Geezer's Long March Toward the Elite Sneaking Up On the Finish Line

[Mark E. Hurling]

9-18-10

Weight: 221
Jujitsu
Since I have had over a dozen views of this log since I asked for input about including jujitsu and got no negative feedback, I’ll keep including it here, so here goes. I got to work on my own brown belt techniques with a higher ranking brown belt while he worked on his own different techniques while being overseen by a 3rd degree black belt. I got to see some stuff in the techniques he was learning that was entirely new to me, mostly leg locks that I don’t have the flexibility to do or even get put into without serious damage to some tendons, ligaments, and other connective tissues. I did get to learn some new club and knife defenses and disarming techniques. Interestingly, the knife defense techniques are almost identical to the gun techniques. This confirms my theory that guns were treated the same way by the Japanese when an attacker is stupid enough to get too close with one instead of just shooting you from 5+ feet away.

Later: some low intensity cardio and a timed thick bar hold with 185 for 32 seconds. PR! This was too big a jump from 175 not that long ago and henceforth I’ll keep my head out where the sun don’t shine and use smaller increments. I include these because the thick bar is roughly the diameter of most people's wrist. If you are going to grab someone on the body with nothing but the hand it will be there on the wrist. Grabbing clothing is different, as is grabbing elsewher on the body. These are done with wraps of the arms around the body area held not just the hand. Stretched and used the foam roller.

9-19-10

Weight: 220 just a few more to go now.

Deloads are over so it’s back to the salt mines.

5 minute warm up on the stationary bike.

Press: 115x5, 130x5, 150x9. That’s a nice feature of the 5/3/1; it lets you get in some higher reps on the last set. I’m paying for this though, I think, with some tendinitis in my left elbow around the brachioradialus. This has happened before, but not recently. That’s what ice packs are for. I probably had one more rep in me, but I’m going to stick with Wendler’s counsel on this and leave a rep in the tank.

One Arm Dumbbell Row: 85x5, 100x5, 115x9. The dumbbells can accommodate this, but I decided to use a tricep bar so I can get used to the grip and balance for the heavy single week coming up. I’m going for 155 and the dumbbells end at 150. I got lots of odd looks from all and sundry while I was doing this, but then if I let that bother me, I wouldn’t be doing hip belt squats. Now those really flummox people when they see me doing them.

17 minutes of stretching and the foam roller. I wore my heart rate monitor to get a better feel for how maxing out on reps for the last set affected my heart rate. Overall, my average heart rate was 128 bpm over the entire workout which is 75 – 80% of MHR. I had a few spikes of 145 bpm+ which are 90% of MHR for a total of 48 minutes with warm up, lifting, and stretching. This cardiovascular effect I am convinced is entirely overlooked by the carbs and cardio crowd. Weight training to them seems to be an entirely different species of exercise with no crossover value. Of course they’d break in half if they tried to pick up even half of their bodyweight.

[Mark E. Hurling]

9-21-10

Weight: 221

I did a running GXP today, now that I’ve temporarily satisfied my OCD over all subjects cardio lately. Time for some more variety once again.

I suffered the tender mercies of stretching and the foam roller to get out lingering kinks I woke up. Happily, the left elbow tendinitis has abated.

Jujitsu was a study in boys’ blood sugar playing ping pong with their brains in the kids’ class. We have two homeschooled brothers who are pretty good at the techniques, but by the time they get to the YMCA, they are bouncing off the walls with excess energy to burn off. Unfortunately last night their higher brain functions were taking second place, so after warning them a couple times I had to hand out some extra push ups to take the edge off them. They were fine afterward.

We practiced counters to judo throws in the adult class. There are well over half a dozen techniques where the thrower turns their back on their opponent to make the throw. There several counters for this in judo, but since us jujitsu bums don’t have to abide by Kodokan rules, we do some things that are not allowed in sport judo. This takes the form of when the thrower turns their back to you, you deliver a right palm heel strike to the right erector spinae, just above the pelvis. This thrusts their hips forward and their head backward. A throw is impossible for them then, and they in turn are set up for about six variations of throws to their own rear. Of course the lower back is not exactly happy getting this kind of treatment, either from the countering palm heel strike or the hyper lordosis produced with the hips forward and the head waaay backward over the heels. I limped back to my car and home. This is why I refer to jujitsu as forcible realignment of primary bone structures in a non-therapeutic manner when I talk to my despairing but increasingly rich chiropractor.

Weight: 222

Today I have made it to Geezerdom; 60 years old! I wasn’t even certain I’d get to 30 when I was in my 20’s because I was pretty sure I’d succumb to lead poisoning on the job. But here I am; more like Beowulf than Achilles. The latter chose glory over the length of days. Beowulf fought and killed a dragon in his old age. He died afterward too, but then you don’t get something for nothing.

