Jarric

A brewery tour and D&D? I want your Saturday!

Yesterday was a good day. Hit my calorie target, ran as I mentioned, teeth were done, and did my hip rehab work in front of the TV after snooker. A while ago I stopped drinking caffeine in the evenings as a matter of course, but I will say that driving to snooker and drinking diet coke all night made me much more inclined to stay up and watch Acquisitions Incorporated - The C Team and stretch! We won our snooker match, and with it our snooker league! I won the frame that took us over the line for the league as well, which I'm really happy with. Think I won 13/15 of my frames this season too. ===== This morning was Crossfit. We did pistol squat practice and I can almost do one? Maybe? I managed a few pistol box squats anyway, which was pretty cool. Think I'll work on these in my utterly imaginary spare time. We also had handstand palm raises, which I suck at but I think I'm getting better, and paused chinups. Had a meeting in town today and I think it went well. It's the first time I've ever been to a client meeting solo, so I was really nervous, but in the end I got through it fairly happily. D&D tonight - gonna be some more scary dungeon crawling!

This is an awesome way to look at this, I feel I'll be quoting this line to a few people over the coming weeks.

Your hikes look so beautiful! I can't remember when I last got to walk in the snow.

Sounds like an extremely productive day man! Glad you guys are holding up well.

Hope the packing's going well Yeti, so glad you got the place you wanted!

Hope the hip heal up quickly. I hope you fare well in your battles!

You and I have very different definitions of the word 'fun'

Week 4 so far... I took it a bit easy at Crossfit Monday and Tuesday, as my knee was still a bit dodgy and my hip on the same side had a twinge on Monday too. Took it a bit easy with my run this morning too, but got in my planned 4 miles. Knee is almost back to normal. Hip rehab was done on Monday during a nice relaxing evening in front of the telly, and yesterday late in the evening after D&D. Tonight I have snooker, so it'll be another late night for hip rehab. Teeth have been done. Calories Monday were way way over - I don't know why but I was just super hungry all day. Yesterday was in budget though, and I'm on track to hit the goal today too. ===== D&D yesterday was really good fun. We finished fighting a woman made of sand, who I had thought was the big boss of this house but evidently was not as she went down quickly. Venturing through the house we came across a ring, accompanied by a ghostly vision of a betrothed couple expressing their love for each other before parting, and promising to tell their parents of the engagement when they next met. Given that it was a ghostly vision we can only assume that they never saw each other again. More disturbingly we found a headless corpse upstairs, with clumps of hair on the floor around it. We soon found out why when we eere attacked by distorted, demonic heads with bat wings growing from them. Thanks to a natural 20 on my Knowledge (Planes) check, I identified these as varghouls. These horrible little blighters paralyse you, and then kiss you whilst your immobile. After 24 hours all of your hair falls out, your head tears itself free from your neck and becomes a new varghoul. This also created the interesting situation where I was the only one to know that in character. Had my character died (and I was dropped to negative hit points) no-one in the party would have know what these things do. Then our ranger, who had been kissed, would soon be the newest headless corpse in town. Thankfully the party were able to kill the remaining varghouls and rescue me, so we were able to heal our ranger. And that's the story of how we hit level 3. ===== Plan for the rest of the week is: Tomorrow I have crossfit, a meeting in town, back to the office in the afternoon, and then D&D Friday is Crossfit, and after work I'm going to see a Metallica tribute band Saturday will be long run day first thing, then I'm going down the pub to watch the rugby (the one match that isn't cancelled) and belatedly celebrate my birthday Sunday will be a very short run, thankfully, and either bouldering or a lot of relaxing. Friday and Saturday will be high calorie days. I don't know when any of my extra credit workouts will happen, but I'll try and squeeze some in.

Sorry for your loss man. But good on you for sticking with the diet and workouts regardless. I think being able to dunk a basketball is a great milestone goal.

You'll get there mate, try not to get demoralised and keep on going.

Thank you! I do love those pictures. I haven't actually qualified, because I entered the 4 lap category but only completed 3 laps. I was fast enough that I would have qualified had I entered the 3 lap category though, and as I have no intention of travelling to the States this year to run the world championships it doesn't actually matter.

More than happy to be blamed for this - looks like you've got a lot of good stuff packed into the next couple of days!

