Stryka’s BodyBlog

Well I stuffed it, pulled out after 5km….

 Are you kidding me, Just messing with you all Surely you should know by now that I don’t quit anything and certainly not after all the hard work in preparation.

 My Day started around 6 with a quick bite and a coffee. A check of the website shows 9 degrees c in town and a balmy 0.4 degrees celcius at the summit. Bugger that means I am going to be too hot for most of the race and freezing the last 3km. My goals today are to not walk (except past the drink stations, I am not that coordinated) and a time of 2hrs30 for a pass with a stretch target of 2hr20.

8am sees us start. I stay half way towards the back. Don’t get too excited yet there is a long way to go. Race plan is to settle in a nice rhythym until 8 1/2kms to go, drag my ass through the steepest bit until 2km and then see how I go from there.

2km in already starting to see a couple of people stop to walk, gonna be a long day for them! I am feeling good, the rain has held off as I weave through the traffic. At the 8km mark I hit the slower walkers who had an hour head start on us. I reach the turnoff from Ferntree on to the mountain road, 57minutes gone. The only other time I had run that section it took 60mins. Ahead of schedule, I still feel good just our usual sunday run to go and I am running to plan.

I then start hitting the walkers. Hit the springs at a time of 1hr24 right on schedule. starting to heat up a fair bit, why did I wear the jumper? 8 1/2 to go. On the way to the chalet the sun comes out and I am really starting to warm up. Hit the chalet at 1hr 50min. I no longer have the ability to work out if that is on track or not. 4kms to go. I can do that in half an hour surely?

Getting cold again now, glad I have my jumper, cloud has descended over us and the wind has picked up. I feel good mentally but my legs are really tightened up. Not long till I finish. Fight it all the way to the end. Is that the finish in sight. Push hard Ryan, you don’t have to worry about tommorow.

 I finish in …… 2hrs 15 minutes 40 seconds at an even faster pace than my shorter training runs! Very happy with the time.

The winner was some Kenyan bloke who ambled it in a lazy 1hr28 so that gives you some idea of where I am.

Gotta run to catch my plane now. Thankyou all to have supported my journey. I won’t be able to get on to bb.com much over the next two weeks but I will return with a new challenge. Not sure what yet.

Well there is now less than twelve hours before the race starts. All sorts of thoughts are going through my mind now. Have I trained enough? Am I prepared? The thought frequentally goes through my mind that I have never run the full distance before, let alone up a mountain. Not too much I can do about that now. It is what it is.

The last few days have been good, I have tried to get a lot of complex carbs and protein in. I am well rested, I feel like I have energy to spare, my only niggle is that I have a dull ache in my quads. Should be fine though, is probably more from a lack of training this past week more than anything.

 I am a little bit concerned about the weather, the forecast for hobart is morning showers and 15C. Which sounds like providing the rain holds off pretty good running conditions. But that is Hobart and the conditions around the pinnacle will be very different. Apparently what they do in bad conditions is turn the race around before the top. I will be absolutely gutted if they do but I think it has to be pretty bad (like our last training run!) before they do that.

Lastly thankyou to you all who have supported and encouraged me in my preparation. Like I have said before the best thing about bodyspace is the diverse range of people all with the belief in themselves to be the best they can. Very hard to be negative when you surround yourself with people like that.

I remember when I was a young boy of about 6 or 7, my father took me and my elder sister for a walk to the summit of Mt Amos here in Tas. It wasn’t a particularly strenuous trip but the thing that I still remember to this day was that I guess at that age the only thing I could imagine as climbing up a mountain would be climbing up rocks and cliffs. So when we left the car park and had strolled along a track through the bush for about half an hour I was starting to wonder when we would get to the mountain climbing. I asked my Dad this and he simply said "Turn around and look". I turned around and to my amazement we were already a long way up and I could see for miles. How does this relate to our training?

Sometimes it is easy to get discouraged when you feel like you have had a lack of progress because you have been so focussed on the journey that you forget how far you’ve come. For example I remember the first time I dead lifted 100kg and how happy I was to break that milestone. I also know how much happier I was when I picked up 200kg.

I remember when I first loaded 160kg onto the leg press sled I asked for the attendant to give me a spot because I couldn’t my mind couldn’t imagine moving that much iron and I was scared of being stuck underneath it. My Current PR is 380kg.

