Today (it's almost 0100, so by "today," I mean "yesterday") was my fifth day in a row at Crossfit. That's ten times in December and five times at PhysioDC. So, averaging things out, I'm getting a workout every other day. I'm a lot stronger (this is my first "formal" month at CF – before this I was doing the "free" workouts, which let me tell you, are a serious beat-down), and my body is changing. It's weird. I am gaining weight. My abs are bigger and firmer than they were before (although I've certainly got enough padding there to disguise it), and my quads/hams are too. My back is getting bigger and my deltoids and biceps are as well. The unfortunate result of this is that my jackets and slacks aren't fitting as well as they were when I was substantially twiggier (before I started working out 4+ times a week, before CF).
One of the things women tend to cite as reasons for shying away from CF is that they don't really want to "bulk up." I may just be genetically predisposed to pile on muscle mass and big a big old goon. Which I guess doesn't bother me, but I need to figure out what size I should have my clothes tailored to.
The other thing going on is my appetite is just voracious. Before I started Crossfit, I was vegetarian. But my body kept screaming at me that I was missing something. I started with tuna salad, and realized that those kinds of meals – animal protein – satisfied that screaming. I know Mac Danzig is a vegan and manages just fine that way, but I just can't do it. So I went back to meat, and since I started working out heavily (since I bumped up to 4x a week), and especially since I started hitting the Crossfit WODs almost daily, my appetite has been voracious. Do you actually burn a thousand calories at a CF WOD? I'm not sure. I know I'm taking in a lot of calories, and I'm not certain how that's being distributed.
But this fitness thing was never about losing weight or looking good. It is about being healthier, and about eliminating the pain I have in my back from the motorcycle accident.
Talking of pain, I am more or less in a constant state of slight muscle pain, the kind you get from pushing yourself in a workout, and honestly, that's kind of comforting. I start to go stir-crazy when I don't have that feeling.
The diet issue is going to be interesting, because I'm going to be taking the no-half-assing-it nutrition challenge at CF, which means I'll be cutting alcohol, gluten, and dairy (although I don't know all the details yet). Apparently this will make a huge difference in my training at CF, and we'll see how that goes. That starts 12 January.
And the more I talk to wifey about sky diving and proximity flying, the more I am starting to think it's not going to be enough. I'm never really satisfied with myself if I'm not pushing death just as far as I can. Jeb Corliss said he was diagnosed with something called counterphobia. It's not that I don't have a working "fear" mechanism; I assure you, it's intact. I just seek that stuff out and embrace it. I wrote a longish piece of mostly-fiction about the psychological process behind it, but it's not fit for publication yet.
Here's to pain and fear, both of which lead to more awesome things, like adrenaline and endorphins.
30 December, 2011
28 December, 2011
Crossfit this morning at 0600, last night at 1830, the day before at 1830, and tomorrow at 1830. I wanted to hit the Yoga class today, but I was pretty sore. We did back squats and while I didn't add any weight at all (so just a 65-lbs bar), the motion has left me with some pretty wicked muscle pain in my low back. I am hoping that I can keep exercising that muscle and it will heal. Something's gotta give here; I can't just be a cripple.
In other news, for the second time in two months, I have torn a tire off a wheel. The rear left tire came off this time and shredded the sidewall. I just bought these tires eight weeks ago, and I have a feeling that all the tail-dragging-around-turns and hammer-down slides might be unseating the tires in this weather. They're Potenza RE-11's, and they are most definitely summer tires, so they might be getting hard and brittle in the sub-30F weather. But really, how am I supposed to get them warm if not by burning out??
Talked to the wife about the skydiving thing for 2012. She's on board (or realizes she probably can't convince me otherwise), so now all that's left is the doctors' clearance.
Oh, and for the curious, I drag raced her Core i5 (1.6ghz) 11" Macbook Air and my Core 2 Duo (1.8ghz) Macbook Air with R this evening. By sheer computation time, it happens that the Core i5 is about 8% faster for the benchmark I was running. But the really curious thing about the benchmark is it seems to be faster because it has higher memory bandwidth. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that you'd be hard pressed to notice a difference between the two machines doing day-to-day work. And I do Photoshop stuff on my Air with no problems. Big bonus to the Core i5 machine though: backlit keyboard. That alone makes me covet the thing. One thing I didn't test, but I should, is disk I/O. I am curious as to whether Apple has changed the storage. I've got a 25,000,000 row database that should do the trick for I/O tests on these little demons. People don't give them much credit, but an Air working on storage is way faster than my Macbook Pro (quad i7) is running off its stupid rotational media.
