22x by 4!

This is the fourth morning in a row that my weight has started with 22. Last night, before bed, I foolishly weighed myself, and I was just a little into 230. I seem to respirate and urinate about two pounds over an average night, so I wasn't terribly worried. My official weigh-in time is after my morning shower, so last night doesn't count! Last night I ate more than a dozen half-sized kit-kat bars along with two hot dogs and some general tso's chicken from 328 I have more chicken, and tomorrow is cake. It is going to be hard to keep that 22x going. But I want to try, as I'm getting close to a week at 22x.

No major bike rides have taken place. The weather has been oppressive. My tendon in my right arm still hurts, though I'm not sure I've talked about it before. It is slowly getting better. It doesn't seem to hurt it to do barbell rows anymore. I am standing and walking more in general, though not tracking my daily step counts.

As for lifting, I'm at 115 pounds now. Squats are the only one that isn't a problem, but at this weight they do keep me quite sore every day of the week. I can do the reps on everything but the overheads. I can actually overhead 115, but generally only one rep. Over the weekend I did three sets of 1, 1, and 2. Last night I did 2 just to prove I could. Wednesday I will theoretically try to 5x5.

I am very tempted to buy access to the swimming pool and go swimming a lot.

Lifting And Riding

I've only tried one bike ride since my last posting. It was a failure. The wind was 30 to 35 mph and against me on the uphill route. I didn't make it more than a few miles, and I had to stop and rest twice. On the plus side, it was an hour of very hard work, even if my mileage doesn't show it. I felt accomplished enough afterwards.

I've been lax about writing down daily steps from my pedometer. My trip log is 421970 steps for 100 days of counting, so over that 100 days I've walked about 40% as much as I should have.

Today I successfully did five sets of five reps of 110 pound overhead presses. The squats and deadlifts (+50 pounds) have been doable at that weight for a while now. It's the overheads that kill me. The alternate day is squats, bench press, and barbell rows, and I've already succeeded at 110 pounds on that day. So Wednesday I'm looking at 115 pound squats, bench presses, and barbell rows. The rows are getting hard too. Soon they might limit me as much as the overhead press does. If I tried I could probably squat a lot more weight than 115 pounds, bench more than 115 pounds, and deadlift more than 165 pounds. Rows and overheads are my downfall.

I've been thinking of working out more days, but the alternate days would be at drastically reduced weight. I did it a couple of times with overhead press, and I really think it helped me.

Water Canyon Turn Off

So back on Monday, February 4th, I bicycled out to the turn off to Water Canyon. It looks like my route was right at 30 miles round trip, still guessing about 2000' of elevation gain.

My speed was improved. When I rode to the top of Sedillo Hill I seem to remember it took me about 2 hours. This time, I hit the Water Canyon Campground at almost exactly two hours. It took almost exactly one hour to return home.

When I stopped I still felt good. Really good. But I had gone quite a ways, and I had to go all the way home. So it seemed like a good idea to turn around there. Shortly thereafter I crashed hard. About the time I reached Box Canyon on the way back I felt like I had reached the end of my rope and was just going to collapse. So I coasted more, instead of pedaling downhill, and that helped a lot.

Monday night I successfully did my 5x5 StrongLifts routine for squat/overhead/deadlift at 100/100/150 pounds. Considering how hard it was to get through overheads at 85, 90, and 95 pounds, the fact that I did 100 pounds my first attempt is pretty amazing.

I ended last weeks 20 mile ride and this weeks thirty mile ride with a numb penis. So I adjusted my seat to be more nose-down. Hopefully it won't happen again.

I had talked about riding to Langmuir, or Magdalena, but I've become excited about the prospect of riding to Datil. I've only tried to ride to Datil from Socorro once. We (myself plus Bob Broilo and Phil De Cat) left at midnight from ice blocking party. We fought a strong headwind for six hours, and only made it as far as Magdalena. We decided to turn around, and within an hour we were at Denny's in Socorro. One memorable moment on that trip was past the top of Sedillo Hill, when someone pulled out a bag of fig newtons to snack on. The wind lifted all the fig newtons out of the package and they sailed away into the night.

My weight hasn't really gone down any.