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.

Cold Thursday

calluses

It thawed a bit today, so I took advantage of the non-frozen roads by going to the gym. I set a new squat PR, at 155 lbs. I probably could have done more, but I was working without a spotter, so I left it at that. It’s moving forward, slowly, but forward nevertheless.

Last night I made more peanut brittle again–this was the third batch. It was over 90% humidity, so I cooked it to about 308 degrees (instead of to 300 as the recipe instructed). It makes me nervous, because it always seems like the butter in the recipe is burning when it gets that hot, but it came out perfect. Nice and crunchy, and good color too. I am also starting to get the hang of testing the sugar syrup by hand using the cold water method. I tested at the “soft crack” stage last night (which is when I add the baking soda and butter), and it separated into pliable threads, exactly like Joy said it would. However, when I tried testing the finished candy at the “hard crack” stage, it just dripped into the water in little gooey droplets and didn’t separate into threads at all. Alas, you win some and you lose some. Nevertheless, the brittle came out great, so now I have some to bring to Christmas, as the previous batch was happily hoovered up by Dave’s party guests.

Brittle number three.

Fall

Sumikins in the warm tent. Don't ever stick your hand in there, cute as she may be, or you're bound to end up bleeding in short order.

Last night the temperature outside dropped to 37 degrees; there’s no denying it’s fall.  It’s 60 in the house right now, in the early afternoon.  I had to set up the little electric blanket for Sumi, tent-style; she’ll pretty much live in there until next summer rolls around.

Today I am working on finishing my AMCAS application.  (That’s the common app.)  This is something I should have been doing for a long time now, but I got stuck.  I got to a section where they give you 15 spaces to describe activities, awards, jobs, and other relevant experiences–things you want med schools to know you’ve done, and that you think make you a more competitive and interesting candidate, basically.  Me, I read it as, what are the fifteen most important things you’ve done in your life?  I pretty much froze, and it’s taken me a while to get back to it.  On some level I feel like I haven’t done enough, I don’t have enough important stuff to put in those blanks.  A crisis of self-doubt, you know.  Happens every now and then.  And once again, I just need to get on with it.

I went to Massachusetts with such good intentions, about getting work done and whatnot, and in the end I just had a complete time warp, and then coming back and getting knocked down by that cold…I kind of lost all momentum.  However, today I am sucking it up and getting on with things.

Yesterday I went to the gym for the first time since I got back, and they’ve moved all the equipment around and put in new floors.  I don’t see that it’s a better arrangement of space, but I imagine they might have done it because the morons dropping the barbells on the Olympic platform were damaging the building, or so they said.  What I see as the most significant problem in that gym–the distinct demarcation and separation of a “women’s area” near the entrance, where the 2-12 lb. free weights are kept, and a “men’s area” at the back of the gym, with 10 and up lb. free weights, still exists.  Not only does this strange arrangement reinforce the idea that it’s appropriate for women to have only a limited and cursory interest in weightlifting (ie, they should stay near the door–and most do), but it’s also pretty inconvenient for us smaller lifters who need to use weights from both areas.

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?

Speaking of…

In the vein of somewhat unusual female athletes at the Olympics, here’s Melanie Roach’s blog–she’s a 33 year old mother of three, and the number one ranked American weightlifter in her (117 lb.) weight class. To give you some perspective, we are about the same size–and while I can squat around 140 lbs., she can back squat an insane 360 lbs. Here’s a video where you can get some idea of just what all she can do (yes that’s double her bodyweight that she’s throwing over her head), and another video piece from the NY Times that’s more biographical in nature.

Form follows function

As an obsessive reader of the New York Times health and science sections, I ran into this article the other day on Olympic swimmer Dara Torres.  She’s been in the media quite a bit lately; as the mother of a two year old and because of her age–she’s 41–she an anomaly in the ranks of teenagers and twentysomethings poised to show the world their stuff in Beijing.  The article–which tries to draw a comparison, and a rather unfavorable one at that, between Torres’ physical appearance and that of an 80 year old broadway actress–is a prime example of just how immaterial, irrelevant, and wrong so much of the media coverage on female athletes is.  As I sputtered to Brian, “But what she looks like is irrelevant–she’s not a swimsuit model, she’s an Olympic athlete!“  Fortunately, a few folks out there in internet-land who are far more eloquent than I am also picked up on this.  Here’s a nice piece over on, strangely enough, the Male Pattern Fitness site (my favorite quote: “To compare [Torres] to an average, diligent exerciser like Parsons isn’t just comparing apples and oranges, it’s comparing apples and nuclear-powered rockets.”), and also a comment from Mistress Krista at Stumptuous.

A minute and a half of toenail chewing

Last night Sumi was far more interested in her toenails than in the chemistry of aromatic compounds and benzene derivatives.

Today's topic

Today, it’s alcohols and ethers at the desk, and pull up day at the gym. I am able to do eight overhand pull ups in a row now, which is one shy of my previous PR, set pre-shoulder injury. Overhand pull ups were more difficult for me to learn than underhand chinups; I think they require more upper back strength, whereas with chinups it’s a lot of bicep.

I have been vaguely considering competing in the next Tactical Strength Challenge, but I think it’s coming up too fast. It’s tempting, where I didn’t do so well in the last one, but on the other hand I know my shoulder just isn’t healed enough for me to do the kind of intensive snatch training I’d need. Next April I will definitely try again though.

I went out back and did a few snatches with my 12 kg kettlebell yesterday–they didn’t feel too bad. The shoulder definitely is healing, but my physical therapist said it’s going to be a six to twelve month recovery, and the more time passes, the more I see she was right.

Squat day

this gym does kind of suck

Today is Monday, commonly known as squat day in my world. I don’t particularly look forward to squat day, but I go to the gym and do it anyway. Why, you ask? Because if you want to get stronger, you must squat. There is no way around it. Most gymgoers don’t squat, or even worse, in my opinion, they load up the bar with a ton of weight and do butt-bobs, little quarter squats, surreptitiously looking around between every set to make sure all the people around them see how much weight they’re moving.

For me, squats are an exercise in discipline, focus, and most of all, perhaps, humility. You see, my squat is one of my worst lifts. At my current bodyweight of 116 lbs, my deadlift PR is 240 lbs, but my squat PR is 140. That’s pretty out of whack. (To be at the same approximate “level” as my deadlift, I’d have to be squatting something more like 180 lbs.) So, my squat sucks. I don’t like doing things that I suck at. Plus, heavy back squats are the single most strenuous movement I have ever come across. A single slow set (I have no speed setting besides slow when it comes to squats) makes me huff and puff like I just sprinted a quarter mile. Plus, they’re technical. Plus, they’re kind of scary. It’s about having all that weight loaded onto your spine, it’s not like you can just drop it easily if something goes wrong. You have to be very, very careful, and as focused as you can be to squat heavy.

I don’t like squatting, but that’s one of the reasons why I do it. Only by practicing will I ever get a not-sucky squat, and that is something I want. So I check my ego at the door, and do what I can as well as I can, because that’s the only way to move forward.