Anyways, back to reading. Currently reading The Weird, (edited) by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Note that I had to switch my Kindle (read: kindle app on my iPad) physical address to one in the UK (I just used the address for the Ministry of Defence) before they'd let me download it. I could buy the paper-and-ink copy in the US, but apparently Amazon can't sell me the kindle copy in the US. Note that The Weird is seven hundred and fifty thousand words long. That's, like, ten Charlie Stross books. I bet that's all of Harry Potter and Twilight put together. Do I really want that on paper??? No. Amazon, this is stupid. The bits never went to the Ministry of Defence, they went to my damned kindle. I would have thought you guys would be smarter than this. And I don't want to hear any whining about "oh the publishers make us do it!!" because really, who are you kidding? You're the 800lb gorilla, you're a monopoly, and you are telling people what to do. Keep doing that, but try not to be a) stupid or b) dicks about it.
In other news, for the second time in two months, I have torn a tire off a wheel. The rear left tire came off this time and shredded the sidewall. I just bought these tires eight weeks ago, and I have a feeling that all the tail-dragging-around-turns and hammer-down slides might be unseating the tires in this weather. They're Potenza RE-11's, and they are most definitely summer tires, so they might be getting hard and brittle in the sub-30F weather. But really, how am I supposed to get them warm if not by burning out??
Talked to the wife about the skydiving thing for 2012. She's on board (or realizes she probably can't convince me otherwise), so now all that's left is the doctors' clearance.
Oh, and for the curious, I drag raced her Core i5 (1.6ghz) 11" Macbook Air and my Core 2 Duo (1.8ghz) Macbook Air with R this evening. By sheer computation time, it happens that the Core i5 is about 8% faster for the benchmark I was running. But the really curious thing about the benchmark is it seems to be faster because it has higher memory bandwidth. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that you'd be hard pressed to notice a difference between the two machines doing day-to-day work. And I do Photoshop stuff on my Air with no problems. Big bonus to the Core i5 machine though: backlit keyboard. That alone makes me covet the thing. One thing I didn't test, but I should, is disk I/O. I am curious as to whether Apple has changed the storage. I've got a 25,000,000 row database that should do the trick for I/O tests on these little demons. People don't give them much credit, but an Air working on storage is way faster than my Macbook Pro (quad i7) is running off its stupid rotational media.
Anyways, back to reading. Currently reading The Weird, (edited) by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Note that I had to switch my Kindle (read: kindle app on my iPad) physical address to one in the UK (I just used the address for the Ministry of Defence) before they'd let me download it. I could buy the paper-and-ink copy in the US, but apparently Amazon can't sell me the kindle copy in the US. Note that The Weird is seven hundred and fifty thousand words long. That's, like, ten Charlie Stross books. I bet that's all of Harry Potter and Twilight put together. Do I really want that on paper??? No. Amazon, this is stupid. The bits never went to the Ministry of Defence, they went to my damned kindle. I would have thought you guys would be smarter than this. And I don't want to hear any whining about "oh the publishers make us do it!!" because really, who are you kidding? You're the 800lb gorilla, you're a monopoly, and you are telling people what to do. Keep doing that, but try not to be a) stupid or b) dicks about it.
27 December, 2011
So I re-opened the weblog today. I had shut it down in June because of some stuff I was doing with work, and because I'm keenly aware that my coworkers (and now employees) "look me up" on the internet, and I'm frankly not sure what they'll find. As far as I can tell, the content here goes back to 2000 or so, and this post is the one-thousandth post here. Which is both fitting and somewhat ironic.
See, I wanted to do or say something special for that thousandth post. That's a lot of yammering on and I don't have a lot to show for it. But as I think about what I want to say today and what I've said over the last ten plus years here (and content culled from advogato), I think this is actually pretty important.
On July 6, 2009, I was in a motorcycle accident. I broke vertebrae L2, L3, L4 and L5. They "healed," in that they grew back together, but as with the rest of the bones I've broken, they didn't heal back correctly. Immediately after the accident, I spent about ten weeks in bed, unable to move. Then I started physical therapy, which lasted almost two years. My physical therapist discharged me, saying she'd done as much for me as she could and that I needed to take things into my own hands if I wanted to get better. It's important to note that "better" at that point was "better shape than I was in before the accident."