I woke up with my lumbars creaking and complaining all the way to the head. This was not unexpected after last night’s festivities, but I was damned if I was going to beg off lifting today on my big SIX-OH even though it was deadlift day. So I went in to the gym at my usual o-dark 30.

5 minute warm up on the stationary bike.

Sumo Deadlift: 200x5, 230x5, 260x5. Not terribly impressive by the lights of others lifts here, but I’m taking it nice and slow, as Wendler recommends and getting my form dialed in right. With the back sore and my old problems with it, I’ll just continue my long march past 330x1 after several cycles. I stopped at 5 reps on the last set, because I didn’t want to tempt fate and rack myself up by trying a few more to satisfy my already overblown ego.

Claw grip: 127x5x2. 20 minutes total lifting. This was less than I have done before as the result of sloppy inattentiveness to my own record keeping. 132 will be my next attempt.

Foam roller and stretching; 18 minutes.

I wore the heart rate monitor again to check cardio value of this workout. The results were a little less intense compared to Sunday’s session, but I still got 43 minutes of cardio at an average of 120 bpm which worked out to 75% of MHR.

[Oldster]

A very nice PR in your thickbar static hold, OLD man! 60!! Happy Birthday a day late Mark.

What you do is awfully impressive. You are in terrific shape!

I'm glad to see you kept to the workout plan even though it was a big day. A VERY big day. An OLD day.

Not to worry, I'll be there in a couple years.

[Mark E. Hurling]

Thank you Oldster. Not to worry, when you get here we'll have a bench for you by the fireplace. Of course since that's where all the rest of us are sitting too, it might be a little crowded.

9-24-10

Weight: 222

Normally I’d do a GXP for an intense cardio day but since I just kicked up an age bracket notch this week I decided to do a fitness test protocol. I do these on a Precor EFX 576i every few months kind of like testing for a max single. It has a built in heart rate monitor and takes you up a series of increasing resistance steps to get you to 80% of MHR-Age or thereabouts. This has taken anywhere from 14 to 17 minutes with me on any given trial. It then goes into a reverse ramping cool down and gives you a VO2 Max score. I got a 41 this morning, which puts me in the high fitness range. Not bad, since the threshold for a high fitness score in the 60+ age bracket starts at 32. It’s not a wired and tubed instrumented test from the Cooper Clinic, but it’s better than guess and by golly for where you might be in terms of cardiovascular fitness. Stretched and done. Back feels great today.

[Mark E. Hurling]

9-25-10

Weight: 221

Jujitsu: My training partner got hugely red in the face from his high blood pressure while working on takedowns from the ground. I suggested he might want to have a seat for a while and get things back to normal. We worked on some interesting hooks and grabs at the elbow for standing takedowns later in class. It’s really amazing how many parts of the body can be used to get some kind of grip and use to off balance an attacker. If you just think of grabbing clothing, or a gi, you end up with very limited options in terms of defense and counterattack. Our skeletal structure gives us all a number of non-obvious places to use a hooking grip on, like behind the humerus, the back of the skull, underneath the jaw, or under the nose. It’s almost impossible to marshal some resistance to these because the body is not used to developing power or strength from where the hands are placed.

Did some low intensity cardio and stretched later. I added a new illiopsoas stretch that I saw in a link in the Mark Rippetoe Q&A Forum. It was hard, but the back is still doing well. I started taking some Vitamin D last week, and this may be the reason. I’ve seen research that shows it helps with lower back pain and sleep. Both seem better the last several days, so I’ll just keep at it with the D and see. This is what you do when you want to keep going at this age. You try stuff; you improvise, adapt, overcome (thank you Gunny Highway). You learn to buy digital watches with the big numbers on them and you increase the font size to 18 on your Excel spreadsheet that you use for your log in the gym. You do this because you don’t want to sweat and fog up your bifocals while you’re lifting, so you need to have big size numbers in front of you so you can read them without glasses.

9-26-10

Weight: 221. I suppose I shouldn’t grouse given the precipitous drop since I started, but I think some of the food and drink aspects of my celebration of b-day LX may have stalled me a little here.

5 minute warm up on the bike.

Bench Press: 155x5, 180x5, 200x9.
Chin Up: -80x5, -50x5, -30x7.

While I was lifting then I remembered a vignette from my 40’s in the gym. It was a Saturday morning and a guy in his early 20’s came over while I was benching and asked to work in. Since I was still warming up, no problem. He probably should have still been in bed because he was pissing and moaning about how bad he felt. I don’t doubt it either, because when he asked for a spot (with 135 pounds!) I had to breathe the fumes of his hops poisoning from the night before that were filtering upward from the bar.

“God this is hard! It’s not like it was when I was in college!” He was wheezing away.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“23.”

“Are you married, do you have kids, are you working?” The answers were; no, no, and yes but living at home.

