strength work

On Thanksgiving, I went over to my brother’s. When it was getting near time to head home, he handed me a couple of bolts and a 60d nail to try bending.

I sure surprised myself later on when I was able to bend the bolts. They weren’t easy, but I was able to get them kinked and folded up. I haven’t done any bending the past couple of months, but I’ve been building in some more strength with the squatting and overhead pressing. Still, the lats are very important when bending steel, I got reminded of that on the harder efforts I did over the weekend — to get the initial kink of the steel when using overhand or reverse grip, I find that I have to feel my lats pulling my shoulders into place, and it really does seem to help with the transfer of the pressing power into the steel.

My wrists still need to get stronger though. They were complaining a lot last night after doing some more bends of bolts I picked up at Lowe’s. The wrists get a lot of stress trying to remain stable enough to transfer the power of the big muscles working to bend the steel.

The basic plan I want to use the next few months has me lifting 2x a week — a heavy day on Wednesday where I work on performing up around 15 total reps of lifts up over 90% of my one-rep max and a light dynamic day on Sunday where I perform 10 sets of 2 reps with minute rest intervals using a weight that’s 50 to 60% of the one-rep max. Deadlifts will only be done every couple of weeks though. Squats every week, overhead presses and power cleans.

I’ve also begun work on doing natural glute-ham raises, I can put my feet under the bed and right now I just work on trying to hold the negative contraction. I’ve seen some improvement already on how long I can hold and how far I can lean forward before the hamstrings get overwhelmed. I hope that by building the hamstring strength this way it will also help drive up my deadlift. 350 lbs is the goal for 2010.

It’s still almost a strange and foreign feeling having built the strength I’m up to now. All my life, I’ve never felt particularly strong. I was the small kid. The unathletic kid. But now I’ve got a decent amount of strength, especially considering my size.

But I like the feeling of being stronger.

I also like how the woman I love likes that I’m strong.

It’s not always about numbers

I was asked last year if I was ever going to run the marathon distance of 26.2 miles. I answered I was thinking about it and thought maybe that 2010 or 2011 I might invest myself in the training to do it.

My life was about to start changing and I really had no clue, no inkling at all, about how much it was going to start changing and what it would all mean. The first 5 months of 2008 saw me working on raw strength. My running mileage declined and looking at it, one would probably think that if I were going to do a longer distance race for running, it would probably be another half-marathon in Philadelphia in November.

But by the end of May, I had made up my mind that I would try to get in enough training to go 26.2 miles on November 22nd. Early on through June and July, it was looking good as I built up more weekly mileage and got my long run out to a distance of 10 miles. It looked good up until my left foot began hurting badly enough that I had to stop running the first August weekend.

I had to begin resting the foot. The weekend following that my love took the time to assess the function of my legs. Judging by my ability to do various tasks, the verdict was that my left hip was very tight and it needed to be remobilized. I worked on doing so with the exercises she prescribed along with some others I found with internet searches. When I resumed running, it was much slower and I was careful with the foot and how it felt. It gradually improved and I ran up about 67 miles in September.

But it wasn’t really until October that the foot was really feeling good again and the runs started showing improvement in my fitness. I would run a monthly mileage record of more than 107 miles and ran 20.5 miles on a long run on Halloween. I knew I wouldn’t really be able to race the 26.2 miles but that I could get it done and I felt there was a reasonable chance at running it in 5 hours or less.

I was ready, the numbers said I was ready. But it’s not always about numbers. Not just running, but life in general. The first big turning point would come on the next day after Halloween and it wasn’t about what I was able to do. Instead, the woman I love, the one who has run marathons and has run a 50K, all the change that has taken place in her life this year and has affected how much time she has to run and train and rest, she was unable to complete a long run that day. The one who was to lead me along and pull me through the unknown territory beyond 20.5 miles was not ready to do that.

So we agreed to run the half together instead.

During November, I thought maybe I could look forward to a PR in the half-marathon distance. I felt 2:10 or better was a good possibility. I knew my running fitness was its best ever. 13.1 miles had no intimidation factor to it seeing how I had run long runs of 16.4, 18, and 20.5 miles. All I would have to hope for was good weather, good blood sugars, and good feeling legs for November 22nd to beat my PR of 2:16:25.