I say start a new challenge now. There's no time like the present, and you can do a lot in a week and a half.

Learning to code sounds like an awesome idea; good luck with it Wolfman!

Week 3 Stats Hip Rehab - 5/7 - missed one day through lack of planning, and the other recovering on race day. Tooth Care - 5/7 - same failures as hip rehab, because that's how this works. Does feel like this habit is getting better though. Exercise - 4/7 - two misses because I failed the goals lower down the ziggurat, and exercise the day after running Nuts didn't feel like a terribly good idea. Calories - 1/7 - yeah, that's not great! It was my birthday week, and the collosal cake that was gifted to me at work really didn't help with this. I obviously ate all the things to try and fuel myself at Nuts, and I ate all the things again on Sunday while I was recovering (did I need the fuel, or was it for comfort? Who can say?). Average daily calories were 3,233 which should have me putting on weight. I forgot to weigh in on Monday, but this morning I came in at 11 stone 9 (153# / 69.4kg) which is a new low for this challenge. Extra Credit - 0/3 - nope, and I think a rest week was a reasonable idea anyway.

Thank you man! I'm really pleased I stuck with it. Thanks dude! Thank you mate! Thanks! And of course - I'm fuelled primarily on tea, I couldn't do this without it!

Race Report - Winter Nuts 2020 One of my main goals for this year (not that I've written them down anywhere) was to complete 4 laps of Nuts Challenge. Last summer I completed 3 laps, and qualified for the Obstacle Course Racing World Championships as a result, so 4 seemed the next logical step. It's also the longest distance they do, after that the distance is 'limitless', and only a tiny number of those people get more than 4 laps. So on Saturday I ran Winter Nuts. The race plan was 1:30 per 7km lap, which is a decent enough pace for what is a very grindy route. A lot of the course in spent running through streams and climbing in and out of them, and on top of that there's a couple of lake crossings/swims. There's also two main obstacle zones on top of the scattered obstacles, neither of which are too technical but both are challenging enough to slow you down and wear you out. The main obstacle zone starts with a stairway to heaven, and if you complete that you get to skip most of the rest of the obstacles in that area. The second picture in this set it the stairway to heaven (taken of me last summer): This year they had to move the start area, as the normal race village was flooded. This meant starting the day with a 20 minute walk from the car carrying all of my transition stuff, and leaving me a bit stressed and shorter on time than I would like. Nonetheless I got myself together, and at 8am we were off. The first lap went really smoothly - I felt strong and good, I completed the stairway to heaven so avoided a lot of obstacles, and finished the lap in 1:28:37. I stopped for a couple of minutes for a banana and a cup of tea, and got on my way. By lap two it was much tougher. I didn't realise how much the cold was going to take out of me. It was about 2 degrees (35.6 Fahrenheit) when I started, with a high of 9 degrees (48.2 Fahrenheit), so the water never got much above freezing. I was wearing a shorty wetsuit, neoprene gloves and neoprene socks, so I thought I'd be ok. And I wasn't too bad apart from numb feet, but I was getting tired. When I got to the main obstacle zone I went for stairway to heaven again. I got all the way to the top and all the way down the other side, but as my feet hit the landing I lost my grip, slipping backwards and landing in a pool of icy water. I was briefly very shocked, and stayed shaken for a while after, and I then had to do the full obstacle zone because I'd failed that obstacle. All in all, not ideal. Shortly afterwards I went to step over a log in a stream and tweaked my knee. At that point I was ready to throw in the towel and call it a day, I just felt done. Over the course of the lap my knee didn't seem to get any worse, so as I neared the finish line I gave myself a talking to and decided not to call it there. I pulled into transition for more tea and fruit, and managed to persuade myself that as long as I had enough energy gels I could push through another lap. I knew I wouldn't make 4 by this point, but I felt I could make three. Well over lap three my knee did get worse, and I was struggling with it a bit by the end. But I got it done, and finished 3 laps of Winter Nuts in 5:39:28. Laps were 1:28:37, 1:58:56 and 2:11:54, so you can see how I dropped off. Overall not what I was hoping for, but I'm still happy I gave what I could. I finished 28th out of about 60 entrants in the 4 lap category, and something like 41st overall. Interestingly I probably would have qualified for the world champs again if I'd have entered the 3 laps, judging by the provisional results (not that I'm going this year, but it's nice to know I'm no less competitive). So 4 laps is still the goal for next year, bring on Summer Nuts!