I remember struggling to break under 12% bf. For the life of me I didn’t think I could do it. I now sit at 7.7% Lastly I remember our first mountain run 4 or 5 months ago. We only did 6kms up before turning around and I didn’t think I could go much further up. Sunday I am going to run up 21.4km. Sea level to the summit 1300m above.

I still have a long way to go but by reflecting on these achievements it helps me to take the next step forward knowing that inch by inch I can achieve my goals. What have you achieved on the way?

Well I gave in and went to the gym this afternoon. I had sort of planned to anyway but I did take it easy and just did a pretty boy mirror muscles workout consisting of incline bench, pec dec, tricep pushdowns, dumbell shoulder press and laterals, bicep curls and abs. Weights were kept about medium to med/heavy but sets and reps were short so it wasn’t too intense and nothing for the legs. There were some guys using the squat rack (yeah I was surprised that someone else actually uses it too!) and I thought about throwing in a couple of sets for good measure but I resisted.

At the moment the long range forecast for sunday is rain easing and a max of 15degrees C. Not exactly promising but here in Hobart the forecast can change in half an hour let alone 4 days.

Only 6 Sleeps to go until the race. I haven’t trained since friday night and even that was half hearted. It is killing me. I know I need to rest up for sunday though but that will take even more discipline from me than anything else.

Seriously how do people survive without going to the gym. I pity those poor soles who have never felt the satisfaction of successfully picking up a barbell loaded with plates in a deadlift or the ego trip when someone says that you "obviously spend a lot of time in the gym" or people that don’t realise that your body can look like whatever you want it to through hard work and consistancy (my crooked nose is a different story however lol.)

Thankyou to all who have supported me up to now. I will try and post between now and sunday if I think of something to say but usually these posts start with what I have done in the gym or on the road and go off on a tangent from there but if I haven’t trained then who knows? There will definatly be a post race blow by blow account asap after the race.

Goodnight.

Today has been a complete rest day of which I will probably have quite a few over the next week. For those that have come in late to the story here is the half marathon that I will run in next sunday.

Well tonight was back to normal at the gym, just the usual handful of lifters when I got there at 7. Oh except for reverse shrugger on the chest press machine kid was there. I swear that kid does like 50 reps per set over a 2 inch range of motion on every machine.

Well I was only there in body tonight, definatly not spirit. My plan was to just do a couple of light sets, some core work and then some treadmill time although after reading Anya’s blog I am going to have to be careful of that because I am definatly a pounder. I don’t wheeze though?

Tonight I did some light close grip declines then tried 21’s using the pec deck. I use them all the time on barbell curls to great effect but it had never occured to me to try it on anything else. I have to say though that I am not sold on it. It hurt but it probably was more arm sore than pec sore. Might have to try it on a full chest day after next week.

I then did some core work and lost all motivation whatsoever. Does standing on the Bosu ball talking count as working? and instead of running I did a lazy 15 mins on the exercise bike and then I thought I would try the elliptical machine and then I got bored and went home. Not very interesting at all. 

Today I was planning to do another easy run but for some reason my legs were really stiff. From what I don’t know, I only ran easy back on tuesday and haven’t trained legs since some easy squats last wednesday. Maybe my legs are just used to being sore on a thursday??? It was also 30degrees Celsius (86 f) and really windy so I blew it off. Tomorrow is only going to be 18 degrees so if it isn’t raining I will run tomorrow.

Anywho tonight was Hero night at the gym. I walked in and it was full of Bogans. A Bogan is an Australia term to describe someone kind of like Kath and Kim ( and for the record if you were on the 3 americans who watched that show as an Australian I sincerly apologise!) Typically you will find a bogan hanging out in Bus Malls and Shopping Centre carparks doing very little except abusing innocent passers by. Tonight there were quite a few of these bogans in my gym. I don’t know maybe the warm weather brings them out???

 There was one in particular that made me laugh and gave me the shits at the same time. I walked over to the pull up bar as it was back night and he was one the pec deck machine. One thing that annoys me more than most other things is people who make the Pssst noise as they lift and I could here this hero over my MP3 player. I understand that a lot of people exhale in the possitive portion of a movement but are you a turbo that needs a blow off valve? No! Are you a snake hissing? No you are not so why on earth do some people feel the need to Pssst as they train. I can understand (not necessarily approve of but I do understand) a grunt but to make the Pssst noise you are deliberately taking your own focus off your exercise to make a stupid noise. Why?

