Oh haaaaaiiii. What’s up peeps. Been a while, and it’s well past time for an update.

The ascribed title is a bit of an unfortunate pun, but it seemed appropriate for the occasion: rekindling the bloggin’ flame aaaaand rejacking my foot up. Bad.

But I’m skipping quite a bit since the last time I posted, so let’s rewind….

I did the SoCal Tough Mudder in March. It was badass, and I managed to finish in 2:45, which I feel like isn’t too bad for a guy who’s only run, at most, 7 miles at any one time.

Proof that I did it. Believe it or not I was even more excited at the finish.

After getting back from SoCal, with a nice week and a half vacation and ragefest behind me, I got back into the swing of lifting heavy things. My buddy Drew and I took on a program known as the “603 PTP” which was thrown together by the same people who put together the Whole 30. Whole 30 worked well for me, so I figured I’d give this puppy a shot as well.

It was hard.

603 PTP was a deadlift and overhead press centric program, which I liked because while it focused on building raw strength, but it also mixed in a lot of metabolic conditioning along with it. During the course of the program, I got my deadlift back up to #400, and improved my strict overhead press from #145 to #165. Not too bad for a 37 day program!

As is my norm, I like to decompress and celebrate a little bit after completing a program or reaching a goal, so I did a week or two of moderate lifting with the plan to start another self-composed program that mimicked the 603 PTP, but with a different focus and some other tweaks added by myself and Drew.

But theeeeen this happened…

This is what happens when your friends convince you to play ultimate Frisbee  after drinking 6 or 7 beers.

I initially thought I’d sprained it pretty bad. Ran around for another minute…. Then hobbled for another minute. Then stood there. Then sat down. Then drank another beer, then played a game of beerpong,…

Finally, after getting loads of what was most likely highly legitimate medical advice from folks around me, such as “I was premed, it’s just sprained” and “bro, you should just drink more”, I decided that the adult decision to make was to stop having fun and tend to the wounds.

Luckily, Patient First was just a couple blocks away, so I headed over there and was quickly told that what I had incurred was a “significant” break. As you can probably imagine, that put a large poop on my party.

Turned out it was bad enough that I needed surgery, and had to have a plate and a couple pins put in there.

Over the two months of brokenness that ensued, I did a few half-assed upper body workouts and a lot of feeling sorry for myself. Luckily, I got it together enough to work on the one thing I was fully able to: my nutrition.

So that means I did another Whole 30, 100% legit, no cheats. Felt pretty great and while I may not have been killing it in the gym, I felt pretty good about killing it come feeding time.

So now we’re here… Present day. Back to 100% as far as I can tell, with a slightly larger left foot, and a few pains here and there. Running again, squatting, deadlifting, and all the other goodness I’ve missed.

Tomorrow morning another 603 PTP begins. Drew got hurt before he finished the first round, so he’s hungry to give it another shot, and I’m happy to have a lifting partner to compete with and to motivate me…

That being said, I need to get to sleep asap. Game time is 6AM, so the alarm goes off at 4:45. I’m out peeps!

So about a week ago a couple buddies of mine and myself instituted a new super-secret, awesome-only club: We call it the Sandbag Death March Club. We’ve only met once, but I’m thinking we’ll shoot for monthly meet-ups. If you’ve got an 80+ lb. sandbag, you’re welcome to join… But here are the rules:

The first rule of Sandbag Death March Club is-…What? No. No, you can talk about it all you want. That’s a stupid rule, why would we say that?… The first rule is don’t drop the sandbag.

Helms returning the sandbag to an eagerly expectant Drew

Second rule? Continue to not drop the sandbag

Drew breaking the first and second rule of Sandbag Death March Club

Third rule is… Well we haven’t made any more rules up yet, but it’s a work in progress.

