Deth

I slept great last night. I fell asleep pretty quickly, and I don’t remember waking up at all last night. As far as I can remember, I only woke up at about 4:00 am to visit the bathroom. Far different from what normally occurs when I go to the bathroom, this time I did not find myself wide wake in bed. I managed to fall back to sleep!

I drank my coffee and enjoyed it very much this morning. I surfed the web a bit and studied some Rust stuff. The thing that kept running through my mind was the fact that I was looking forward to getting back on board with my lifting. I missed a few days last week for various reasons. The main one is waiting around for my girlfriend to be ready to do the team WODs. She wanted the icon, so I couldn’t say no. Unfortunately, they severely limited what was counted and doubled down on the stupidity of the new ones that were counted.

Synchronize this and synchronize that, and do super high reps of dumb exercises like push-ups and drags, which we skipped. Thankfully, we only needed four instead of the twelve from last summer. For me personally, I want to just work out. Even the partner ones when we work out together are fine for me as long as they don’t include the dumb gimmicks. I love doing WODs with Molly when we can, due to space and equipment. She pushes me, and I push her. Not yesterday, but that was due to my circumstances. When they do this team stuff, they seem to double down on the dumb stuff and forget the simple, not-easy stuff.

The bigger issue for me last week was that the stupid cyst near my thumb was really feeling inflamed last week. That was only exasperated by having to do the weird upper body stuff or high reps. It came to a head on Saturday. I think it was when I felt it pop. When that happened, I subbed something else for the kettlebell swings, which caused it, since it always hurts for a few days when that happens. It will feel better, though.

My new keyboard feels so much better to type on. My accuracy shows that. I wonder if that will help keep the cyst away at all. I guess time will tell.

Yesterday afternoon, I did the vault WOD and felt fine. That was pretty heavy on the grip, so I scaled the weight quite a bit and never really felt any issues with my wrist besides a little stiffness while it was warming up. The knees to elbows were fine then, and the hang snatches with the dumbbells also felt fine. I scaled to hang for less flexing of the wrist.

Fast-forward to early this morning, and I decided it was time to get back on board with my lifting. Actually, I wanted to get my bench press or deadlifts in yesterday morning but got preoccupied with something else. Laziness is fine once in a while. Later, I watched the Phillies, so that took the afternoon away. Let me get back to today now. I knew I had the bench press to do, which was going to be the worst on my wrist. Even before I started, I knew I was not going to be aggressive and not make a PR today.

It went a little worse than I expected, though. Even the empty bar felt like it was just off. Often times, when that happens, things improve as the weight increases, but not today! The five at a hundred and forty-five pounds felt okay, but I did feel like I was favoring my left (weaker) side. That’s the opposite of my messed-up wrist. The next set was supposed to be three at a hundred and sixty pounds. That felt really unbalanced, as if I were seriously off center, so I did the smart thing and aborted it after two reps. I thought maybe the first one was a bad rep. There will be another day! The bench press just felt extremely odd this morning. I have never had it feel odd like that, or any other lift, for that matter. Things just didn’t seem to be firing properly.

While the wrist doesn’t feel inflamed any longer, it does feel a little weaker. I’m sure that my brain is subconsciously avoiding it for that reason, and that’s why I’m feeling unbalanced. Now I get the fun internal debate of whether I will increase or lower the weight of my next cycle. That will all depend on how the wrist feels by next week. I know that I should have made four or five reps at my final AMRAP working set today without the issues that I was having today.

I relaxed for a little while, then went ahead and did the deadlifts from last week. I thought they wouldn’t bug my wrist too much, and since the bench press was such a bust, why not give them a shot?

These deadlifts felt tons better right from the start. Most importantly, I was not favoring anything. I worked my way up through the lighter weights pretty quickly. I slowed down for the last couple of heavy sets purposefully, or, shall we say, I at least tried to take longer rest periods? The five reps at two hundred and thirty pounds felt great. Next up, the set of three reps at two hundred and sixty pounds felt great too. They certainly felt heavy, but not an impending failure type of heavy. Last up for this morning was the final AMRAP for one plus deadlifts at two hundred and ninety pounds. I got one rep pretty easily and stopped at that. Why risk pissing off my grip? There will be better days than today to push things.

I was happy with my deadlifts today and accepting of the bench press given the circumstances. The fact that I am in my later forties and can still move weight is a huge plus. I didn’t even start taking care of myself physically until about ten years ago.