Stuffed Superdud: Bumpy road to respectable lifting

[anniemichael]

that living art festival in Laguna Beach

I've watched that series start to finish at least 5 times, with different people, and my favorite is getting to those episodes and going "hey so that is actually a real thing, fun fact." My husband was actually in it as a kid. "Pageant of the Masters."

A former colleague of mine lived in a dumpy building in Costa Mesa on 17th and.......Placentia?.....and I always liked visiting him there on our way down to Balboa. On my first visit, he went, "Yea I like living here. Cheap, good food, maybe the only part of OC that actually has some culture. But it's just here; most of this city is actually a big pile of the most uncool white people you'll ever meet."

"big pile of the most uncool white people you'll ever meet" should be Orange County's slogan.

Placentia, yes -- the street that I mispronounced frequently as a child, much to my parents' dismay. I left out that crucial "i"...

[stuffedsuperdud]

I've watched that series start to finish at least 5 times, with different people, and my favorite is getting to those episodes and going "hey so that is actually a real thing, fun fact." My husband was actually in it as a kid. "Pageant of the Masters."

Oh yea. And don't forget that the Bluth Company is just a funnier, more incompetent version of the Irvine Company.

"big pile of the most uncool white people you'll ever meet" should be Orange County's slogan.

Heh. Yea I figured this out when my mom came down to visit once. I figured LA was way too dicey for a chronically anxious middle-aged woman so we did a Tour de OC instead, and she commented that she wouldn't mind retiring to Mission Viejo. I lived in Laguna Niguel briefly and thought I was going to die, if not from boredom, then from starvation, as the only source food, the local Albertsons, would close at like 7:30PM.


Training:
Welcome to Suckdickistan, everyone. Coach had to adjust my program due to my missed days, and now my conditioning block is mixing slightly into the strength block. I stayed at work too late and was dehydrated from the lack of water and excess of coffee, and started cramping up almost immediately; the left groin was particularly annoyed. I did:

No feet snatch from knees:
40kgx3
50x3
60x3
70x1,2

Groin was making me hesitate going down. Cut it off here and did:

Snatch high pulls:
80x3
90x3

Snatch deadlift:
110x3
140x3
150x2
160x2

Goal was to establish a 2RM for use in the strength cycle. The rules are to make jumps until technique deviates from the actual snatch motion. 160 felt okay but the coach saw that while my low back was straight, my chest was staring to drop, so I got cut off here. Now to make sure my groin didn't die.

I had to take another Mad Men break because I hate too many of the characters. Switched to Hinterland and oh wow this is good. Any of you guys watching it? For the unacquainted, it's a noirish show from Wales (yes! Wales!) with the same dreary gloom that defined The Killing, one of my favorite shows of all time, only minus the semi-realtime gimmick. Amazing what they were able to do with a tiny budget, and it's kind of neat that each scene was filmed twice, once in English and once in Welsh....not sure why they did that though; Welsh is the craziest language ever and us non-speakers should just have to put up and read English subtitles. Like this:



That'd be 1000x better than the alternative anyway, that is, no one should ever have to listen to English while trying to read something as keyboardmashy as "Rhagflas estyngedig o gyfres dditectif newydd Y Gwyll. Yn dechrau ar S4C 29 Hydref 2013."

[idlehands]

Oh yea. And don't forget that the Bluth Company is just a funnier, more incompetent version of the Irvine Company.



Heh. Yea I figured this out when my mom came down to visit once. I figured LA was way too dicey for a chronically anxious middle-aged woman so we did a Tour de OC instead, and she commented that she wouldn't mind retiring to Mission Viejo. I lived in Laguna Niguel briefly and thought I was going to die, if not from boredom, then from starvation, as the only source food, the local Albertsons, would close at like 7:30PM.


Training:
Welcome to Suckdickistan, everyone. Coach had to adjust my program due to my missed days, and now my conditioning block is mixing slightly into the strength block. I stayed at work too late and was dehydrated from the lack of water and excess of coffee, and started cramping up almost immediately; the left groin was particularly annoyed. I did:

No feet snatch from knees:
40kgx3
50x3
60x3
70x1,2

Groin was making me hesitate going down. Cut it off here and did:

Snatch high pulls:
80x3
90x3

Snatch deadlift:
110x3
140x3
150x2
160x2

Goal was to establish a 2RM for use in the strength cycle. The rules are to make jumps until technique deviates from the actual snatch motion. 160 felt okay but the coach saw that while my low back was straight, my chest was staring to drop, so I got cut off here. Now to make sure my groin didn't die.

I had to take another Mad Men break because I hate too many of the characters. Switched to Hinterland and oh wow this is good. Any of you guys watching it? For the unacquainted, it's a noirish show from Wales (yes! Wales!) with the same dreary gloom that defined The Killing, one of my favorite shows of all time, only minus the semi-realtime gimmick. Amazing what they were able to do with a tiny budget, and it's kind of neat that each scene was filmed twice, once in English and once in Welsh....not sure why they did that though; Welsh is the craziest language ever and us non-speakers should just have to put up and read English subtitles. Like this:



That'd be 1000x better than the alternative anyway, that is, no one should ever have to listen to English while trying to read something as keyboardmashy as "Rhagflas estyngedig o gyfres dditectif newydd Y Gwyll. Yn dechrau ar S4C 29 Hydref 2013."

