The Intellectual Wilderness There is nothing more useless than doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

My legs felt tired this morning but my heart didn’t so I felt like doing a longer run that involved less hills than my usual route. My normal run route involves some huge elevation changes and I didn’t want to have my hamstrings or quads get overworked and tighten up because that usually screws up my boxing workout later in the day.

Coming back down the huge hill

I picked a route that is 2.8km one way and should have been relatively flat. I was totally wrong about that and I greatly underestimated the number of major intersections between my starting point and my turning point. This was a big mistake but all I could do was laugh at myself for having chosen such a bad route. It turns out this route is one very long hill, in fact it is so long and has enough curves that looking down the street it is difficult to perceive the incline because you can’t see the beginning or end of it. The intersections all involved huge delays and on my way up the hill I was stopped at every light for what seemed like forever. I did jumping-jacks (side-straddle hops) to pass the time at the lights, which turned out to be a bad idea because it really worked my already strained shins and calves over a little too much.

I wound up putting in a 5.6km run time of 31:01, which is significantly slower than any other run so far. That’s OK. I picked a bad route. I was delayed numerous times, traffic was horrible and the route which I picked for being flat turned out to be one incredibly long incline.

Sometimes I screw up like that. Its really not a big deal. I did get cardio training out of it and I did complete my run for the day, so it certainly wasn’t a waste. A bit frustrating but definitely not a waste. So now I learned something new about that route: its a hill.

My planned weight routine for the day was shoulders but I had run myself out of time and had to choose between lifting and boxing. In this particular case boxing is more important than lifting because getting better at fighting is my focus and that has little to do with being a musclehead.

I headed to the gym and Farrap had some new things planned for me. I went through my usual jumprope, shadow boxing, heavy bag routine but instead of mitts today Farrap had me practice evasion and blocking — from baseball bats. I figured he would be nice and try to work me into it slowly because those things hurt. I was wrong. In his mind I would most quickly learn to be quick if he swung them fast. He was correct, actually. On the ones I was supposed to block I managed to always have my guard up in time, but those were relatively slow. The ones he wanted me to evade he swung very fast and the fear of getting smacked in the leg really hard by a bat made me move a lot faster and I wound up never getting hit.

Not getting hit doesn’t make it un-scary to have a stocky little Thai man swinging baseball bats at my legs and body, though.

Farrap trying to give me whelps on my legs

Boxing:

Jumprope, 2R
Knees (heavy bag), 2R
Front kick (heavy bag), 3R
Shadow, 3R
Bats/defense, 3R
Heavy bag, 2R

My boxing workout was not as intense today as I had thought it was going to be, but I certainly learned more about balance, reaction time and moving the right parts of me out of harm’s way while keeping my poise. It was a good lesson day.

Today was a pretty simple and straightforward day. I had no run scheduled, my boxing workout was optional and all I really had to focus on was lifting weights. Today was scheduled to be a legs day so that was my focus. I missed my chest workout yesterday so I was hoping I would have enough energy to make it up today also since I was not committed to doing anything else physically.

I went to the gym. My legs felt a little tired from all the kicking and running over the last two days so I didn’t think I would have much strength for heavy lifts. My legs felt tight just walking around the gym and positively weak going up and down stairs not carrying anything so I figured today was going to be a very light lift day.

I was totally wrong. I didn’t go super heavy but I went a lot heavier than I have over the last two weeks whereas I thought I was so worn out that I would be having trouble with even light weight. I don’t really know where the energy (or motivation) came from, but I wound up doing my final squats at 130kgs for whatever reason and felt comfortable doing that without a spotter. I also went up a little more on straight-leg deadlift — my alternative because the hamstring machine is still broken.

I had wanted to get at least a little bit of a chest workout in today because I missed it yesterday, so I hopped on the bench after my hamstrings were done, but it was pointless. Even at 80kgs I felt unstable and weak, and I could only get 6 reps (instead of the normal 10) out of 90kgs and 100 was just a disaster. I was, at this point, incredibly tired feeling. It wasn’t as though my muscles were tired — my chest felt fine — but after a single press I felt shaky and had no energy. It was as if all the available energy in my blood was used up and it would take time to get anything back in there to use up.

This doesn’t really need a caption — but here’s one anyway

Squats:

12 reps @ 100kgs
10 reps @ 110kgs
8 reps @ 120kgs
6 reps @ 130kgs
12 reps @ 100kgs
10 reps @ 100kgs, 2 sets (close toes)
10 reps @ 100kgs, 2 sets (wide toes)

A better representation of this exercise than I posted before — sorry for butt-centric nature of this pic…

Straight-leg deadlift:

12 reps @ 30kgs
10 reps @ 40kgs
8 reps @ 50kgs
6 reps @ 60kgs
12 reps @ 40kgs

A decent angle to obscure my weird benchpress face

Benchpress:

12 reps @ 80kgs
6 reps @ 90kgs
3 reps @ 100kgs

I was hungry so I headed to McDonald’s for some Big Macs and a double cheeseburger.At this point I am really bored of eating burgers and fries, but when I’m hungry enough I’ll eat it all with gusto because, hey, its food. I don’t really like it anymore, but food is food to ravenous man.

Hunger alone can convince me to continue eating the same thing over and over and over and…

I wound up not boxing today, which was OK because it was optional. I just never could shake that weird fatigue after the gym so I decided to give it a rest. My shin splits were just waiting to be aggravated by hopping around the mat (not to mention using a jumprope) and I just didn’t feel up for getting clobbered because I was too tired to be there in the first place.

After working over a bunch of technical issues related to this project it was already getting way larer than I realized and it was time to go in for an evening meal. I wound up heading to McDonald’s around midnight. I ate, headed back home for a shower and turned in. I had a run planned for the morning, as well as lifting and boxing so I needed to get to sleep pretty quick. It is amazing how much time you can eat up dealing with technical details.