I had all of those yesterday. The weather was mid 40s and dry. My blood sugars were in perfect position for the race. I was at 76 mg/dL a little prior to the race and I bumped that up with 8 grams of carbohydrate. My finish line blood sugar would be 93 mg/dL so I know I ran the race with a beautiful blood sugar level. And when the race began, and my love and I started running, my legs felt strong, light and fast. I wanted to run hard and fast.

The early congestion and wanting to hold back from starting too fast led to us doing the first 2 miles in 21:42. But there were ominous signs. The first was that I was the one leading the pace, at least so far as much that I would run slightly ahead of my race partner. I would check behind my shoulder to see how she was doing. She was leading in the sense that almost any effort by me to push a bit faster would see that she wasn’t able to follow at the same pace.

It was in the 4th mile that it was becoming apparent I had the racing legs and she didn’t. Over the next 5 miles, I would try various strategies to see if she had anything more to run with, but she really didn’t. Over those miles, at various points, she would urge me to go on and run the race I could possibly run. My answer every time was that she would never leave me behind and I was not going to leave her behind.

The minutes per mile would slowly worsen and we would walk up the hill in mile 10 near Memorial Hall hand-in-hand with one another. I had no regrets in doing so. This wasn’t a race about setting a PR. There was much more and something not about numbers going on. You don’t leave the person you love behind for pursuit of a number that has no real significance except ego and pride.

We would cross the finish line together in a time of 2:33:25. But there’s so much there than any simple unfeeling number.

a few days away now

On Sunday, I will be running my 3rd straight half-marathon in Philadelphia. I have done enough training that I could run the full marathon as super long easy run, but the person that I’ve been planning to do this with had too much real-life interference to get enough training for herself done. We both have enough to run the half together though and that’s what I want more than anything, more than running a marathon.

I’m gonna run 4.1 miles or so this evening after work. Don’t know if I’ll run Saturday or not as a way of saying “Hey legs, be ready to run tomorrow.”

Last night, I did power cleans, standing overhead presses, front and zercher squats. I set a new one-rep max on the standing overhead press with a lift of 125 lbs. I liked the zercher squats, I can see they’re going to be a way for me to squat heavier than with front squats. I can load the bar on top of a couple of sawhorses and use that as good starting position to get myself loaded up with the zercher style.

I definitely want to keep squatting here over the winter time. I need to. The range of motion is different from the deadlift, but I also think that working squats like this should help boost my deadlift as well. I think I’m setting a goal of trying to hit 350 lbs for a deadlift in 2010.

I wonder if I can maintain this schedule where I lift 2x a week and run 3x. I’ve been thinking about that because if am able, I could make the Vermont City Marathon in May a new goal marathon to try to do. If I can maintain good distance on the long runs over the winter, then scale out some longer ones during March and April and early May, I could be in even better running shape for a marathon than I am presently.

They were otherwise ordinary people

Perhaps the experiments I cite below are stunning in showing just how thin of a veneer civilization might be over our human nature. Let’s accept for the moment that civilization and the rules that have evolved are generally positive. We can perhaps take some measure of pride in our gradual advancement of the concept of human rights and human dignity, how we should behave towards others.

Although most stubborn probably about treatment of others is when we create our divisions of groups and our concept of in-group and out-group. History shows us over and over again that those who are considered out-group will not get the benefits that the in-group confers upon its members. Forgiveness, pardons, the benefit of the doubt. Those get tossed out. At its best, the treatment by one group towards another will be something of indifference. At its worst, it can become a pile on, where the in-group reinforces amongst itself that it has privilege, the out-group members have no feelings worth regarding.

The Stanford Prison Experiment shows this behavior. Milgram’s experiment about authority and orders, how it can promote sadism in followers, shows this behavior too.

All of those in those experiments were otherwise ordinary people. People that if you knew them in ordinary life would be non-sadistic. There were likely sadists among them, and the presence of those sadists can be especially reinforcing in certain circumstances. But otherwise there were normally civilized people who showed how human behavior can go all to hell, can go all to hell especially whenever, whenever there is any conception of in-group and out-group.

And the truth is that probably nearly every one of us wants to think that if we look in the mirror at our reflections, it couldn’t happen to us. It couldn’t happen. Just can’t happen.

