[Kishi]

On 10/1/2022 at 12:09 AM, sarakingdom said:

 

Bodies are so strange. I've been eating more lately, trying to hit what is supposedly maintenance for me (I'd been maintaining and flirting with gaining on half that), and my weight dropped to the lowest thing I'd seen for months. Sure, calorie surplus for weight loss, whatever, man. 🙄

 

 

Right? I've been scaling my calories up and instead of sitting at 180-something and drifting to 200, I've seen these massive swings in weight. Woke up this morning at 170, which, like. What?

 

9 hours ago, KB Girl said:

When is the tournament? Gaining weight can be harder than losing it, depending on the person. You don't mind having to eat more?

 

Tournament is on 10/30. And I don't mind having to eat more; having more energy in the system is a nice change of pace from chronic cutting. And my thought is, if I eat my way to the top of my weight class, then I have more energy to train with, and if I go over at that point, it's easier to cut down and get back under. So in theory, while some cut days would happen, they would be isolated and corrective vs having to be going all the time.

 

Of course, this was when I thought my walking weight was 85-87kg and that I'd have to eat my way up to ~91 or so, but then you have mornings like today where I wake up at 77.6 and it's like, "Damn this thyroid of mine!"

 

*

 

GOAL: 15/24

 

It's been a pretty emotionally draining few days.

 

Got word Friday that one of my family's friends' grandparents died, and while I wasn't asked to go to the funeral, I would have felt bad not going, so that made my plans for the weekend.

 

Saturday was a long day; BJJ was great, but I had overtime to work, so I did that. Afterward, figured I needed to text with brother over Dad's concern with his casual profanity around Mom; Dad says that Mom's bothered, but Mom hasn't said anything about it, and it's not actually clear that she has a problem so much as she may have made an offhand comment that Dad took and ran with on account of 1) his own lack of emotional health and 2) his recent phase of religiosity, which tends to bring out a lot of his more conservative, authoritarian tendencies. Brother wasn't too pleased about this. It's not the issue of language itself so much as what he sees as an inappropriate reassertion of the parent-child relationship by way of Churchy concerns over the form of speech versus its substance. Also, he felt disrespected by that; he sees it as a problem for the parents as adults to talk to him about as a fellow adult rather than working through me, which I was surprised and disappointed to learn about as I thought Dad would take the lead on this since he'd told me that "We need to do something about your brother's language."

 

So that was fun. We'll see what comes of it. Don't know if they're going to sort this out or not, but I apparently did more than anyone else to solve this supposed problem, so I don't really care how it shakes out from here.

 

Sunday I made it out to Open Mat, hung around for a little while before going to the funeral. Brother was part of the service; the rest of us were observed to have been there but we really didn't accomplish more than that. My best friend from high school called that night and said he's having a kid, which is awesome and definitely got me in a "energy out, energy in" frame of mind for the rest of the evening.

 

It was the kind of weekend I could have used a weekend from.  But, my caseload doesn't care about how tired I am, so I was back to work Monday morning. Had too much going on to skip out for mat time, so I just worked all day and went to hang with friends for sci fi night. Lower Decks is getting better, although it's still relatively hit or miss at this point. Speaking as a relative outsider, I'd say it's at its best when it's a hopeful Rick and Morty clone, although I'm able to pick up some references here or there which I'm sure would have tickled me pink if I were more of a fan.

 

Anyway, brings us to today. Plan's to get mat time tonight. I think it'll carry off, although it definitely won't if I don't hustle back and get to work, so.

[Kishi]

GOAL: 16/25

 

So far, so good. Managed to get my work done and get out to the mats on time. Did better sparring than I'm willing to give myself credit for, if that makes any sense. Like, when I was in the moment, I didn't feel good about my performance, but when I looked back at it, in terms of actual events, I did better than I thought. If I can pull off another such performance in beginner's class, that's what I'll take as my cue to return to the regular classes. I assume I'll return to being smashed at that point, but if I'm going to commit to tournament fighting, then I need to commit to more and different kinds of fighting than I'm likely to find in the beginner's classes.

 

Also, one side effect of building a video library for training is that my retention's doing better, so a lot of the basic stuff that I was worried about not having has stuck around some.

 

Otherwise, thankfully, there's not much to report. I forgot to mention that we learned Sunday that my last living grandparent's in the hospital for congestive heart failure, but we got news yesterday that she's doing a lot better, which is good to hear. Got laundry to do tonight, so can't do all the mat time; if I can't get out of the office early enough, I won't be able to do any. Wasn't able to get here early and I have to spend 6 hours here; it's going to come down to how soon everyone else leaves so I can sneak out, though given the nature of my chores tonight, it might actually be better for me to skip and just focus on getting done what needs to get done.

[Mistr]

Ah, the joys of laundry. At least you can do other things while the washer does the heavy work. 

 

I hope your grandmother is okay. My MIL has congestive heart failure and it is manageable. It would be more manageable if she would do what the doctor's tell her to do, but hey, that's her call. 

