mightstone2k

I be jealous. Yours was longer. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Good solution on the judo. Small steps. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Thanks! I like the aesthetic of simple and clean. Separating the things with actual dates attached and just things that need to be done that month is something that I was never able to do in a way I liked with traditional planners. Seeing this in Ryder's tutorial made so much sense to me. The key is setting aside time on the last day of the month to migrate. That's one commitment I've made to myself that's worked out so far this year.

The Rainbow Bridge is one of the most recognizable landmarks of Tokyo. It connects mainland Tokyo with Odaiba, a man-made island in Tokyo Bay. It is open to vehicle and pedestrian traffic, so it's possible to walk across the bridge and enjoy a stunning view of Tokyo Bay and the Tokyo skyline. It is also possible to drive across the bridge in a go-kart that hits 70+ kph. Wearing a Stitch onesie. Yep. That was totally a thing that happened yesterday. The office did MariCar as a going-away for two of our attorneys, and it was a blast. Those go-karts can move. And they are super low to the ground, and have no suspension. They are completely street legal. We were driving all over downtown Tokyo in them, past police officers and everything, and no one stopped us. Plenty of people stopped to take pictures and wave, and we had a great time waving at cars and posing for pedestrian pictures while we were stopped at lights. We also came close to photobombing a J-pop girl band at Odaiba, but they piled back into their limousine before we got close enough to see if they wanted to take a group picture. There were a few times that Yoshi and I got cut off from the group. We were the tail of our column, so a few drivers decided they wanted to move into our lane in the midst of our group. Unfortunately, red shells were not an option. But we were able to reform and continue on. After everyone got back - with no injuries or deaths! - a few of us went out for drinks and dinner. I got lucky on cider last night. We started at the Tap Stand in Shinjuku, which had Schilling's Lumberjack cider. After that, we went to an okonomiyaki place in Harajuku, followed by after-dinner drinks at the PDX Taproom, which has ten drinks on tap, all of which are Oregon-made. They had Reverend Nat's Sacrilege Sour Cherry cider, which was fantastic. I really enjoy hard ciders that use fruits other than apple, and cherry is one of my favorites. So that was MariCar. This morning I woke up and hit the gym for 5x32L/R OHS and 5x32 R/L TGU. It's time for me to start thinking about flipping the crazy switch now. My working weight is clearly 32 kg, so I can't run from it any more. Perhaps tomorrow I'll do it? I'll read the book this afternoon and figure it out. Now for the drool talk. Tonight I'm cooking a double recipe of West African chicken stew, and tomorrow morning I'll start Thai yellow curry before going in to the gym and reading at mass. They didn't have brisket, so I got flank steak for the curry instead. Tomorrow is going to be a bit of a day. I need to start the curry, then hit the gym, then read at 0900 mass, then I'm nipping in to work so I can get caught up on tax stuff. My NCOIC left for her new assignment, so it's all on me now. I need a day where I can burrow down without distractions, so tomorrow will be it. There will be a slight break in there for lunch. One of our soon-to-depart attorneys and I are trying a new ramen place for lunch tomorrow. Oh noes, the gluten! Meh. My Paleo life is a little loose, living here in Japan. I refuse to let food rules dominate my life, especially when I have the opportunity to try a new culture's food. Granted, I'm not going out of my way to get gyoza or noodles all the time. But a mindful enjoyment on occasion will not cause me any grief or guilt. Rule of 3 for 4-10 June 1. Read to page 391 in volume 3 of the Civil War. I am at page 243 currently. It may seem a bit short, to only shoot for 148 pages. But my new role at work tends to keep me a bit later in the evening. The smart call is to adjust fire on the reading goal and see how I do. 2. Identify the missing parts for the light drive ring. This is the component I forgot to build for Serenity, and I am missing parts. The set looks complete without it, but my inner perfectionist rebels at the notion of leaving it alone. The need to figure out what parts I'm missing has been something I knew I needed to do for at least a month now, so let's get it done. 3. Get measured for the tux. Let's get this thing done early in the month. ALL HAIL THE WISDOMANCER!!! In all seriousness, I appreciate this sentiment. Wisdom has always made the most sense to me in terms of D&D attributes applied to real life. I'd rather have wisdom than intelligence, say. Although I wouldn't say no to both... So... none of that? Yeah, being done with the PFT for a year is pretty awesome. I can spend eleven months getting down with the kettlebells before I need to concern myself with preparing for the test again. Definitely gonna hit Simple in that time, and either make legit progress toward Sinister or start working toward something else, like the pressing and snatch test goals. Or hell, even start developing bodyweight strength. The world is my oyster, and my goal is to crush the shell with my bare hand.