But it does. And it’s all too easy to gloss it over when we ourselves do it. It’s all too easy to think of someone in the out-group as not deserving of equal treatment. It’s all too easy for members of the in-group to joke about it even. Humor about it like that is not surprising. I still remember when an English professor of mine pointed out how humor is often cruel. Think of chariacature, how it takes a person’s identity and exaggerates it or diminishes it into a grotesque characterization that gives us license to laugh about.

The development of online communications has likely seen a digital resurgence of this behavior. Things that people wouldn’t ever say to real life people are made easier to say with the comfort of physical non-proximity by the others. Online life is almost chariacature at times, in fundamental ways both in-groups and out-groups are almost by default chariacatures composed entirely of their chariacature members. It is so much easier to not to ever have to think that the other person is that — a person, a human being, one with feelings.

Selfishness can rule over everything. It becomes not about communicating, but about indulging in what feels good. Jokes and taunting become all right. Jokes and taunting that most adult human beings grow out of become all right.

We should always be uncomfortable with ourselves and our behavior. Always be uncomfortable when if you look back over your words, you don’t see justification, but only self-justification. There is a difference and it’s a difference we try to teach our children as they’re growing up.

I should not be entirely comfortable with what I said here. There lurks some self-justification in it. I’m just as ordinary as you then.

20 plus

So around a quarter to 8 this morning, I began running. I would for the longest time I’ve ever run and consequently ran the farthest I’ve gone. 20.5 miles.

Blood sugars were much better on this run. I was at 159 mg/dL before starting, I injected 1u of insulin on top of the 2u I had injected 30 minutes before and set out doing the loops. After the first 5 loops, I stopped and checked. Blood sugar had gone up to 169. I feared it getting higher and me getting insulin resistant. I injected another unit. 5 loops later I had dropped to 141. I let it ride. 5 more loops and I was at 96. Time to start using the peanut butter M&Ms. I ate about 3/4 of the pack over the next 5 loops. Blood sugar was at 88 mg/dL. I had 5 loops left. I finished off what remained in the open pack and opened another for a bit more. When I finished, the blood sugar was at 75 mg/dL.

I had also checked my blood ketone level when I woke up today. It was 0.2 mmol/l. At the end of the run, it tested at 0.5 mmol/l. I burned some fat while running today. Here are the splits –

l1 — 9:35
l2 — 9:26
l3 — 9:16
l4 — 9:15
l5 — 9:03 46:35

l6 — 9:19
l7 — 8:47
l8 — 9:00
l9 — 9:11
l10 — 9:07 45:25, 1:32:00

l11 –9:10
l12 — 9:02
l13 — 8:39
l14 — 9:08
l15 — 8:49 44:49, 2:16:49

l16 — 9:03 2:25:52
l17 — 9:04
l18 — 8:46
l19 — 9:04
l20 — 9:10 45:07, 3:01:56

l21 — 9:11
l22 — 9:04 3:20:11
l23 — 9:30
l24 — 8:57
l25 — 9:05 45:47, 3:47:43

My legs didn’t feel too bad by the end. My quads were complaining a bit on the last two loops. If I had wanted to, I could have kept going, but there was no sense in beating my legs thoroughly into submission. Today was enough. I ran well, I ran smart, I managed being a type 1 diabetic while running for almost 4 hours. I did good.

a deal with running should always be negotiable

It’s a good forecast for tomorrow — lows overnight around 50, cloudy tomorrow morning. It should be much more comfortable than the 18 miler of 2 weeks ago.

Last evening, I negotiated the following deal with my legs — I’d run easy for 3.4 miles after running Tuesday and lifting on Wednesday, then I would run 8x.2 mile intervals with full walking recoveries in between.

I ran the 3.4 miles at 10:20 pace. Then the intervals went as follows –

1:22.7
1:18.16
1:23.08
1:18.23
1:20.62
1:16.87
1:17.8
1:11.89

I ran that last one as hard as I could since it was the last one. Guess I was a bit of a slacker on the 3rd one, not sure why that one was so slow.