I mentioned the stairs at Church Hill here in Richmond, VA (RVA, hollaaaa) a few weeks back when my buddy Drew and I did the stairs a couple times with a Sandbag climb to top it off… I’d liken that to the fight Ed Norton and Brad Pitt had in the parking lot when Brad said, “just hit me… Surprise me” (Sorry for all the Fight Club references, but I was Tyler Durden for Halloween and I’m still feeling it evidently)… It was a dry run.

Last week though, we put some parameters around it. So here’s what the deal was…

Each person does:
3 stair sprints
1 double stair sandbag climb
1 single stair sandbag climb

We do the above until we’ve all finished, or until someone pukes… See, there you go: third rule.

Drew puked. Three times in fact. Right after the double stair climb, he lost his breakfast… So luckily for all of us, we didn’t have to do the last single stair climb. Gotta’ give the man respect though, he pushed through the rest of the workout regardless of his moment of weakness.

After that, we worked in some heavy core:
sandbag get-ups
sandbag oblique raises

Drew taking it like a man. Despite puke, he pushed through and finished it off in style.... sorta.

So there you have the initial agenda of the Sandbag Death March Club. It may not look like much, but I can assure you it was grueling at times. I look forward to doing it again in a couple weeks! Hopefully as we get more badass, we can make the workouts more badass.

As always, I’ll keep you posted!

Monday’s have unofficially been dubbed a “running day”, and after taking both Saturday and Sunday off to heal up after a pretty wicked leg day on Friday, I was ready to get after it.

The plan that was bouncing around in my brain was to do 3-4 miles of steady state running at a decent pace (for me), but my so called friend wanted to join in on the fun and add a little bit of excitement to it: stair runs.

So we settled on a compromise, and after doing a couple miles on the treadmill, we headed over to the beautifully ghetto/majestic (depends on what block you’re on) Church Hill. There, I was greeted by a great view of the city….

Which was quickly followed by a terrible view:

We did a couple rounds up the stairs, which sufficiently winded me, after which I told my buddy I’d see his stair runs and raise him an 80lb sandbag carry…. He was not happy. I’m pleased to report, we both manned up, and made the trek up the stairs with the sandbag across the shoulders. There was absolutely zero running involved. I’m fairly certain if I tried to run up stairs with a sandbag on my back I’d end up with a fraction of the teeth that I currently possess.

Anyway, great workout, and one that I think I’ll bring out of the arsenal more often. On top of the cycling and normal lower body lifting days that I’m now working with, adding this in should kick my quad strength up a few notches… At least that’s the idea.

Good news Team! I think I can officially say that the saddle has been remounted. Last week I lamented a bit about my fitnesshood being all out of whack due to change in workout routine, venue, scheduling, etc. But I think that’s all behind me now as I joined my alma mater’s gym and gave it a shot at my normal time of 5:30ish after work. It was a tad crowded, and I’m not going to say I’ll “never” have to wait for anything, but it was certainly manageable and they have much, much more equipment than my local Golds Gym.

Oh hey... There you are. Let's do this thing.

Which, by the way, is starting to suck pretty hard. I’ve actually been a big fan of Gold’s Gym over the past 4 years or so, but in the past several months I feel like our local franchise isn’t taking care of business like they used to: case in point, it took me 3 tries to finally find a decent treadmill to use the other night. First one had some weird timing issue with the belt; the second one rocked back and forth viciously when I actually tried to run; and the third one was just right… I’m just trying to workout here, not botch a bastardized version of Goldilocks and the 3 bears, so I was less than excited by it.

Anyway, the workouts have been going off without a hitch, I’m making progress with my running, and feeling good about my lifting. And when things are going well in the gym, that means things go well on the blog. So expect some content to start flowing, because endorphins make me want to do awesome things.

I refuse to watch such a blatant chick flick as “How Stell Got Her Groove Back”, but if there’s a lesson to be learned from it, someone please lay it on me.

I think it’s time that I confess that I’m having a little bit of a hard time getting back into high gear. It’s not a matter of not wanting to, but trying to figure out the right routine and schedule. November of last year through August of this year, I’d been working out with a coach for all my workouts. This made my job the following:

1. Pay the man
2. Do what I was told

That’s it.