Something else for me to look at when I'm not at work :lol:

Well done on an awesome week 3! For your extra goals, I feel like a video of beatsaber should be one of them. Other than that, you can always do a bit of extra credit on the other life goals - a different type of workout, and extra stretch/recovery session, an extra art project?

Also, our stamps are stickers now and I think glue has more calories. Good point, I'd forgotten that. Shows you how often I send letters! Definitely, I went for Machine Head again today and Only the Names is a perfect track for yoga. I think slower doom-y stuff might be better, but then sometimes thrash is just what you need. I'm gonna need to come back to this when I'm not at home and can watch the videos!

Yesterday was a good day. I slept in for an extra 15 minutes and then lounged in bed for a little longer as I was only doing a 2 mile run. The run felt easy enough. Work was busy after two days off and I'm still catching up. I've got a million questions from clients about Coronavirus, on top of all my normal work, so I think it's going to stay busy for a while. One of our suppliers delivered a cake for my birthday on Tuesday, but I didn't realise until I came into the office on Wednesday that it was the worlds biggest cake. This thing is ludicrous, it must be a good 1.5-2 cubic feet of chocolate. So I had a couple of tiny slices of that during the day (read: 750 calories worth). In the evening our recipe box turned up, so I cooked curried haddock with spinach dal, mint cucumber salad and coriander mayo - it was rather excellent. Then we had snooker, in which I played very well and we won 3-2, so all in all a really nice night. I did have 5 pints without tracking them, so I was somewhat shocked to see my calories at 4,051 between that and the cake. Whoops... I also totally forgot to do my hip stretches, and when I got home at nearly midnight I decided that I'd rather get some sleep so I went to bed. I also didn't brush my teeth (a side effect of the ziggurat; I'm not getting any points for it either way so I'm not that incentivised to do it). No points for anything for yesterday. ===== This morning I got up and did a yoga video, as I try and get rested before Nuts on Saturday. I do like yoga, but it's not a priority compared to lifting and running so I rarely get the chance to do it. It was pretty good, despite my hangover. After yoga I had time to do most of my hip stretches, so I put on some nice relaxing yoga music to do those: Tonight I'll do my remaining hip exercises, and then it's off to D&D where most of the party is currently shrunk and talking in squeaky voices.

Then I definitely can't call myself a perfectionist . I'm quite sure my calories are a fair way out, but as long as they're always out by about the same amount in the same direction I don't think that actually matters.

It's amazing how less than 4 minutes of work an take so much out of you. I thoroughly enjoyed the doing nothing bit though! Thank you man! I guess I'm just not enough of a perfectionist!

Yesterday was a good day. It was also my birthday. I went to Crossfit late again as I had another day off. We had a brutal WOD: 3 attempts, each for time: 15 sumo deadlifts, 200m row. Because they were separate attempts the only approach was to go balls to the wall, so I went at 80kg and completed the rounds in 1:15, 1:13 and 1:11 respectively. After those I felt utterly sick, and whilst I was tempted to do a 4th round I thought better of it on a week I'm supposed to be taking it easy. We finished up with some single arm kettlebell bench press, and some freestanding handstand holds. For the rest of the day I did a lot of nothing. Cooked myself an omelette for lunch and then made a cottage pie for dinner. Chilled in front of the TV some more and did my hip stretches, did a bit of hoovering, and then put the pie in the oven before picking WW up. In the evening we had D&D. We ran from a swarm of scarabs that we couldn't hope to damage (the joys of being level 2!) and rested. The following morning we entered the house proper (we'd previously been exploring the grounds and the crypt beneath it) and found it haunted and full of skeletons and creepy shit. We ended just as we were about to be attacked by the spirit of the house, a weird animate sand statue who decided it would be fun to end our lives. I also got to drink a few pints of salted caramel chocolate stout in the craft beer pub where we play. All in all it was a good time! I don't know how but I managed to stay within calories at 2,408/2,410 (unfortunately I didn't have two stamps to lick @Sloth the Enduring), so 4/4 goals done for the day. I strongly suspect that I won't get any of my extra credit exercises done this week, because I want to take it easy and be fresh for Nuts on Saturday. I'm ok with that choice.