That prospective student sounds like so much fun to play with! People like him made me happy when I was still training regularly. No, I'm not a masochist in my martial arts. I was the class enforcer [emoji48] people that were being colossal dicks got to play with me, and my instructor let me do as I please (within reasonable limits). Which meant more hitting more harder. Thems were the days. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Here's my very spartan monthly spread and sample of my daily logs: Like I said, I wish I had more creative/artistic tendencies and could thwock a few awesome designs in there. That was never my strong suit. Next year I think I'll switch to a dot grid instead of lined. I just happened to have this one sitting around.

Heh. They keep getting quoted in articles - and Federalist quotes are common in constitutional law opinions - so I feel like I'm not a real lawyer unless I read and understand them. It would be like not knowing Palsgraf and claiming to be a personal injury lawyer. Gotta build my street cred. Training yesterday: Swings: 2x32L/R, 6x32T TGU: 3x32R/L The blisters on my right hand felt like they were ... pulling, I guess, on one-handed swings. Mindful of the torn palm and subsequent uselessness of my right hand when I was in Florida, I switched over to two-hand swings. If torn skin on the palm is bad, torn skin at the base of the fingers probably isn't any better. TGU was just a case of me not being present mentally. Better to stop than to press on and practice badly. This morning was not intended to be a day of rest, but that's what it became. Tomorrow's SFG session is "not a smoker," as he put it, so I planned to train hard this morning and have tomorrow be a light day. Well, life happened and the SFG had to postpone. I finished my cup of coffee at 0530, sat here for a few minutes reflecting on how I felt, and decided that I just needed a slow morning. So I made another cup of coffee and opted not to train today. The office is shutting down so we can go into Tokyo and do MariCar for a going-away. Driving a go-kart through the streets of a major metropolitan area counts as exercise, right?

You talked a lot about head alignment with the trainer? *giggle* Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Concerned with appearance too much, you are. All that matters, tasty deliciousness is. Send empanadas to Japan, you must. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Heh. I've been here in Battle Log Land. I fell off the challenge wagon pretty early in my NF career. I have a thing for consolidation. Keeping everything in one place makes reference and continuity vastly simpler. I even started tracking my training sessions in my BuJo instead of keeping a separate training log. If you want to do a Federalist discussion group/PvP, I'd be on board. Maybe that will spur me into reading that through to completion. I was a constitutional law junkie in law school, and political philosophy is growing on me as an actual interest, as opposed to a thing that I "should" know.