The man’s full time job is training athletes (with a few slouches like myself on the side), so I let him worry about what he was good at (achieving my fitness goals) and all I had to worry about was showing up.

Man was I spoiled.

So now that I’ve been released back into the wild, I’ll admit that settling upon that oddly comfortable grind or routine has been a challenge. I’m used to going straight from the office to the gym, and getting after it: never waiting for a rack, or equipment.

Now I’m back to the Gold’s Gym thing, and going to that place anytime during the week between 4 and 9pm is an exercise…. in futility (I feel like I could’ve done more with that).

Anyway, so I’ve been doing my running outside to build up the cardio slowly, and then lifting at Gold’s at night time, usually around 9pm. However, my body doesn’t seem real stoked about that schedule, and often times I find myself dragging my ass to Gold’s and not having nearly the workout that I’d had pictured in my head.

So today I joined my alma mater’s gym (nice and cheap) with the hopes of going there for all my triathlon and lifting needs, and am going to give the lunch time lifting thing a try. It’s literally only a mile from my office, so one would think I could pull it off if I dust off my old cutthroat parallel parking skills.

I hope this works out, because the Gold’s Gym thing at 9pm or later is really not working out. I’d like to be in bed about the same time I’m hitting my target heart rate. Not the ideal situation, and I need to find that groove again, to the point where I find myself at the gym at a particular time without even thinking about it.

Let’s make that happen VCU gym. Let’s make. it. happen.

aaaaaand we’re back.

I gave myself last week off. I hope you’re okay with that. We’ll call it a “de-load” week. I ate whatever I wanted, I only worked out once, and I didn’t write a single word for the blog.

So now that I thoroughly feel bad about myself for such a completely unproductive week, it’s time to get back on the horse. Not that I don’t think a week off here and there isn’t a good thing. I think it is, and I’m sure I’ll do it again. But any more than a week, and I start to feel like I’m making what’s supposed to be a healthy break into a bad habit.

So why the break?

Well since last November I’ve focused almost 100% of my physical exercise towards one thing: getting stronger. I hired a coach to train me week in, week out, and I’d say he paid off big time. I hit my deadlift goal in a couple months time, eventually hit my clean goal, and made considerable progress towards my front squat goal. Realized early July that some of my favorite lifting sessions revolved around the strongman style lifts, so went ahead and decided to give the RCSC 2011 a shot and made that happen a little over a week ago….

However, if you’ve read this blog for any extended length of time (probably just a month or two is enough for anybody for a lifetime), you’ve realized by now that variety for me is absolutely the spice of my fitness life.

So what does that mean? It means I’m changing gears again. My next two “events” will be the Tough Mudder (which I had to move from October to the end of February in SoCal, due to my jerk friend deciding to get married on the same day) and a triathlon. So I’m moving from focusing on strength based events to cardiovascular endurance type events. I figure training for a triathlon and a Tough Mudder simultaneously shouldn’t be too difficult, since the most challenging thing in each (for me anyway) will be the cardio.

However. The last thing I’m interested in doing is losing the strength that I’ve worked almost an entire year to build. Endurance sports are notorious for eating away at muscle and making men look Project Runway ready, and I’ve already got a metabolism and body type that shies to the leaner side anyway. So thanks, but no thanks.

What this means is, I’m going to continue to lift, and lift to get stronger. Not just for giggles, but keeping in mind that come next year, when the River City Strongman Competition 2012 comes around, not only will I do it again but I’ll be stronger than I was the first time.

That kicks things up a bit and mean I’m shooting for a pretty lofty target: expand my cardiovascular ability while gaining strength (and hopefully retaining mass).

How am I going to do it?

…I have no idea… yet. I’m pretty sure it’ll involve eating a lot of food, and being extra smart about the length of my cardio training sessions at any one time. But hey, it’s just the next leg of the journey. I look forward to doing the research on how to make this work.

