Jarric

Tuesday - Week 1 Day 2 Yesterday was a good day. Attempted to go for a run first thing, but my knee wasn't feeling 100% so I gave up pretty quickly and went home to do my physio and to stretch generally. Had my first counselling session around lunch time. She prescribed journalling, which I'm amazed I didn't think of myself but there we are. I'm not going to make it a challenge goal, because I don't know if I'll be up to doing it every day, but I think it will help. It's odd, I can sit on my own and think over things for hours, but as soon as I'm talking to someone it all goes out of my head. We had an hours session and we ended it after 25 minutes as I had nothing more to say. Still, it gave me time to write out some thoughts, and if I do write a lot of stuff I'll have more to say next time. In the afternoon I had a study session, which gives me an hour and a half towards my study goal. In the evening we had Pathfinder - the Greek campaign. It was a really nice session, and good to play again as it's been a couple of weeks. I did plenty of sketching in character, so very much hit the creativity goal. Teeth were done, no beer. A good day all round.

My current strategy on this is to try and never answer an e-mail on the day it comes in. Otherwise I end up stuck on the small urgencies that you talk about. Each thing is fairly urgent, but probably can wait 1 day, and each one looks like it should only take 10 minutes. Then it's 4pm and I realise I haven't even started the first item on my to do list. Yeah, this is where I am. I don't know where all the good candidates are, but they're certainly not applying for jobs here! It definitely sounds like you need change - 4.30am starts and not being able to do anything useful in the normal working day is not good.

£1,728 per year, plus interest if you can find somewhere to put it that earns interest, that's a pretty big jump! When I stopped working in London I saved myself £5k per year on train fairs, but I also took a pretty massive pay cut so it wasn't quite as successful

Monday - week 1 day 1 New challenge HYPE! Yesterday was a good day. Crossfit first thing, and we did overhead yoke for the first time in ages. I managed 95kg (209#) for 50 ft, and did 4 reps of that. I always feel badass holding a weight heavier than me above my head and walking around. The workout was, in 5 minutes: 5 rope climbs, 50cal air bike, max distance hand walk. I didn't quite make it through the bike, which was a shame as I wanted to get some more handwalking practice in. Amazing how knackered you can feel in 5 minutes though! I did my physio when I got back. Work was ok - I had to head up to town at lunch time for a meeting, so it was a bit of a broken day, but that also meant I didn't spend the whole day in front of a computer for once. I should talk about my lunch. On Sunday I got 2kg of chicken thighs, and put them in the slow cooker with 10oz of short grain brown rice (yes, my cooking always mixes grams and ounces, deal with it). We're starting getting a second veg box from Oddbox (who reduce waste by selling wonky and surplus fruit and veg), branded as a salad box, every other week, so whilst the chicken was cooking I set to work chopping up everything that was in there. Coriander, carrot, cucumber, mixed leaves, tomatoes, potato, beetroot (I boiled those last two). I divided everything into 10 pots, then did the same with the chicken and rice, and now WW and I have meals for the whole week. Given that the only seasoning is a bit of salt in the rice, it's actually turned out bloody lovely so far. In the evening I mostly sat on the sofa and caught up here, and with various group chats and my e-mails. I nearly didn't do any drawing, but I remembered myself right before bed and did a quick sketch of a bulbasaur plant pot that's on a shelf in the living room. Teeth were done, no beer was had. I also spent a long time reading through a very technical article on how best to deal with bulking and hypertrophy, which was really fascinating. I've now got a vague plan that next challenge I will start tracking calories again and establish a baseline, the following challenge I'll go for a cut and see what I can do in 5/6 weeks, and then trying bulking a bit for the next two challenges after that. The logic here is that I don't want to cut during race season, and the best time to bulk will be the Christmas period when I'll be eating and drinking a shitload anyway. It'll also help me put on a protective layer of fat for the winter

I'm excited for it too! It'll be good for me to run some D&D again; it's been a while.

That's interesting, and makes a lot of sense as a plan. I would think that you could make a lot of progress that way for quite a while - you may have 5 days between a lift but you'll never have more than 3 between repeating a muscle group (on the basis that OHP and bench use similar muscles, as do squats and deadlifts). My gym does something similar, except they break down workouts into 3 days: Push - e.g. bench, OHP, pushups, dips Pull - e.g. deadlifts, rows, pullups Legs - some type of squat or lunge They also treat the Sunday as though it was a lifting day, even though it's a rest day. That means we get: M: Push T: Pull W: Legs T: Push F: Pull S: Legs S: Off Then: M: Pull T: Legs W: Push T: Pull F: Legs S: Push S: Off I think the logic of pretending the extra day happens is so that people who only come on a regular 2 days per week don't miss out on one of the three days - not really relevant if you're lifting on your own.