Hardstyle does teach punching through on snatches. Swings don't come high enough for punching through to come into play (none of this above the head swinging!). But I cannot tell you for sure what they teach about where to grip. The book (p 24) simply says, "hook the kettlebell handle with your fingers, but do not grip it tightly." I just defaulted to a full-hand grip, which means centering it in the middle and ring fingers. I don't like training with headphones, so it's rare that I play music in the gym. The fact that I fired it up yesterday says a lot >< Well, May was a month. Not the worst I've ever experienced, but hardly the best. Let's start with the Rule of 3 recap. Run individual Tax Center reports (completed 4 May) Hike Mito-san Read Federalist 7-16 I sat down and knocked those reports out early. Setting that as a goal was a very productive way to get it done. It was first on my list and first in my mind when May rolled around. And, thankfully, I had the room to bear down on it early in the month. There was some benefit to my short stint in the obscure office. Mito-san was a binary goal: do or do not. I did not. I was taking it easy during the first half of the month because of my PFT. After that, I had Cassie coming in, so I planned to do it Memorial Day weekend. The Spartan put paid to that idea. I was too whipped Monday and Tuesday. No big deal. I'll knock it out this month some time. As for the Federalist, I read six of the ten essays, including the rather meaty Federalist 10 (on the dangers of faction). That was a failure of choice. I could have accomplished the goal had I prioritized reading it. I did not, so I did not accomplish the goal. Lesson learned. I had great success when I made reading The Civil War a weekly goal, so perhaps that is the takeaway from this. A weekly goal of reading two Federalist Papers may be more fruitful than a monthly goal of reading ten. Outside of the Rule of 3, other things of import happened. The most obvious of them was the PFT (obvious to anyone who read my kvetching for the first half of the month). I'm happy to say that I passed with a 90.8, which is enough to give me a year until I must retest. After that, I was able to get back to my kettlebell training. And the time away - combined with the mental simplicity of PFT training, coupled with its successful result - gave me room to refocus. I'm not here to work out. I'm here to practice. Practice swings and Turkish get-ups until I can perform the moves virtuously. Strength will follow, as will the Simple goal. I'm not in a rush to add loaded carries, a weekly run, or greasing the groove with one-arm pushups. Not yet. I meet with an SFG Saturday for an expert's eye on my two practice techniques. As an aside, my training today was very similar to yesterday. Same volume, less primal. Personally, the month was not awesome. My week as a host was less relaxing and more fraught. I spent Monday and Tuesday emotionally exhausted and running around in circles in my head (to no avail, naturally). No answers, lots of questions, and no way to answer them without either taking a leap or maintaining the status quo. And I'm not sure what the right answer is. Yes, that's deliberately vague. I'm not quite comfortable looking at the issue any more directly than from the corner of my eye, because I don't really want to make a decision. I dunno. Life is short, and nothing is guaranteed, particularly not the future. And choices have consequences. Long term consequences, often with unforeseen downstream effects. And I don't want to do all my thinking "out loud." If I do that, I have to really think about things in order to put something coherent in writing. I really just want to unplug for a week or two. Go to work and be an officer/attorney, practice at the gym, cook lots, and get out on the weekends to do things, all without having to worry about being tied to US time zones (or FaceTime, or texting, or anything). Eh. Looking ahead to June, the Rule of 3 is fairly simple: Finish reading The Civil War: A Narrative - Red River to Appomattox (the third and final volume). I'm in the home stretch of the war, even if the Confederacy and Union don't know it yet. So let's get this done. I made this a monthly goal before having my eureka moment about the relative success of weekly v. monthly reading goals. I may spend one goal each week on reading benchmarks for this. Upload my tux measurements. I'm a ... bridesman? for one of my best friend's from law school in September. It's a lesbian couple, which is downright fascinating for me to consider (I try to keep my views under wraps on here because ain't no one here for that (including me), but it's fair to say I'm generally conservative). It was a running joke between us that the Catholic boy and Jewish lesbian turned out to be BFFs (and roommates as 3Ls). Now I'm in their wedding, in some capacity. I'm still not clear on what capacity, precisely, because despite her explaining Jewish wedding customs, I'm not sure what role an unrelated non-Jew plays in the ceremony. Other than attendee, of course. All that aside, I am apparently a bridesman and thus must get measured for a tux and send the measurements to the place she's renting from this month, since I can't attend the group fitting next weekend. Research Fuji climbing. I plan to tackle Fuji-san on Independence Day weekend. I have a month to research what I need and what dangers and difficulties I'll face, and to prepare for them. I will hike Fuji-san once, and I will succeed. From what I've heard, doing it twice is a very special form of masochism. I will now go upstairs and read. The pizza spaghetti pie turned out quite well. Prepping it ahead made things real easy tonight. I just came home, popped it in the oven, and puttered around getting things in order for tomorrow. One hour later, deliciousness.

Creativity is my weak point. I have the basics: index, future log, month-at-a-glance, monthly to-do, and daily logs. But it's all very spartan, with just the notation used in Ryder's basic guide. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Where does this exist? I must own it. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Training went really well today. The gym was basically empty, and I trained down in the pit while the only other people there - an exercise class - trained in the open area. 5x32L/R OHS and 5x32R/L TGU. Easy peasy on the grip. They had uninspiring pop music playing, and I was training angry. Well, twitchy and nerved up. I finally kicked on The Devil and the Huntsman to drown out their playlist and tapped into my primal side. Rawr. I ate exactly nothing that I cooked today. I bought sushi at the commissary for lunch after going in to clear out my email, and had no motivation to cook dinner when the time rolled around for my stomach to start gnawing at me. So I went back to the commissary and bought a half chicken and potato wedges. I just finished prepping the pizza spaghetti pie, which I will let sit in the refrigerator overnight. I'll bake it tomorrow after work. Tonight it's just Tombstone. Early morning training session tomorrow and back to work. Happy belated Memorial Day to all of you back in the US.

