To...

 ...be pleased with one’s limits is a wretched state.

            -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Travel, fun, work, injuries, death, more work....not in that order but life get in the way occasionally. It's ok, I've come through. It reminds me of how the Roman's were ransacked throughout it's existence. In one particularly effective siege of Rome, the population just flat out refused to give in. The concept is this, "You steal the victory from the victor by not admitting defeat." It's like talking shit after tapping or better yet, he lets go because you didn't tap and your arm is hanging there by a chunk of your gi. It pisses off your opponent and you may get beaten again and again, but by not admitting defeat....somehow you win. I do not advocate this behavior in BJJ...yet for some reason, in life, it's what I live by. A big gigantic F U to the world when the sky falls around me. Life will win eventually, but I'm not going to admit it.

Today Mini-Brock txt'd me and asked if it was time. He said he wasn't ready...why? Because he was busy dropping a deuce and didn't know if he would be on time. Dude!

I just bought a new spiffy badass watch. A Garmin Forerunner 305. It tracks heartrate vs GPS! Now CSI can tell the exact moment and location of my heart attack while running from mountain people in the Ozarks.

I fired up my SpaceMan Spiff watch and the three of us walked exactly 1 mile. As you can see from the Garmin diagram below we walked a fast Speed Zone 2, even tapping into Speed Zone 3, woo hoo. Interestingly, my heart rate didn't do shit during the walk. Yet, as you can see, when I stopped walking it spiked to 120! That was because I had to demo the exercises of the day. All 8 of them!

 

Here's what we did:

One minute of each, no breaks.

1. Lateral pushup walks (about 6 feet), then a pushup at each ends of the walk.

2. Rear somersault rolls to the back of our heads, then roll forward to your feet and jump straight up.

3. Rear crab, arms straight. Legs bent, body flat. Lift one knee to chest then the other. -- fast
4. Lateral jumps over shit
5. Alternating sandbag shoulder presses (from one to the other) -- hop to get the whole body involved
6. Rings, climb, hand over hand, no legs.
7. Back shoulder walk with atlas ball on gut
8. Turkish get ups with sand bag on shoulder

Each exercise is really easy...on their own. Once you hit about the 22 second mark, shit starts to break down and you feel like you have to poop. Not nice poop, but explosive death poop.

From the diagram you can clearly see the 8 minute run I had. Starting at 83.6 bpm and slamming up to 165.2 bpm at the end. It reduces rapidly and nearly back to normal at the 10 minute mark. The goal is to reduce the recovery time. By what I've read, recovery rates are a true measure of performance and now I have a way of testing this. Also, according to theory, 185 is my maximum heart rate for my age. I remember charting my heartrate last year and routinely hitting 188. So maybe theory is correct!

Here's some images(click for bigger versions):

 

The Chart

The Face

The Weight

The Arm

The Jump

The...uh WTF??

The Pain

The Birth of an Alien Atlas Ball

Later,

Mark