Tomorrow the goal is to go 20+ miles. I need to make sure I start it off nice and easy, I want to have plenty left to work with when I get up over 18 miles. Hopefully my blood sugars will be in a better range than the 18 miler and I will get to test my fueling strategy again for when I’m running for longer than 2.5 hours.

redemption

Last Wednesday featured a bad fail for my lifting. I guess it wasn’t too bad when I got 7-6-4 on my reps for the power cleans of 120 lbs and I wasn’t too surprised that the overhead presses came up short with 6-3-2, but it was the front squats that said more than anything it was bad. I put the 115 lbs on the bar, cleaned it up to the rack position on my shoulders, squatted down and couldn’t go back up for a single rep. This was after the prior workout where I had done 6-6-4. So anyhow, that’s when I said enough is enough and decided to look forward to how I wouldn’t be lifting over the weekend to come since I would be up in Montreal and without access to a barbell. Plus I just needed some extra rest, that was apparent.

Last night the power cleans succeeded, 8-6-4. I knew I would come up short on overhead presses, this time I got 6-4-3, so a couple more reps than last time. But it was the squat that was scaring me. I knew it was extremely unlikely, but what if it happened again? What if I got to the bottom and couldn’t squat back up?

It was with great relief that after I racked the bar, took a few deep breaths and went down for my first rep, that I came up out of the bottom fairly easy. My glutes and hamstrings started me up and the quads came into play as I got further up. I churned out the reps at a nice steady pace and felt good and solid on all of them. The set of 6 went well too and the set of 4 got done nice and quick.

My legs were rested. My legs were stronger. So next time it’ll be power cleans at 125 lbs, overhead presses of 105 lbs, and front squats of 120 lbs.

—–

Plan to run around 5 miles after work today.

rested again

It felt like I got rested when I ran yesterday. With fewer miles run and only the abbreviated lifting session on Wednesday last week, the legs got time to recover. Yesterday’s run the legs felt strong and light, I was able to run about 10 min/mile pace using 10 minute runs and 1 minute walk intervals with it feeling fairly easy. I picked it up over the last mile and ran that in about 9:10. Then I set about to running 3 half-mile intervals where I took full walking breaks in between.

The first half-mile came in at 3:54.42 which is what I was hoping to see at least. Last year when I ran 800m intervals my best time on any of them was 4:06. The second interval was done in 3:49.15 and I knew that the final one should be even faster. I didn’t look at my watch while running the last one, I just tried to run a bit harder than my perceived effort of the last one, especially a bit harder over the distance between .1 and .3 miles where on the previous intervals I had throttled back some. The third interval came in at 3:41.50. Nice, better than 7:30 min/mile pace.

I’ve been doing that this month, throwing intervals on after a run about 3 to 3.5 miles. It’s given me 7.2 miles of fast running this month in a cumulative time of 51:38.56. The left foot has been feeling fine with it, the soreness is all gone and the tight weird feeling is gone. I can still sense how the foot is a bit different from the right, but it’s much less all the time now.

Tonight the hope is to do much better on my sets and reps for lifting.

Then I’ll run another 5 miles again tomorrow with some intervals for the last 1.5 miles of distance and on Saturday see about going more than 20 miles ever for the first time in my life.

5.8

Got my results for the blood drawn for HbA1c last week, 5.8%. I had thought the couple of tough weeks before the draw might skew me up towards 6%. So the doctor was happy with that result.

—-

I was up in Montreal over the weekend. It was dark and gloomy on Saturday, but I had a good time doing nothing with the woman I love. Sunday was sunny, although very windy. We ran 10 miles together in a park with trails and trees, which helped break up the wind.

I love her now more than ever. It just feels better and better the more I get to know her and the more she knows about me. We don’t always agree but there is never anything venomous in disagreements.

Leaving always sucks though. It seems especially insulting to have to leave the one you love and then go into airport security screening. Yesterday, I got chosen for more thorough inspection, including using the wand metal detector on me and a security official going through my carry on bag and jacket and a pat down search. Yeah, that sucked. But at least I got lucky with my customs official. He looked at my passport, said my name, commented how it’s a bit of tongue twister and I said, “Yeah, it is, but you said it very well.” Then he glanced at my declarations form and sent me through. I wish it was always like that.

crackberry entry

When you’re used to touch typing it’s hard to look to find the keys.