Back again

Well, I’ve been busy lately–or, I suppose not really, just busier than I was.  I’ve been teaching, it’s three hours at a go most weeknights, and with both the preparation I have to do beforehand and the high energy level I have to maintain while in the classroom, it’s enough to fill my days.

To catch up a bit, Brian and I spent Christmas in Weed, California with his family. Here are a few pic, unfortunately it seems like I never remember to take enough of them…

OK, well Sumi wasn’t really there, but she sure looks cute in the presents, no?

Anyway, to move on to more current news… Lately I’ve been reading a lot. I’ve read Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, and Anna Karenina…all good books, though some more enjoyable for me personally than others. Presently I’m reading Middlemarch, which I’m enjoying immensely. But the most important books I’m reading are of a different kind entirely. They are Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training and Practical Programming for Strength Training, both by Mark Rippetoe. Brian ordered these for me for Christmas, but I just got them last week. And wow, did I ever need these books! Starting Strength is geared towards the novice lifter, which I am not, but it covers the basic movements so thoroughly and well it’s like, well, it’s like what the Joy of Cooking is for all things culinary. The bible, if you will. It’s embarrasing to say, but I have never power cleaned–and now I’m going to learn, because the book tells me how. If I had read Starting Strength four years ago when I started weightlifting, I would be a veritable brute by now, and I probably wouldn’t have lost so much time to injuries either. Sigh.

Practical Programming, though, is what is really going to change my life. I have come to a place in training some of the basic compound movements where I just can’t seem to make progress, and I know exactly why. It’s because I’ve never paid much attention to my programming. I just went to the gym, and worked hard at whatever I felt like doing, and that was enough to make me stronger, because that’s how it works for pretty much everyone at the outset. If you’re weak, any kind of physical work will make you stronger. However, after a while it gets a lot harder to make progress–once you’re strong, getting even stronger requires more than just random effort. It requires planning, and to plan properly you need an understanding of why and how the body gets stronger in the first place. That’s what this book is about. Me, I want a 1.5x bodyweight squat, and this book is gonna tell me how to get it. And believe me you, you all will hear about it when it happens.

Massachusetts

I think I'm about ten here...

Well, I made it here. So far I’ve slept some, eaten some, and watched some more Olympics. My dad got me a membership at his gym for my stay here, so I got to experience a mainstream gym the other day. There’s a single piece of equipment that you might be able to label as a squat rack, maybe. It wobbles when I give it a shove. But I used it, and it didn’t collapse, and there’s a place to do pullups, and some space towards the back amid all the useless Nautilus machines where I managed to do deadlifts without arousing the suspicion of the management. I had to go sockfoot though, because I only packed my running shoes and left my lifting shoes at home. Running shoes are too squishy to lift in.

My brother Bryan is here, but I really haven’t seen him very much. Ari is preparing to move into her dorm at UMass Lowell in ten days, and somehow I have been assigned the job of managing the process. Today we did some online shopping and chose various accessories for her bed, and tomorrow I believe I am going to be dragged about in the flesh to select the remainder of what all is thought to be necessary.

This one needs some Photoshop repair...

I got to see my old friend Stacey yesterday, and her new house as well. It’s adorable, built in 1910 and so it has a lot of character. I’m jealous. The way things are going I’ll have my first house when I’m about fifty, I figure.

My aunt Dorothy will be here tomorrow, I haven’t seen her in years. She has celiac disease too, so we always had some solidarity in eating, but apparently now she’s gone vegan. Me, I shoot for about 100 grams of protein a day, so alas, our alliance is dead.

Well, back to the Olympics. Did you know BMX racing was an Olympic event?  What about racewalking?