“Tell you what kid, I’m 43, I have a wife, I have a kid, and I have a mortgage. When you can get your tired old ass to the gym on a Saturday morning like I did today you can tell me how hard this is. Hell, I’d be surprised if you even know where a gym is when you hit 35. Now grab that 45 over there and put it on the other end of the bar, I’m done with my warm ups.”

So here I am, over 15 years later and still banging away at this stuff. Rust never sleeps.

[Oldster]

Great work there, Old Timer!

Good to see you bangin' away now that you are OVER 60.....!! hehehehe!

Good story about the kid. While I've never lifted in a commercial gym, few places but my own home gym, I've also had my run ins with the youngers. Back in my late 40's I was asked by a couple youngsters in their early 20's if they could come check out my garage gym and maybe get some lifting in. After a couple weeks of lifting and answering their questions they started razzing me on the rest time between my heavy squats and benches. I challenged them to just 'do what I do' but within their own limits. 1 workout. That's all they lasted. In fact, they didn't even finish due to exhaustion. And they never came back. Far as I can tell, neither of them lift anymore.

[Mark E. Hurling]

I don't want to turn this into a "dumb asses and dumb shit I've seen at gyms" narrative, but man, there are some of the most incredibly ignorant people and actions I've seen there. I am confident in my younger days I fit that category pretty well myself a time or two.

[Mark E. Hurling]

9-28-10

Weight: 221

I couldn’t sleep much last night because of the heat wave here in Southern California. It’s been a cool summer with a thick marine layer so the 110+ inland temps and 89 by the beach where I live just drained me because I have had no opportunity for acclimatization. I know compared to the rest of the US we’ve been cut a big break with the heat. I just lay in bed and soaked both sides of my pillow with sweat last night. I’m one the walking dead today so I blew off cardio this morning and will do the same with jujitsu tonight. I can hardly keep my eyes at better than half mast just now. I freely confess to being a wuss when it comes to the heat. My back still feels OK, but my chest is tight, probably from the bench presses on Sunday.

9-29-10

Weight: 221

It cooled off a little so sleep was better.

5 minute warm up on the bike.

Hip Belt Squats: 150x5, 170x5, 195x7. I had a few more reps left in me for this last set, but by then I was sweating so heavily that the hip belt was slipping down and I was afraid it just might slide down right past my big ass. I’ll cinch the belt tighter next time, but I think all the sweat wicking through on my hiking shorts next to the cordura nylon hip belt reduced normal friction enough to cause this problem.

Power Clean: 115x5, 130x5, 145x8

Pinch Grip: 135 for 30 seconds, PR!

The usual roll and stretching routine to keep Mr. Lumbars happy.

Jujitsu tonight; we need all the adult supervision we can get to keep a handle on the large kid’s class on Wednesday nights. Kids were full of energy and listened well but somehow came completely unglued at the end of class when they lined up to bow off the mat. Absolute chaos occurred then. It took three of us to pick them up bodily and sort them out like chess pieces.

The eight LAPD explorers showed up again tonight. These kids really listen well for high school age teens. Of course they are not a typical teen population and are already accustomed to self and external discipline for years by the Scouts and the cops. They were particularly attentive when we worked on come-alongs and extractions where you bend fingers and elbows in directions God didn’t intend for them to go. The kid I was working with said he’d seen miscreants at the station he did his time at that needed to be waltzed into or out of cells. There’s nothing like seeing immediate application to sharpen the focus. An old Japanese guy got up from his chair outside and walked over to the window to get a better look at what we were doing. That’s always a sure sign that we have passed beyond the commonplace in our techniques. It’s funny to write “an old Japanese guy” when you’re 60, he was probably less than 10 years older than me. Some of the extractions get you up and on your toes in a vain attempt to relieve the shear forces and pain. In my case, it must have made me also arch my back, because the lumbars are giving me some grief this morning. Unfortunate, but worth the price to get kids moving along the road to some public service that will do more than just empty speechifying about hope and change to organize the community into something livable.

[Mark E. Hurling]

10-01-10

Weight: 222. Dang, not only am I stalled, but a bump up. Maybe this is just stabilizing of fluctuating hydration. Have to grit my teeth and stay focused on getting to 219 in the next lower weight class.

I did a running GXP this morning in defiance of my creaky back. The pounding impact from the running never makes it happy, but I decided this added discomfort would be part of my penance for stalling on the weight loss. I overslept, so I did my usual rolling and abbreviated my normal stretching routine to just the lower back and hamstrings so I could get to work in something like on time.

[johnreynolds]

Hi Mark, If you're running then you still have body parts that haven't fallen off yet ! I stopped running 5 years ago
when my arthritis in my knee flared up. I wish I would have stopped 20 years ago and saved all that wear & tear on the knee.