[KB Girl]

On 10/5/2022 at 10:01 PM, Kishi said:

 

Also, one side effect of building a video library for training is that my retention's doing better, so a lot of the basic stuff that I was worried about not having has stuck around some.

That sounds like a nice surprise  

 

On 10/4/2022 at 10:36 PM, Kishi said:

 

Tournament is on 10/30. And I don't mind having to eat more; having more energy in the system is a nice change of pace from chronic cutting. And my thought is, if I eat my way to the top of my weight class, then I have more energy to train with, and if I go over at that point, it's easier to cut down and get back under. So in theory, while some cut days would happen, they would be isolated and corrective vs having to be going all the time.

 

Of course, this was when I thought my walking weight was 85-87kg and that I'd have to eat my way up to ~91 or so, but then you have mornings like today where I wake up at 77.6 and it's like, "Damn this thyroid of mine!"

Sounds like a reasonably good place to be, as long as those lows aren’t bothering you energy-wise. How far out is the weigh in, morning of? Or day before? 
Wouldn’t even bother cutting if you’re a little over, it’d be easy to drop some water before weigh in.

[Kishi]

On 10/5/2022 at 4:29 PM, Mistr said:

 

I hope your grandmother is okay. My MIL has congestive heart failure and it is manageable. It would be more manageable if she would do what the doctor's tell her to do, but hey, that's her call.

 

Yeah, I remember reading about that in your challenge! It sounds like there's a lot going on there with her CHF. I hope your MIL is okay too.

 

On 10/8/2022 at 12:56 PM, KB Girl said:

Sounds like a reasonably good place to be, as long as those lows aren’t bothering you energy-wise. How far out is the weigh in, morning of? Or day before? 
Wouldn’t even bother cutting if you’re a little over, it’d be easy to drop some water before weigh in.

 

Weigh-ins start the night before and go to the day of. And I say cutting, but I think I mean something closer to what you're saying, where I just take the odd day to cut my starches out and just focus on meat and veggies and let the water flush out. That's what I mean by "cutting."

 

*

 

Wow,

 

 

Okay, almost 1 week. Let me have this.

 

It's been a busy while to be sure. Hit a point where I needed to be "doing" things rather than talking about them. Only I did it without actually meaning to? Mostly I've just been trying to keep up with what needs to be done around here, which means job and training and catching as catch can. It did mean staying away from here, although it wasn't intentional. More emergent.

 

Um, most significant thing in the past week is that I've hit my personal goal of graduating out of the beginner's BJJ class. I got to a point where I was handling everyone I was rolling with - not winning or submitting, necessarily, but handling them - and I did well enough doing so that I felt comfortable leveling up. Got smashed on Friday as a result, which was so expected that my lack of emotional response was itself remarkable. That or I was just dead. Full context, I did striking sparring for an hour and then rolled through an open mat; I thought I was conditioned enough but I eventually just hit a point where I was Done and I couldn't work past it.

 

Otherwise, not much happening here. Went to hang with friends on Sunday rather than parents, and Monday Night Sci Fi was off last night so I got on the mats. Rolled well. Hit pads like a boss. Good times.

 

Tonight is more mat time. I got my other physical training out of the way earlier today so my hope is to train, come home, get dinner, and get down relatively early for a change. I have no clue if it's gonna carry off or not.

[Mistr]

Congrats on leveling up in BJJ!

[Kishi]

Welp! Plans didn't carry off. Oh, I got on the mats and had a grand old time. I've been trying to practice reframing my losses as learning opportunities, and it's helped, and I've been able to execute on my game plan sometimes, and I'm working on getting out of side control more with some success. And it was all good. But I was late to get pretty much anything else done. I don't really have an excuse. Somehow the night just got away from me.

 

Today's a laundry day, so no mat time tonight. Got some morning training done before going to the office, which wound up doing some employee appreciation stuff. A raise would be better, but a pizza break will have to do.

[KB Girl]

Congrats on getting out of the beginner class

How's the new class been going so far? 

 

On 10/12/2022 at 9:27 PM, Kishi said:

I've been trying to practice reframing my losses as learning opportunities, and it's helped, and I've been able to execute on my game plan sometimes, and I'm working on getting out of side control more with some success.

This at least sounds great! 

[Kishi]

On 10/19/2022 at 11:01 AM, KB Girl said:

How's the new class been going so far? 

 

It's been good! I've found that I'm retaining things a lot better and having opportunities to work on the game plan turned out to be very useful. And also, that's where the rolls were that I needed, so.

 

*

 

Whoops, new challenge, so better get on that. Thanks to @KB Girl, @Mistr, @Jupiter, @Tanktimus the Encourager, @sarakingdom, @Mad Hatter, and @juliebarkley, along with anyone else I missed for following along and being generally awesome around me.

 

I definitely dropped off for a bit. Got busy. Things and stuff happened, but nothing unusual or noteworthy. I'll see y'all in the next round!