Haven’t picked out the triathlon yet, and I don’t have a bike (which are damned expensive), but I’ll be sure to lay it on you as I figure it out!

Well…. I’ve got good news and bad: The good news is I didn’t come in dead last. The bad news is, I think the one guy who I “beat” dropped out of the competition due to bird flu or something… or may never existed, but all I know is there was somebody on the list who’s name was below mine.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here, let me rewind back to the beginning. I feel like Friday was the beginning of everything that made up my strongman experience, so we’ll start with that…

Friday was an interesting day: Obama was about a mile from my house speaking at U of R, and Sir Richard Branson was speaking at a conference that afternoon and they were having an after party at the Virginia Museum of Fin Arts that evening. Thanks to a friend, I was able to score free tickets to both events (thanks again buddy).

The conference was pretty uneventful, though the talk on Virgin Galactic was pretty cool, and I have absolute certainty at this point that I’ll be going to space at some point in my lifetime (assuming I don’t die in the next 20-30).

Anyway, the after party was what I was real excited/nervous about. Why? Because it was an open bar event. Usually I’m pretty good about being smart and not drinking the night before something important, but when there’s an open bar I always feel like I’m missing out on a once in a lifetime opportunity by not taking part in that, so I did drink a few. However I am proud to report that I did not drink too much.

….At least that’s what I thought, until I woke up on Saturday morning feeling hungover like a jackass.

So getting to the gym just in time to hear the end of the rules, I start to warm-up with a little bit of trepidation about this minor hangover and the fact that I had just been told we’ll be flipping a 520lb. tire three times. The most I’d ever done was a 500.

We had about an hour to warm-up, and I spent most of that wandering trying to figure out where things were and what I wanted to do about it. An hour seems like a long time, but it flew by pretty quickly, and next thing I knew we were starting…

Initially I was pretty nervous, but even before I had to take on the first event, I realized that the environment for this type of thing was a lot different than other competitive events. Back in my baseball playing days, or even professional grade beerpong days (don’t doubt me), there’s always been the “us/me vs. them”. There’s always somebody pulling against you, talking trash about you, trying to break you down and take the wind out of your sails.

Interestingly, the attitude at the strongman was completely the opposite. Sure, everybody wants to win, and you’re doing your best to beat the other guys, but it’s interesting how you all feel like you’re on the same team. Everyone high fives everyone else, cheers each other on, and is all around full of encouragement. It was completely foreign to me, and completely awesome. It’s a great feeling to be surrounded by a crowd of people yelling and cheering for you, even if they have no idea who you are. My theory is, everyone has a high level mutual respect due to knowing exactly what it is you’re going through, since they just did it or are going to be doing it shortly after you. It’s very much an “us vs. the weights” mentality.

Anyway, I hit the first challenge, and I’m happy to say that I accomplished 2 of the 4 lifts. Successfully clean/pressing the 180lb. axle, and pulling 350lb of the floor without any trouble. I was really hoping to get the 180lb log, since I know I have the strength to do it but have a really hard time getting the technique down. As far as the 500lb. off blocks, I’m not going to lie, I never really thought that was going to happen, and like an idiot I tried several times and ended up jacking up my lower back only 45 seconds into a day long competition. I am well aware of my tendency to round my back like a jackass on the deadlift when the weight gets heavy, and unfortunately this was no exception and I paid for it.

After the power medley was the yoke walk. The most I’ve ever done was 450lb., and I wanted to get some numbers on the board early, so I started with a relatively light 360lb.

Hitting 360 with ease, I bumped it up to 440 for my second attempt, and got through that without any problem and 0 drops.

At this point I learned that you get a total of 3 drops over your 3 attempts, so I made a ballsy call and decided to skip over 480lb. and go straight for 520lb…. Well, this ended up being not a very good call, and I ended up making the fatal 4th drop about ⅔ of the way to the finish line. Oh well, I figured if you don’t push yourself to the point of at least a few drops, you’re being a pansy about it… I didn’t want that.

