Jarric

Just catching up, and I have thoughts! You said last week you need to take rest days but you're bad at doing it, why is that? Do you feel like your body needs a rest day or do you just think you should do it because that's what people say you should do? If it's the latter I'd say drop them if your body can handle it - I haven't had a rest day in at least 2 months. Your body gets used to consistent work. Body fat percentage is really difficult to track to compare yourself to anyone else. It's useful for tracking yourself if you can be bothered to do it - it doesn't really matter if the number is accurate, just whether it goes up or down. Using the "looking at photos" method I'd put you a little under 25%. I feel you on living your whole life in one room! I spend all of my work time and most of my social time in the same 10'x8' room these days! Finally got a chance to watch that pullup video, those are amazing! You look really strong too; I think you've got another rep or two in you! Also, you no longer get to say you suck at pushups, those were really solid

W2D1 - Monday Exercises - 0/3 Stretches - 0/7 Rolling 0/2 Warmup - N/A Pose Running - N/A As you can see I did not do the things yesterday. It was otherwise a pretty good day though. Workout was supposed to be 3-7 rounds of 5 handstand pressups, 10 handstand flutter kicks, 5 weighted pullups. I did 5 rounds, with a 20# (~9.1kg) backpack for the pullups. I would normally go for max rounds, but I slept badly Sunday night and woke up late on Monday morning. Still I got that done, skipped my hangboarding due to time and tiredness, and followed it with some stretching. I also videoed some of the workout for my trainer, and for the gram Work was ok, just really trying to catch up on stuff. After work I got to play D&D with @WhiteGhost, @Red1263, @Kestrel Grey, and @Mr_Willes, wonderfully DM'd by @jonfirestar. It was really good fun, and so nice to play 5e instead of running it for a change! I might save talking too much about my character until I've had a few more sessions to feel him out, but if you want to know what happened I can't do better than send you to the writeup on White Ghost's thread. We finished that a bit after 8pm UK time, so I had dinner which WW had lovingly made for me (and was not very happy with me overrunning for). After that I just chilled out, and it at no point occurred to me to do my hip stuff for this challenge or do anything else productive

My one question was going to be where you were running it, but if it's play by post on Discord I am most definitely in! I'm going to try not to start planning a character before I know what setting we're playing in. It's hard not to start designing one right now!

Week 1 Summary Exercises - 2/7 Stretches - 3/7 Rolling - 3/7 Warmup - 3/3 Pose Running - 5/5 Not the most stellar of results! Basically stuff that was directly linked to running workouts got done, but the main stuff did not. I'm not really sure how best to approach this at the moment, other than just growing up and doing the damn thing! In other news, I had a really nice weekend. Slept in and did a quick 2 mile run on Saturday, then ran our Ranger D&D game. The party locked up some bandits, secured themselves a new base of operations (by hijacking the bandits' base), and headed out to find their friend who has been kidnapped. On their journey through the wilderness they were attacked by an owlbear. Poor thing only got one round before they destroyed it (which is probably good, coz those things hit hard. Sunday I went for my long run, but it's my running deload week so it was only 8 miles. In the afternoon I started some D&D prep, of which I have quite a lot to do (until I knew where the party was going I didn't want to prepare a load of locations they might not use, which means that I now have a big chunk to prepare to get ahead of myself again). In the evening I watched High Rollers D&D and generally chilled out.

The picture won't load for me, but looking up "fires of Dis" gives me some idea of how that might look! Today is better; I just need to get on with the thing in front of me and I'm fine. I don't fear my boss, I fear my workload if I don't do anything for a few days! Thinking about it that might have been why I was struggling last week, I'd just come off a week off and was trying to catch up! Aww, that's so cute! Good to see you

I've never seen the word Winchester used as a verb before. We usually only get brown eggs, and I'd never really thought about it until recently we started getting a load of different colours to keep up with sudden increased demand. Apparently different countries expect different colours of eggs, so raw white eggs here aren't normally sold to consumers.

Well done on this one - it's a tough one to crack but if you stick with it I think everything else will be easier.

Welcome to the ranger corps Triage, nice to meet you! Looks like you've got some good goals - I'm with you on the handstands and sprints; that's most of my training right now. As EG said you may want to make your goals more quantifiable - it makes it easier when you look back at the end of 5 weeks to see what you've achieved (e.g. if you say, "did I eat better?", that might be a tough question, but if you say "did I eat three servings of vegetables every day?" the answer is a straight yes or no).

