really get the balance right so two of the five reps were really sloppy. I was treating this more of an afterthought. A warm-up for the last exercise. But also just dealing with angry and frustration. So last item was SOS work. 5 singles EMOM style. Now it was written to do 250lbs or so and not really indicating warm-up, assuming that the sandbag stuff was warm-up enough. I know that the extension part can be not fun if not warmed up and I can feel like I’m going to pass out sometimes so I did work up singles to make sure I was feeling good before going for it. These felt easy. I think some hesitancy with the pick as I’m concerned about sweating and slippage. Grip feels pretty good. Trying to get this to feel automatic again. Weighed out a little heavier than planned but that’s ok. Had to clean up first before stretching. Decided I’d eat before stretching too rather than waiting until late to do so. One week down, 41 more to go.