After that was one of my favorites, the farmers walk. I was confident I could do this without any problem, which ended up being true, however something I need to work on is how quickly I walk with the weight. I ended up not doing so well as far as placing since everyone was able to complete the event without dropping, and a couple guys practically jogged with the weight.

Then came the tire-flipping/sled pulling medley, and the 520lb tire that I was so worried about proved to be the easiest implement of all, and I flipped it 3 times without much trouble, followed by a sled drag for ~45ft. I have no idea how much was on the sled, but it wasn’t too bad.

Sadly, the last event, the Atlas stones, which I was super stoked about, proved to be my worst event. After watching the women do the stones, I was feeling pretty good about my chances, when all of a sudden they cleared away the ~48” platform, and pulled out a tiered platform that blew my mind with the height they had picked for some of the lifts. If you watch the video below, you can see that I wasn’t able to get past the seconds stone, which is 215lbs of pure, infuriating frustration.

Thankfully, the next 2 or 3 guys couldn’t get the 2nd stone up either, so that made me feel quite a bit better. Not that I wasn’t pulling for them, but if I had been the only guy unable to get it on the platform, I’d have been pretty pissed.

So having finished the last event, I packed it up and headed out, roughly 8 hours after stepping into the gym: bruised, battered, and my back already sore as sh*t.

Am I glad I did it? Absolutely. Do I think I’ll do it again? Probably. I now know what they’re like, and what I need to work on. Having seen where I’m at, I know I’ve got tons of room for growth, and I believe I can make substantial progress if I put my mind to it.

However, I think it’s time for a change in the training regimen… More on that later. For now, I’m still tired, sore, and it’s time for a beer…. I think I’ll take a couple days off. DONE.

Coming off of a week of hurricane recovery, and only having lifted a grand total of 1.5 times during that week (with a jog somewhere in there), I’ll admit I wasn’t feeling real good. I’ve discovered that much like a crack addict without, well… crack, when I take several days in a row off from serious exercise, my mood and overall sense of well-being just goes straight south. Compound that with the fact that I’ve switched back to lifting on my lonesome (sans coach), so I’m all on my own as far as programming.

Take all this, and considering I’ve got a strongman competition this coming Saturday, I was just not feeling that awesome.

Until last night…I went to my old faithful, Gold’s Gym, and decided that it’d be a good call to do two of the core lifts in the upcoming competition: deadlift and overhead press.

Well I’m not sure if it was my long rest, or the sweet knee-high snowboarding socks that I was rocking at the gym for the first time to keep myself from bleeding all over Golds, but not only did I clean and press 185lbs without too much trouble, but I hit a 15lb PR in my deadlift, pulling a 1RM @ 400lbs.

Talk about a weight lifted-HEYOOOOO. Sweet joke…. seriously though, a weight was lifted off my shoulders, and now I can take it relatively easy the rest of the week up until the event, allowing myself to go in fresh (may do a little tabata type work just to get the body sweating a bit).

Event is only a couple days away, and I’m excited. You know I’ll be writing about that mess when I’m done!

Last Monday was once again the sometimes dreaded, but always needed, squat day. If you’ll recall from a recent post, squat day didn’t exactly go as planned on the previous go around, so there was a little trepidation for this next round.

We went heavy again, but for triples rather than singles, and thankfully at 285# I hit a triple without incident, thus erasing my less than stellar squat the previous week and totally redeeming myself… Which prompted me to share this video clip, for no real reason other than the fact that it amuses me.

Ah yes, what a great movie.

Anyway, sorry for being a bit sporadic with the posting the past week. It’s been insane: bachelor/going-away party planning, pre-bachelor party cleaning, earthquake, pre-bachelor party drinking (need to flex the tolerance a bit to make sure I still got it), and then instead of the actual bachelor party, we had a hurricane induced practice bachelor party, since a lot of folks aren’t able to make the trip due to weather, but the bride-to-be was already on his way… so we just went with it.