My only explanation is that it is simply a "look at me" noise. "Look at how much of a hero I am with my puny weights (you can’t lift heavy whilst Pssting, It is impossible) I must be good because I make a stupid noise"

 And to top it off because the gym was busy as I was doing T-bar rows I had a younger version of ShanBL’s Shorty Shorts man come and plonk himself right on a bench 2 feet in front of me. In his defence he wasn’t as bad as ShanBL’s and there was nothing wrong with his training, I just didn’t need to be looking at his shorty shorts.

I did a few more exercises than I have been doing but ditch deadlifts for the next two weeks workout was:

Pullups: Warm up of 10, added 10kg plate for 4 sets of 6

Tbar rows: Worked up to three sets of 8 with 70kg

Lat Pulldowns: 3 sets 8 x 90kg, dropset of 45kg

Seated one arm rows: 3 sets 10 x 60 kgs

First of all thanks everyone for the responses to tuesdays post. I am very excited about it all. But today I am going to talk about something completly different that has gotten me a little bit perplexed. I have been meaning to get myself a new suit for work for a little while and have been putting it off until I knew when I would start working again.

So I go into this store that is aimed at a younger market and the find a suit in the colour I like and try and find my size. Now I don’t believe that I am exceptionally big across the shoulders and arms (yet) so why would the jacket that fits (just) come with pants that I could fit two of me in around the waist???? Does this mean the youth of Australia are becoming a nation of puny armed fatties? I would of thought that clothes were designed for someone my shape. And the clown (who was a little bit too much in touch with his feminine side) who was assisting me wouldn’t let me swap the pants for a different size.

Then I went into a different store and my faith was restored. I walk in and right in front of me is the colour I wanted. The sales lady measured my waist and then went here this one will fit you (how she knew what size jacket would fit me by measuring my waist size has got me completly bamboozled) but the suit fit perfectly!

No running wednesday but I did a full arm workout just holding back on the weight a little. I did:

Weighted dips with 2 plates 3 x 6 reps

Close Grip Bench 75kg 4 x 10 reps

Cable pull downs to failure

Dumbell Curls 50pds 3 x 10 reps

Barbell Curls 20kg 2 x 20 reps

cable rope hammer curls to failure

2 sets of hanging leg raises

2 sets of windscreen wipers

2 sets of bosu ball crunches

prone hold on bosu ball with feet elevated

spiderman push ups on bosu ball with feet elevated.

Today was a good day, something I haven’t mention in my blogging yet is that back in August the bank that I worked for decided to restructure it’s financial advice department (even though we were one of the most profitable parts of the bank) and I got a tap on the shoulder. I wont get into a rant about whether it was a good decision for them or not (other than that they smell like poo) but one thing I did take heart in was that they didn’t do it based on me personally or my performance, everyone with my job title got the sack.

I had tried to stay pretty positive about the whole thing as up until now qualified financial advisors were in pretty short supply so I was pretty confidant of picking up something fairly quickly. Well the weeks wore on and by today I was starting to feel a bit down about where I was going to find work. I had interviewed with 2 of the 3 other main banks and one decided not to hire anyone and the other I hadn’t heard back from. I had met with a few other boutique practices and most of the responses where "we would hire you…. but we don’t have a position" Don’t people realise that with this sort of economy is when people most need good unbiased advice and also when people will actually admit that they don’t have time to understand their superannuation (401k for you Americans) and an absolutely brilliant opportunity to build relationships with your clients. Sure there will be some uncomfortable conversations about investment performance but that is what I am/was paid for to help people reach their long term financial goals.

ANywho today I got a phone call back from the bank that I had interviewed with and they offered me a job which means that through the whole story I got a nice redundancy payout that I can now spend some, a payrise, plus now I have the opportunity to earn monthly bonuses and I got 3 months off that I spent focussing on my training and getting my diet a lot better. Downside I have to go to Sydney for 2 weeks for an induction and my flights will be the afternoon of the 23rd of nov. The point to pinnacle is the morning of the 23rd. It is going to be a long day!

 Tonight I did a medium session on shoulders which felt good and a easy 4km in 19:28 on the tready.

And I won lotto tonight - about $30