August 8, 2020 – Week 1, Day 3

I’m trying to get my life back in order. This last month has been literal hell. Just been unending. Last week was another tipping point. Haven’t shaved in over a week. Why bother. I feel like I have to be happy with myself again before I clean up my face. Or not. My hope is that the actions I’ve taken the past two days will alleviate some of this stress and anxiety and self-loathing. It is hard to feel like you don’t know if you made the worst decision of your life or dodged a bullet. Perhaps I should be happy I made it a week of consistent training. Stuff came up the night before and I just shut down and went to bed early. I stayed in bed for over 13hrs. It wasn’t that I was that tired, I just didn’t want to see what the day had in store for me. I did eventually make myself get out of bed. It ended up being a terrible day but I didn’t shutdown this time. I did what I wanted to do for the day and like I said, hopefully I can move forward without the anxiety, stress, fear and loathing and hatred.

5 Minute Walk (.25 miles)

Mobility Prep

NY Barbell Yoke
190x50’ in 5.55 seconds
280x50’ in 5.87 seconds
370x50’ in 6.23 seconds
460x50’ (camera fell over, no time)
550x50’ in 7.86 seconds
550x50’ in 7.38 seconds
550x50’ in 7.83 seconds

Stone of Steel Loads (62”, tacky towel)
138x3
182x3
225.5x10

Prowler Drags
555x137’2” in 75.00 seconds

Stretching

Comments: Despite my lower back being stiff, warming up and walking felt ok. I was expecting my knees to be terribly sore and achy from how things felt the previous workout warming up. Of the training plans I had, this was the day with the most up in the air. All I knew was that it was going to be a low volume approach. The basics I had was yoke, sandbag, sled. That was it. I looked through past trainings to figure out what I felt I should do to work on things that needed work while not taking away from the log and deadlift work. Events are stressful as it is. Even light. I had this plan setup as prepping for the December Plat Plus but after the realizations of things as I previously posted, that wasn’t really a viable option so that meant I had to figure out long term stuff. So moving events are going to remain between 60-80% for majority of things. I’ve skipped farmer’s a few times already but I figured that yoke was where to start as the plan will be to do farmer’s twice in a month (trained differently). Yoke for short distances and since I can load the hips more here this is the overload for the moving. I didn’t want to repeat the last session of yoke as that would be the plan really as going up 5% each time for the next hopefully 12 weeks. Plan put out as 65% for 3x50’. I was debating if I wanted to just be doing 30lbs jumps rather than the 40lbs jumps I had based off the percentages. I decided to stick with what I had for right now. Resetting the yoke is time consuming. Taking 90lbs jumps in weight. Last warm-up my phone got a message and the vibrating knocked it off the stand so I couldn’t get my time. After that, I set my phone to silence so that it wouldn’t happen again. Probably should’ve done that a while ago as the sound of my phone vibrating has caused me severe anxiety with everything going on. As I said, very time consuming to reset with my slanted street. I think it was about an hour from when I started with the walk to when I was setting up my first working set run that it had been an hour already. It’s hot and it takes a lot of work moving stuff around so I never feel like I cooldown. The first set I felt slow but it actually wasn’t too bad. I just know I have the yoke working against me when I hear it creaking. Second set was faster. Not quite the fastest time I’ve had with this weight (less than .10 seconds slower) but it was good. Third set was slower but just under the first sets time. Really trying to get fast turnover with my strides. I left a lot of the weights outside for later. So instead of sandbag stuff this time, I was going to do stone of steel. I’ve skipped this workout twice already. For right now, I’m sticking to lighter with higher reps. And tacky towel. I have no intention of getting my real stones or stone stuff back from being left at the strongman gym. Part of what I’m dealing with. I’ve done the weights with a stone of steel and tacky towel for the planned concrete stuff at USS Nats so if I can work up to those weights for many reps I’ll have no problem with real tacky. The issues I have is with my abdominals not being ready for the heavier weights I can hold with tacky on concrete stones if I go with no tacky towel. No tacky towel is too stressful on the biceps. Aggravates the tendonitis. And with how damn hot it is, I’m sweating and being slippery and slippage is where the injuries happen. I’ll save the no tacky stuff for sandbags and kegs. Speaking of slippery, I had to change shirts as I had soaked the one I was using for yoke. Now the plan here before I just went AWOL was 70% for a crisp set of 10 reps. I was going to base that off my best without gloves tacky towel stone but that had been to a much lower bar height. And seeing as how I’ve skipped several weeks of this and reps over 5 on loading was just gassing me, I lowered that to being where I’d just be doing 2 plates in my stone of steel for my top set. Reps felt good today warming up. I had felt like only the first rep went up well the last time I did these. Only had to retack between sets, not during the top set. Reps is exhausting. The last time of the day was prowler drags. As I wasn’t going to be doing a short drag anymore, I figured I’d do a timed set. These are tough and it is just one set. 75 seconds instead of 60 seconds because I like the challenge. Now due to personal matters, I had about an hour of cooldown from the loading to this drag. I will not say anything else about it other than I hope this is the last of it. I was worked up and I think that helped in that I didn’t cooldown my body or muscles that much. Also helped that it was warm outside. This took a bit to setup as well because my one neighbor has started parking a car near my side of the property so I had to go down two houses to insure that I had enough of a course to keep pulling the entire time. It was slow going but that was fine and the idea. With all the thunderstorms, there were a lot of little twigs and stuff in the street that I’d get caught on. I got further than I expected I would but I guess the work has been put in since I last tested this. This was like 30lbs more and 15’ further than my best. I was worked up and it took a bit to calm down and put stuff away. Cleaned up before I started making dinner and stretched. I can only hope that the light I see at the end of the tunnel isn’t a train coming my way.