W1D3 - Wednesday Exercises - 0/3 Stretches - 7/7 Rolling 0/2 Warmup - Done Pose Running - Done Yesterday was a good day. Started off with a short run of 4 miles, which felt good and pretty quick, and I remembered my glute warmups and to focus on my running pose. I did my stretches straight after my run as I had the time, with the idea I would do my exercises and rolling later. I forgot to do either of those things Work was a bit of a struggle; I don't know why but I found it really hard to get stuck into anything (and I'm finding the same today). After work I attempted to make empanadas for the first time ever. I'd never heard of empanadas until @Raxie took me for some last year (thanks Raxie ❤️ ) , so I was really excited to have them for the second time ever! For the pastry I mixed a pound of flour with a teaspoon of sugar and two teaspoons of baking powder. To that I added 60g of diced lard and 60g of diced butter and combined the whole thing into a crumb. Then I added some water until it was the right consistency and left it to sit in the fridge for about an hour. While that was resting I boiled two eggs and set them to the side. I diced an onion and threw it in a frying pan to soften, then added diced green pepper and beef mince until the mince was browned. To that I added paprika and chilli flakes and cooked it through. Once I had taken it off the heat I added raisins, diced green olives, diced boiled egg, and cumin and mixed it all together. This may be the strangest mix of ingredients I've ever had in a pan. I rolled out the pastry, cut it into circles and added a spoonful of the beef mix to each circle. Then I folded them over and crimped the edge together. The recipe, which was supposed to make 12 empanadas, made enough pastry for 20 and enough filling for 30! When I fried them I also discovered that, despite the recipe saying they can be shallow fried, the only way to cook them is to half submerge them in boiling oil. I cooked them in two batches of 10, the first batch going for lunches later in the week and the second warm for tonight's dinner. The leftover filling will make a nice pasta for tonight's dinner. When I took the last of them out of the pan I splashed a bit of the oil on the hob ring, and my hob promptly caught fire. I left the fire to burn itself out, and then served the empanadas with a sprinkle of sugar, and with carrots and broccoli on the side. The whole process took about 2 hours, more like 2:45 if you include the time I was waiting for the pastry to rest and not really doing anything. And I have to say, it was totally worth it, they were great! As a consequence not much got done in the way of art or anything else yesterday, but such is life!

well now that's bad! Best hope there is to hope you're too insignificant to be worth killing.

That sounds like fun!

That's one nasty looking beast! Oddly enough I think we'll be ok - we took on 2 Glabrezu the other week and killed one (the one that escaped being the one we're facing now), as well as a host of other nasty things. We barely survived that fight, but 1 Glabrezu should be ok. Then again knowing our GM all sorts of nasty things might show up next session! Not least because Glabrezu have the power to summon other daemons. Nah, I just want to play with you guys

It probably is, but he'll only be 30 once . It was really nice, hopefully it won't be too long before we can have proper beers with mates.

Late, but following along now for your awesome handstands! Random thought: I usually browse the forums on my phone, so I've only just noticed your forum title. That's pretty good

Sounds good. Maybe that should have been my recommendation in the first place - do what sounds fun! Yeah, it's nerve racking having your face that close to the floor!

W1D2 - Tuesday Exercises - 3/3 Stretches - 7/7 Rolling 2/2 Warmup - N/A Pose Running - Done Yesterday was a good day. Workout in the morning was 7x80m (~89 yard) sprints, supersetted with 7x8 pushups. I followed that with 15 minutes of handstand practice, shown in that video I posted yesterday, and some leg raises. I could really do with a much higher bar for leg raises/toes to bar, as I can't hang with both straight arms and straight legs. I spent some time mowing the lawn, and then did some extra handstand practice and some cartwheels to help me bail out if I need to. After lunch we made dinner! Well, first I did my hip exercises and stretches, then we made dinner. We went over to hopalong's house as it's his birthday. We sat in the front garden at a respectable distance and talked to each other - it was really nice to see him and his family after so many weeks. We then came home, ate our ready-made dinner cold (chicken, olive and pesto pasta), and logged on for D&D. D&D stuff: All goals were completed nice and early. Calories were a bit high thanks to snacks at hopalong's and beer at D&D, but not too over the top. It was a good day.

thanks. I've got a way to go, but I'm pretty happy with how these are going. Thank you! Should that be hands down?

Because I promised @WhiteGhost:

I don't have an answer for you, so here's a question instead. Handstands and skipping fulfill totally different training purposes, so what meets your long term goals better? If you don't have clear long term goals, which would make you happier in 2 months time: better cardio conditioning, or better shoulder strength and overhead stability?

W1D1 - Monday Exercises - 3/3 Stretches - 7/7 Rolling 2/2 Warmup - N/A Pose Running - N/A Yesterday was a good day. I worked out in the morning - 5 rounds of 5 handstand pushups, 10 handstand flutter kicks, and 5 weighted pullups (20#/~9.1kg). I followed that with some hangboarding and some l-sit progressions, and lots of stretching. Altogether it was quite an intense workout, which was nice! In the day we spent a lot of time sorting out boxes of books and one of our bookshelves; still need to finish that today. I also spent a bit of time on art practice, just a rough perspective study in watercolour pencils. After lunch I spent a bit of time on D&D prep - I'm at that awkward point where I'm not sure what to prepare because I don't know what my players are going to do! I made a pork chilli for dinner with leftover roast pork from Sunday, it was lovely and I have leftovers for lunch today. All good goal-wise yesterday, did everything whilst watching High Rollers Curse of Strahd in the evening. Today I have another day off work, but plenty to do around the house, seeing Hopalong for his birthday, and playing D&D (our Rise of the Runelords game) in the evening.

Pah! Silly boring humans

Your D&Dungeon game sounds like so much fun! I don't rate Kbar's long term survival chances, but if a barbarian makes it to level 5 without dying are you really playing a barbarian?

I love this, it really does feel infectious! I think that's a great idea, make the goal something you can control (making time to practice), rather that a result that's hard to predict.

Hiiiii...

Suggested activities are a good shout - I hate getting to the end of a day and realising I forgot about all the things I wanted to accomplish. I may have to include this in my bujo or something. I seem to have missed all the media stuff about Joe Exotic, so that reference goes straight over my head. Not sure if I'm missing out or not! Thank you! Yeah, I'll probably share some stuff, if any of it turns out well anyway!