Haha this was my first Spartan. It was a lot more obstacles than running, which I liked. Heavy swings are exactly that. One-hand swings call for far more grip strength than two-hand. And when I say "heavy," I'm talking 32 kg. At least, that's my current definition of heavy [emoji1] Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Spartan Sprint Tokyo 2017 @Oramac I know you are an OCRaholic, so you might find some amusement in this. And if you haven't started your season yet, here's something to whet your whistle. This year was the first ever Spartan Race held in Japan. One of my coworkers tipped me off about it, and we ran it: twenty-two obstacles packed into seven kilometers. Our wave went off at 11:00. Our third teammate hadn't run in a while, so we walked a lot of the course, finishing in 1:20. I successfully completed twenty of the twenty-two obstacles. I'll try to keep my thoughts on the obstacles in the order we completed them, and sum everything up at the end. Over-Under-Through (O.U.T.) - fairly straightforward. You go over the first wall, under the second, and through a hole in the middle of the third. This was merely a way to loosen up for what was to come. Monkey bars - also fairly straightforward. Traverse the bars and ring the bell at the end. The bars were widely spaced, and the one in the middle was six inches higher than the others. Completed no problem. This obstacle set a personal tone for the rest of the course. Unlike my Mudders of yore, grip strength was not a weakness. Barbed wire crawl - bastards. The crawl was a long horseshoe curve, so it took a while. The first bit was okay, but the vast majority was on rocky terrain. A lot of people came out scraped and beaten. I suspect this is what caused the gnarly scrape on my right ankle. I used my hands for most of the crawling instead of my elbows, largely to avoid the pain. After a while, I switched to the barrel roll approach, which worked wonders. Actually, at the moment, I'm not in much of a mood to expound on each of the obstacles. Let's leave it at what follows. I was shocked at how freaking incredible my grip has become. I completed the Traverse Wall, the Bucket Brigade, and the Rope Climb (despite not climbing a rope previously) thanks to a freakishly strong grip that could last what felt like forever. Heavy swings for the win. What I learned was that (1) I should wear long-sleeve and long pant compression gear to leave less exposed skin; (2) I should wear a hat or other top-of-head protection; and (3) I should wear trail running shoes, not VFFs. My feet were the only part of me that got really beaten up (along with a very sunburnt top of my head). My two teammates with shoes didn't have that problem, and they said the mud and water didn't weigh them down very much at all. This was not a Mudder, where there is mid-shin mud all over the course. Spartan Super coming up in October. Not sure if they are doing a Beast here or not, but if they are... Trifecta, here I come.

I read your post about halfway through last week - I think - and gave it a shot during the next day's training session. The swings felt really easy, strangely enough. I cannot remember quite how I was gripping it, but I know my index finger was more involved. Thanks for the tip. As for notation, I write "sets x weight." The underlying assumption is that each set is the appropriate number of reps prescribed for S&S: swings are ten reps and TGUs are one. Since I'm doing an equal number of sets per side, I mark that by "L/R" or "R/L," depending on which hand did the first rep. I start with my stronger side on swings, and my less strong side on TGU, hence why the L and R switch. So one set of swings per arm with the 32 kg bell is notated as "1x32L/R" (which means I did the left hand first). There is rest between the left and right sides. A full swing session is notated as 5x32L/R - ten sets of ten swings with the 32 kg bell, equally divided between the left and right side. Two-handed swings are noted with a T. Each practice session usually involves 100 swings and 10 TGU. Now that is interesting. Hm. There could be an experiment in here somewhere. And now for my recap, I suppose. I'll do my week in review in this post, then do a separate post detailing the Spartan. I cooked the curried egg salad and broccoli salad that I posted a few weeks back. The egg salad was really good. The broccoli salad was okay. It was tasty, but not fantastic. I'd make it again though. I also made my chili cornbread casserole (on request) and a Thai chicken curry. That curry was awesome. I love using kabocha squash in stews because it really thickens up the broth and adds a hint of sweetness to it. This week I'm making three things. First, the V8 chili is coming back (in fact, it's simmering on the stove as I type this). I had enough V8, tomatoes, and spices for it, so I figured I'd bring it out again. This time I replaced the carrots with a butternut squash and a pound of beef with turkey. And I am probably not going to add spinach because that's a mighty full pot. Tomorrow I'm making pizza spaghetti pie with homemade pizza sauce. And I'm going to make these protein bars for preworkout snacks either tonight or tomorrow. Honestly, they seem more like energy bars than protein bars. I'm guessing maybe 10-12 grams of protein per bar if I cut it down to twelve bars as suggested. That's a spitball, not something I got from MFP or anything. It'll be a fun experiment. As for the week's exertions: Sunday - swings: 5x32L/R. TGU: 5x32R/L Monday - swings: 5x32L/R. TGU: 5x32R/L Tuesday - 16 km hike up Hinodeyama and on to Mitakesan. That was some brutal shiznit. Lots of incline up to Mt Konpira, then we traversed for a while along the Konpira Ridge before hitting more brutal incline up Hinodeyama itself. Wednesday - rest Thursday - swings: 5x32L/R. TGU: 5x32R/L Friday - swings: 1x32L, 9x32T. TGU: 5x32R/L. My grip was terrible today. It felt like the handle was literally stuck to my hand, and I could barely generate any power from my hip snap. Or I couldn't transfer it properly. Either way, I could barely pop the bell up to my navel. So I stopped and switched to two-handed swings. This was not a day where I wanted to fight to get one-handed swings to work and frustrate myself if I failed. Saturday - Spartan Sprint. See write-up in next post. Sunday - rest Monday (today) - the 32 kg bell felt heavy just carrying it out, so I took today as a light day per the book. Swings: 10x24T shadow swings (high-speed eccentrics). TGU: 3x24R/L with a 10 second pause at each step. Today I went in to the Pokemon store. It was basically a ton of stuffed animals, trading card game paraphenalia, and kitschy stuff. More or less what I imagined it would be, but now I can say I've been. There was no Arcanine swag, but it's the place to go if you're a fan of the Eeveelutions. Those were all over the place.