Now my house is filled with trash, beer bottles, and dirt, and my yard is covered in debris, burned out tiki torches, and a cable line that got ripped off the side of my house.

So that being said, due to cleanup and recovery from hurricane of mass destruction (whether it be in natural or alcoholic form), and considering the fact that I’m still out of power, my posting may be a bit patchy over the next few days as well. But I’m hoping everything is back to normal here soon.

Hope everyone out there made it through okay!

Have you ever heard of the Crossfit WOD (Workout Of the Day) known as “Fight Gone Bad”? It sounds pretty terrible: round after round of wall balls, box jumps, push press, etc… with very short periods of rest in between. It sounds short, painful, and completely miserable.

Well I’ve never done the official Fight Gone Bad, though someday I may give it a shot, but I have been in a fight that’s gone pretty poorly for the home team, and so I can relate to the feeling: you sort of remember how it started, maybe a little bit in the middle if you’re lucky as you wildly sock somebody a few times square in the face, and then you wake up at the end and ask “what the hell happened?”

Well I had a similar workout last week, and I’d tell you everything that happened, but unfortunately it was so non-stop and bewildering that quite frankly I don’t clearly remember what happened: There was a med ball push-press ladder, immediately followed by an ascending med ball front raise ladder, plus a max effort dumbell shrug set immediately followed by a max effort dumbell curl set… I think there were some fat grip pull ups mixed in there too, superset with suspension push-ups…. I don’t remember, there wasn’t much rest and it’s all kind of hazy. Some parking lot dry heaving was involved afterwards.

This got me thinking…. What’s the most brutal workout I’ve ever had?

There are a few that come to mind:

• Birthday workout this past May – you know when you start a workout off with a single set of 28 squats with your bodyweight on your back, things will most likely end badly.
• My first (and only) calf tabata day… couldn’t walk right for a week
• and then there’s the workout last week

However, I have to say that no workout sticks out more in my mind than this caveman workout that I did with my buddy Graham several years back. It traumatized him so much, that he told me he’d never do it with me again. The beauty of it? All you need is:

Yes, that’s it: one decently sized medicine ball, and a field (horse farm not necessary).

In case you didn’t click on the link above, the idea behind it is this: 10 rounds of the following, in ascending ladder format starting with 10 reps (reps do no apply to sprint portion):

• Overhead ball squats
• Ball push-ups
• Ball sit-ups
• Ball push-ups
• Overhead ball squats
• 200-yard sprint

So just to spell it out for those of you who don’t understand how this would work: the first round you do 10 ball squats, then 10 push-ups, then 10 situps, then 10 push-ups, then 10 squats, then you sprint. When you get back you do 11 squats, 11 push-ups…. Until you do 20 of everything in the last round. You get the idea, right?… If not, leave a stupid comment for further explanation.

Anyway, having not trained like this… well pretty much ever, at the time, my buddy and I took a medicine ball out to a field and gave it a shot. We figured, hey, how hard can it be?

It. was. miserable…. I can’t even begin to describe to you how miserable this was. I even had to call in backup, and have a friend bring us some more Gatorade, protein shakes, and a loaf of bread to put directly in the face. Oh, and to make us feel good about almost putting ourselves through shock and complete kidney failure, they have a scoring system for this workout: with a “gold” medal being awarded for doing it in 18 minutes or less, a “silver” for doing it in 18 – 22 minutes, and a “bronze” for over 22 minutes.

My friend and I both were happy to escape with our lives, and a well earned “bronze medal: the Peter Jackson director’s extended uncut edition”…. For those of you who aren’t nerds, that means it took a really, really long effing time.

Anyway, that’s my story…. So what I want to know from you is….

What is the most brutal workout you’ve ever had?… Heck, if I’m feeling crazy enough, I may even try it.