First Day Blues

Well, actually, not so blue. First session with Will this morning, I’m sure Heffernan will put up my scores and reps soon enough but basically it was tough, really tough but enjoyable.

I started this morning at 7am cleaning my house for a viewing to see if someone wants to buy it. You can’t make it up, if you’d have told me 10 years ago that I would be polishing a fucking chrome kettle so people would buy my house one day I would have laughed at you. But there I was, smothering with a cold at 7.30 doing just that. Gotta be done though. I was hoping that the fact that I couldn’t breathe was down to that morning feeling of having a cold, but it didn’t go away so I really wasn’t looking forward to banging out 100m intervals on the rower, climbing the stairs was bringing me to a cold sweat.

The first set on the rower was poxy. 100m pulls for your best time with a rest of 30 seconds. The lactate kicked in on around interval 6 and I was seriously fucked getting off the machine. Unfortunately, even the rest periods were timed so long before I was ready to go, I was back on my feet and stumbling down to do the first work block which was bodyweight deadlift, pull ups and push ups in a ratio of 2-1-4. The goal was basically to get around as many times as I could in ten minutes, with the ultimate goal being high reps accumulated in the ten minutes. This was a disaster, deads became hard but manageable after the 5th round, push ups were okay but my pull ups were, as expected, horrible and really held the rest of my session back. I was informed later that this was actually part of the purpose, that the ratio set for me was that of a balanced athlete, but because I lack back strength, the pull ups hold back the rest of the movements. At one point I stood up for the pulls after doing my 4 deads really fast to try to make up time and I thought I was going to see breakfast again. Turns out it was just a burp. Anyway, I finished this with about 50% of my target reps completed.

A quick lie down, and then I’m back on the rower with just 2 minutes rest. This time my rest period was 45 seconds, so more recovery and I felt the benefit as there was little or no lactic feeling this time. I felt more powerful from the off and I think I kept all of these below my benchmarks fromthe first pulls. Again, another all too fucking short lie down on the treadmill track and then back up for goblet squats, inverted rows and one arm kettlebell presses in a ratio of 4:2:2 (each arm on the press). Again, it was as many in the ten minutes as possible. It sounds silly but one of the worst parts of this was getting back on my feet after the inverted rows, I had to climb over the bench that was supporting my feet and it sucked. So much so that I actually began to come up with ways to avoid stepping over it. Ghey. In the middle of this one I thought I was sufferring a little but then I just realised I was being a poof and feeling sorry for myself, so I upped it and finished much stronger but still wound up with a score 50% off my target.

No rest for the idiotic though and it was back on the rower for the last set which had a full minute’s break between 100s. I kept these fairly low except for a really stinky 19.9 when I slipped off the seat a bit. On the last one, I think Heffernan got it on video he had the camera at the end anyway, I went balls to the wall and got it sub 19 for the first time since the first set of rows of the day. Think it was 18.6 which is still shit. The only thing I can think of now is why I couldn’t pull that on the first interval on those? I suppose there’s a thing about your last one you always want to finish big, and a natural caution on your first few that you don’t want to be fucked for the rest of them, but I think the next time I do this session I’ll try harder to go all out from the off.

So in summary, it sucked, I almost took a ride on the vomit comet and my scores will probably be beaten by the next 12 year old who walks in but on the plus side I thought I would be screwed cos of my cold but after the first set of rows it stopped bothering me. What I most liked about the session was the rationale, a little too complex to go into here. Anyone who knows me has probably had The Conversation About Fitness with me and will know how stupid I think most methods are. A lot of the time it’s just intense for intensity’s sake, not a bad thing as part of a programme, but mostly people are just being stupid. They see someone’s programme and they add 10% and think that’s the way to go. I said this to Heffernan before about watching a Munster match before, and just focussing on one of the backs for 5 minutes, I think it may have been Doug Howlett. In a particularly intense period, he got through some amount of sprinting, rucking, tackling and grappling. I know that fighting and rugby have different requirements, but for me they’re not that different and while there may have been some breaks for Howlett that a fighter wouldn’t get, we could all do with his power and ability to sustain and re use that power over a given time. I know it’s not like with like, Howlett is a former All Black, an elite athlete, but I bet you wouldn’t find him doing some of the fatiguing stuff fighters do. I’d bet right now in training he’s focussing on quality over quantity every time. How many fighters can say they do the same?