Yes, it is. See the "Roll to Elbow" bullet here (http://www.strongfirst.com/solid-simple-sinister/). I don't recall offhand if this is also said in S&S the book, so I can't quote chapter and verse to you. But Pavel Macek is a respected authority on the SF boards (with a first name like that, he must know his stuff), and the SFG out here told me to read this article before we met up, so it's fairly authoritative. Dumbbells would require perfect vertical because of the way the weight is distributed. It's equally distributed smack on top of your arm. A kettlebell is not. It sits off-center, so your arm must hit an angle that allows the bell's center of mass to be balanced correctly. I'm not 100% sure where that point is - right over your shoulder, perhaps - but if your arm is perfectly vertical with a 32 kg bell, that's a whopping 70 lbs that's actually suspended to the side of your body, as opposed to above any part of your body. It would pull your arm sideways rather than being balanced.

Ich verstehe. Danke schön. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

When you say "true straight arm" on the TGU, do you mean perfectly vertical? From what I understand, the heavier the bell gets, the less vertical your arm gets and that's okay. The mass of the bell changes the angle of your arm because you must adjust for the heavier weight. Something about center of mass and more science than I can grok at 04:00. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Here for the ride Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Continued creeping on a kindred kettlebell cultist (with bonus alliteration) Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Can you elaborate on the not panning out too well? As self-centered as it may sound, I'd like to learn from someone else's poor experience in order to avoid potential pitfalls later #mercenaryscum

You wear it, and if the Nazgul come to your house, you bend them to your will. One Ring to rule them all, after all. Or occasionally slip it on to escape nasty relatives and tiresome situations. Bilbo did it; it can't be all bad.

Heh... Pavelisms. The over-the-top tough guy ultra-manly persona gives me the chuckles. I wonder what he's like in person. He comes off much more serious in his StrongFirst videos. Anyway, doubling down on the hand care is my plan. I don't want to think much beyond focusing on technique. Today's session was great. I was up at 0500, had coffee, made it to an empty gym at 0600, and I was on. Didn't feel distracted, rushed, unfocused, "out there," nothing. Hit 5x32L/R on OHS and 5x32R/L on TGU. The 5L set on OHS was my only sloppy one, and 5R was noticeably better. I remembered to moisturize before bed last night, and it seemed to make a radical difference. The gnarly blisters from yesterday's pictures were basically gone. And then I got home and prepped Reese's breakfast cheesecake for tomorrow. I quadrupled the recipe because I bought a 4-cup container of Greek yogurt, and I was dividing it into two containers. Pro tip: if you use a food processor to make this, use a dough hook or mixing paddle or something not sharp. It makes cleaning up afterward - with your tongue - that much less fraught with peril. And you're going to want to lick it off before you wash it, because