Sounds like this new job could be a major improvement in your quality of life

I'm confused here - surely 15 workouts in 5 weeks is 3 per week? 2.5 x 5 weeks would be 12.5? I like how you've taking your cooking challenge from last time, learned from it, and built upon it. Looking forward to seeing how this one goes.

I'm definitely borrowing this phrase - what a lovely way to put it.

Colour me curious. The camping trip sounds great, and very rangerly. Glad you had a good time.

I decided to do this, but when I came to it I quickly realised I have no real concept of what I look like. This is probably a really odd question, but out of interest, did you look in the mirror/at pictures of yourself for your intro or do you just know what you look like?

Hi! Good to have you Now this is what I'm talking about!

Love it, I'm here to watch you get stronger. For core work, I've found pretty much the only thing I'll do are hanging knee raises/leg raises/toes to bar - I get tired of crunches real fast. Also, what @Marauder said. You can multiclass, but you'll always be a ranger

Challenge tracker, with some bonus doodles:

Yeah, you're right, I should have know better. I didn't catch much of the triathlon. Saw the end of the blind triathlon, that was cool. And watching the rugby 7s right now. Mostly it's been the weightlifting though, and I'm really hoping we have some oly lifts at crossfit this week!

I really love all of this - it's nice to see someone with such a clear idea of what they want from their physique

Yeah, macros can be a bit of a rabbit hole when you get into them. It depends what your goals are, but I think you're probably ok with a fairly high fat content if it comes from unsalted nuts (as opposed to, say, blocks of lard ) I'm gonna have to think on the vote of the week, there's so many options!

I had never considered this, but you're absolutely right. I will try and appreciate hotels more in future.

This might be more effort than it's worth for your purposes, but I thought I would share an example of adapting character sheets to make them easier for non-players in case they give you ideas. These are sheets made for a comedy D&D show, where the players were comedians and hadn't necessarily ever played D&D before. Each player also got a set of colour-coded dice that match the colours on the sheet, so the DM could say things like "for your damage, roll the red one twice". They are, obviously, very stupid character concepts for comedy purposes

Disagree - if people only posted when they were hitting all of their goals this would be a very quiet forum. Sounds like a lovely day, if not very on target.

That sounds like such a fun bouldering session. I love the feeling when you stick a good dyno; I always find I'm faintly surprised that I'm not falling

A quick week zero update - I was hitting my two zero week goals (brushing teeth and physio) until yesterday. Yesterday I forgot about physio until it was too late, and I didn't brush my teeth after I stayed up way too late drinking. It's been a good week. I took Friday off work just to give myself a long weekend, and I got some studying done on Friday and a bunch of D&D prep yesterday. Had some good workouts too - we had 'Prison Friday' at crossfit - bench press, bent over rows, chinups, dips, strict press, and dumbbell curls. I also went climbing yesterday, but with my dodgy knee and Hopalong having hurt his finger we couldn't do much, so we went to the little gym they have at the bouldering centre and did pullups, press ups, and leg raises. My shoulders and boobs feel suitably inflated after those two days. I've drunk beer twice this week, on Wednesday and yesterday, which is good enough for week zero. I tried some non-alcoholic beer on Friday night because it was on offer - it was rubbish and I still didn't feel great the following morning so I won't be repeating that experiment. I'm also excited for the commonwealth games - not sure how much I'm going to catch of it, but I saw some of the weightlifting yesterday and that was cool. There's para powerlifting on Thursday; really excited for that.

Hey! Don't resist the urge, just send it to them Thank you! Good to have you. It's surprisingly tough, isn't it? Definitely worth it though; the compound effect of a few days drinking really takes it out of me (I must be getting old!). I rolled a 2 for my initiative - looks like I'm going last Always good to have you here x I KNOW! Every time I watch it I pick up new bits I love in it, I'm very excited. Ah thank you. Yeah, I'll share stuff, that's a good idea.

Oh much better - they sere just flashbacks to younger Jarric. When I say not too long I mean not many years. So I've only done my accounts, but that's my current account, our joint current account, a savings account and two credit cards. You can set internal transfers to not register as income/expenditure (so like if I move money from my current account to our joint account, or if I pay off my credit card, it doesn't affect overall numbers).

I was having a similar conversation with a mate earlier who's a tree surgeon - doing heavy work all day every day is always going to build more strength than working at a desk and going to the gym a few times per week.