Go watch utopia. Bbc.

[stuffedsuperdud]

On it. Ian McDiarmid is on it??! Always good to see Palpatine cameos.

Training...sucked:

Power jerk WUT?
40kgx5
50x5
60x5
70x5

Squat:
80x5
100x5
140x5
150x5
155x5
140x5

Assload of ankle mobbing. I also did a band distraction elbow exercise for that janky right elbow that yielded a crazy test-retest improvement. But the effect only lasted about 10 minutes. Guess I'll add this to the list of things I'm doing for the rest of my life...

Bought cheap whisky. Anyone ever try the fakey McClelland's brand? They're not a real distillery; they just put their label on 2nd tier products of other distilleries. Their Islay whisky? It's just an underaged Bowmore, which itself is one of my less preferred Islays. Beats sucking down Johnny Walker, sure, but only barely. Lagavulin costs $105 a bottle here. WTFF? the extra F is for fuckity.

[Simon Rest]

Snatch deadlift:
110x3
140x3
150x2
160x2

Goal was to establish a 2RM for use in the strength cycle. The rules are to make jumps until technique deviates from the actual snatch motion. 160 felt okay but the coach saw that while my low back was straight, my chest was staring to drop, so I got cut off here. Now to make sure my groin didn't die.

do you use the same grip as your snatch, or just any grip outside the rings for these?

[stuffedsuperdud]

Yes, everything is identical to the actual snatch. Well, except that the barbell is obnoxiously heavy and upward velocity approaches zero as I stand up. IIRC I did something like 160+ for a set of 5 or so a few months ago, but the last few reps looked nothing like an actual snatch first pull, whereas here they're pretty strict about technique. Even deadlifts are to be done strictly with low hips and a big chest, as if we're about to clean it, instead of the ugly grinders you see in PL meets. I'm not sure I am 100% onboard with the idea, because the slow lifts are meant to be a strength builder so we should just go as heavy as possible and allow for some technique slop, right? But I'm openminded, and it's again very similar to what the LSUS folks do on their way to tons of data points of success, so why not?

[Chris McCarthy]

I think it's preparing you to snatch 160 rather than just deadlift it.

[idlehands]

Fincher was gonna redo utopia for HBO but he wanted more budget than they would allow so they nixed. Watch it. I need someone to geek out. That show is like nothing out there. The music the characters and the lighting. Stressed me out.

[Erok]

Bought cheap whisky. Anyone ever try the fakey McClelland's brand? They're not a real distillery; they just put their label on 2nd tier products of other distilleries. Their Islay whisky? It's just an underaged Bowmore, which itself is one of my less preferred Islays. Beats sucking down Johnny Walker, sure, but only barely. Lagavulin costs $105 a bottle here. WTFF? the extra F is for fuckity.

I was just browsing scotches yesterday (payday!), and also came across McClellan. I immediately found it odd that they had Highland, Lowland, Speyside, and Islay, all color-coded and ready to go. How can one place do all that?

Lagavulin is $99.99 here. Still haven't pulled the trigger on it (probably wait for my birthday). I went with Eagle Rare, plus an airline bottle of Knob Creek 100.

[stuffedsuperdud]

Ugh not even in my glorious adopted state of Wisconsin can one catch a break? It's bad enough Allen Edmonds prices have been creeping up steadily... I hear that's because Gucci and Prada and LVMH are buying up whole tanneries more than anything else, and unlike the whisky issue, their customers are pretty much THE establishment couldn't possibly be less hipster, but still. Both ends with me not getting what I want and I can't deal with that. Uh...fuck Europe?

Training:
These mornings-only weekend hours are starting to become a bit of an issue for me. Got to the gym with only 45 minute to spare, so all I had time for was:

Snatch push press + OHS 2+2

40kgx1
50x1
60x1
70x1
80x1

supersetted with

Snatch balance:
40x3
50x3
60x3x2

and then more mobbing of the right ankle and elbow.

Hey, check this out:

thetrad.blogspot.com

It's ostensibly a blog about preppy / Ivy-style menswear, but really it's an informal memoir about the author's childhood growing up in NC while his Green Beret dad led an A-team in Vietnam, his own time as an infantryman a decade later including a funny part where he washed out of the Q course, his marriage and subsequent divorce, etc. It's a nice balance of everyman tales and stories unique to an Army brat / soldier / clothes horse. At one point in the 1980s he lived about a block away from where I am now, and paid more in rent than I did for a smaller place, which I found kind of amusing. The Green Beret dad also weighs in every so often in the comments section of the earlier posts (he died a few years ago it seems), which offers a fun counterperspective.