I started working with a personal trainer, and I'm about four months into that. About three months ago, I started going to CrossFit. Between the two programs I get 3-5 workouts in a week.
As recently as June, I was taking fifty-mike fentanyl patches for the pain; I take nothing now. I still have a little weakness and pain, but it's to be expected. I've got a broken back, right?
The reason I decided I could start posting here again is that I've got a long journey ahead of me. I've been talking with a spinal surgeon who is an avid skydiver and has counseled many people who have been injured in jumps and want to return, and I'm going to see my surgeon on the 4th. My goal is to get clearance from my doctor for the training leading up to jumps. That's really the first step; I've got some ambitious goals, but I'll leave those under wraps for now. When the weather gets better, I'm also going to get the car out on the track as much as I can. There's just too much torque in that thing to put to the ground on the street. And I want to get in to power-kiting, which should hopefully lead to kite surfing. And, if I've got the leave and the money, I have a two-week hiking trip planned for the Huayhuash Circuit in Peru.
I've never been one to set easy-to-reach goals for myself.
So I need to not just get fitter, but reach a level of fitness I haven't had since I was playing soccer in high school -- seventeen years ago (back then, I was running 7:19 miles; today I can manage 400 meters, but I'm pretty winded). The stakes are higher than they might seem reading this: if I attain the level of fitness I need to go racing, skydiving, endurance hiking, kite surfing, and so on, I'll be a happy guy. That's great. But if I don't, I'll be disabled. I cannot imagine higher stakes than that. It's almost as if the fun (and dangerous) stuff is the reward for the hard work.
"Visions of up" has always been about my deepest, closest-held dreams: flight and velocity. Here's to "up."
See, I wanted to do or say something special for that thousandth post. That's a lot of yammering on and I don't have a lot to show for it. But as I think about what I want to say today and what I've said over the last ten plus years here (and content culled from advogato), I think this is actually pretty important.
On July 6, 2009, I was in a motorcycle accident. I broke vertebrae L2, L3, L4 and L5. They "healed," in that they grew back together, but as with the rest of the bones I've broken, they didn't heal back correctly. Immediately after the accident, I spent about ten weeks in bed, unable to move. Then I started physical therapy, which lasted almost two years. My physical therapist discharged me, saying she'd done as much for me as she could and that I needed to take things into my own hands if I wanted to get better. It's important to note that "better" at that point was "better shape than I was in before the accident."
I started working with a personal trainer, and I'm about four months into that. About three months ago, I started going to CrossFit. Between the two programs I get 3-5 workouts in a week.
As recently as June, I was taking fifty-mike fentanyl patches for the pain; I take nothing now. I still have a little weakness and pain, but it's to be expected. I've got a broken back, right?
The reason I decided I could start posting here again is that I've got a long journey ahead of me. I've been talking with a spinal surgeon who is an avid skydiver and has counseled many people who have been injured in jumps and want to return, and I'm going to see my surgeon on the 4th. My goal is to get clearance from my doctor for the training leading up to jumps. That's really the first step; I've got some ambitious goals, but I'll leave those under wraps for now. When the weather gets better, I'm also going to get the car out on the track as much as I can. There's just too much torque in that thing to put to the ground on the street. And I want to get in to power-kiting, which should hopefully lead to kite surfing. And, if I've got the leave and the money, I have a two-week hiking trip planned for the Huayhuash Circuit in Peru.
I've never been one to set easy-to-reach goals for myself.
So I need to not just get fitter, but reach a level of fitness I haven't had since I was playing soccer in high school -- seventeen years ago (back then, I was running 7:19 miles; today I can manage 400 meters, but I'm pretty winded). The stakes are higher than they might seem reading this: if I attain the level of fitness I need to go racing, skydiving, endurance hiking, kite surfing, and so on, I'll be a happy guy. That's great. But if I don't, I'll be disabled. I cannot imagine higher stakes than that. It's almost as if the fun (and dangerous) stuff is the reward for the hard work.
"Visions of up" has always been about my deepest, closest-held dreams: flight and velocity. Here's to "up."