Onward into battle

[Xenophon]

Or, the continuing march to stay more or less in place.

 

Hi, I'm a nerd and I like fitness. Despite my login name I'm not a mercenary captain, not even Greek (but Norwegian). I'm neither particularly young nor particularly a beginner: 43 years old by now, married with three young sons (current ages 7, 4 and 2). My wife works evenings/nights a lot which makes me housebound much of the time; fortunately I have a job with a lot of flexibility and a decently-equipped exercise room in the basement of our office building. I also have some simple equipment at home, which has admittedly not seen much use since #3 son was born, but now he's gradually becoming less demanding sleepwise so this has begun to improve.

 

My main fitness thing is picking things up and putting them back down. Previously to becoming a dad, my thing was martial arts (and I'd dabbled in a number of various things over the years, starting with traditional karate way back in the 1980s, lately it was mostly kickboxing). After having kids, though, going somewhere to train something organized on a regular basis right in the middle of prime family time up to several times per week... that went out the window; so I settled on lifting stuff instead as that was something that could be done on my own schedule by myself. My main motivation being to stave off the ravages of time and keeping my body in working order for the benefit of myself and my family, this has proved pretty succesful so far.

 

Had the usual year or two of pretty good newbie progress, and since then it's been a tale of slow progress interrupted and set back by various happenings (such as getting sick or injured, or my wife becoming pregnant again). I mostly train as a wannabe powerlifter (and have in fact competed once, at a small local meet, but do not currently have the time or interest to pursue further competition). At the moment I'm fairly close to being the strongest (and also heaviest) I've ever been; I've had a pretty good months-long streak with no real injuries or anything, and have recently begun setting a few little PRs here and there. I've tried a few different lifting schemes over the years and am currently doing what I usually fall back on when I'm not trying something specific, namely a mutant variation of 5/3/1 which has been hacked away at until it's almost but not quite unrecognizeable (spreading the volume work around the week for more frequency, usually go for multiple worksets instead of a single AMRAP set, a lot of autoregulation of volume because available energy and recovery capacity for a guy in my situation varies a lot, etc.)

 

As for my nerd credentials, I guess it was predestined that I become one... back around 1982 or 1983 when I was still in primary school, when the first real wave of home computers hit the market and I was just about in the right age group to be interested, and around the same time I randomly found a big fat book by some dude named Tolkien and was endlessly fascinated by the appendices full of maps and genealogies for realms that didn't even exist... I was done for. A few short years later I stumbled into D&D and so on. My future career necessarily had to involve computers (and it does to this day); my reading necessarily had to involve a lot of nerd-genre crap (and it does to this day); and a major hobby necessarily had to be gaming (and it does to a lesser extent to this day; face-to-face gaming has been put on ice for the foreseeable future due to lack of time, but I still play some computer games on nights when I'm alone watching the sleeping kids, etc.) 

 

Furthermore I've been a metalhead since I was 16 and remain of the opinion that one cannot really be lifting heavy metal crap without also listening to heavy metal crap. 

 

Vital statistics:

Gender: Male

Age: 43

Height: 190 cm

Weight: 120 kg

Dependents: 3 children

Allies: 1 wife

Duties: Full-time office job, moderate flexitime, can work some from home

Equipment: House, car, a few kettlebells, simple barbell/squat rack setup in garage, access to more fully-equipped gym at work

Best-ever lifts:

Press: 85 kg (new PR set just a few weeks ago)

Bench: 140 kg (set back in 2012, cannot currently do this although 130 kg was easy last I tried it a few weeks ago)

Squat: 180 kg (ditto, have managed a double at 170 kg though)

Deadlift: 212.5 kg (might be able to beat this given that I pulled a triple at 205 kg last week, which was a new lifetime 3RM)

[AaHa]

Welcome abaord. What type of metal bands?

[Xenophon]

The short answer would be "too many!"

 

I got into metal right during the Golden Age of thrash, so for the first couple of years it was mostly whatever thrash bands were big at the time, plus some Iron Maiden. Although within a year I'd also stumbled on good old Bathory. Got into death and doom metal in the early 90s, was present during the whole wave of Norwegian Black Metal in that decade... have gone through various phases of interest since then. Favourite subgenres remain thrash, black, death and doom metal; and old-fashioned plain heavy metal. At the moment, for example, I'm spending a lot of time listening to Summoning (an atmospheric black metal band whose entire discography is devoted to Tolkien), Cattle Decapitation (deathgrind), Satan's Host (blackpowerthrash).