bradl’s weight training

I barely made it to dinner this evening, but it didn’t really matter because tonight it was beef lasagna and bread. The meals tend to be meat and starch, but heavy on the starch, pasta and potatoes. Not much for vegheads, especially ones looking for veg sources of protein, but today I heard that "special" meals can be requested. If I knew that I would be able to get to the meals, then that might be worth looking into. Now that the sun has come out and the equipment is getting ready, my structured days may be coming to an end. Someone plugged in a battery charger that only takes 110V into a 220V socket (through a converter) today and fried it. Shhh. That’s the kind of thing that’s not supposed to be out to "the public", but it’s a small set back in our progress.

After an after-dinner break, I went to the gym again. The sun came out while I was there, about 2015. It’s supposed to be good weather for the next few days, which means it won’t be overcast and dreary during that time, but off and on sunny. It’s nice that the weather won’t be dreary, but the bad part is that my dorm room is on the north side of the building. The sun shines from the north during the night. I have a sleep mask, but still.

Today was back and biceps day at the gym, so deadlifts, pulldowns, rows, shrugs, and curls. The deadlifts seemed hard. I converted from pounds to kilograms, but they seemed hard anyway. I’ve gone back to basically Tony’s program because it’s simpler than the trainer’s assortment of exercises. With the bench, the universal weight station, and the small dumbbells, I was able to do everything without the need of the resistance tubing.

There are about 160 people here now, but I was the only one in the gym, well, there were two guys playing badminton in the open, court space. One day I expect to walk in and the weight station will be mobbed.

The dogs and terns are making a racket outside, but don’t know why.

After dinner today I came back to my room and cropped and shrunk the better of the pictures I’ve taken so far and emailed them home, finally. After a suitable break after eating, I went to the gym and did my version of cardio, getting all sweaty, then suited up to go outside again. It’s about 3-5deg C out there, so not really cold, but wearing the overpants and coats was … annoying with the sweaty part.

This morning when I was out waiting for the truck to take me out to our work site, I was reading some of the signs and was dive bombed by one of the arctic terns. They are nesting now and very territorial. It was coming at me squawking with its mouth open facing me, then I turned around and walked away, but not fast enough. It kept swooping over me and one time pecked me on the head (hood of my coat actually). The pecking almost happened back in Longyearbyen too. This tern I didn’t see before it started chasing me.

I don’t have much training stuff to write about, so I may be doing more digressing into travel stuff in the coming weeks. I don’t write this blog for self-motivation, it’s mostly to record my training experiences, but I digress as well.

We arrived in Ny Alesund on Wed morning, checked into our rooms, got settled there, checked out the town and where we are going to be working.

A few of us checked out the gym, which has been upgraded since 2005, the date of the picture I found of it. They have a better "universal gym", multi-station than they had before. It has a leg press part, but nothing for squats. I thought about going over there Wed evening, because I had time, but still have a lot of jet lag and expected to take a few days off from training because of that, which was part of why I took no breaks the last couple weeks. I have the resistance tubing and the gym may be a better option. I’m still wondering about my end-of-day energy level and time availability, but will see how it goes.

The rest of this is not training related.

It’s a basically a research campus. We are staying in an apartment building. Each room is like a dorm room and has a twin-size bed, closet, small desk, small bathroom (sink, toilet, shower). They say this building is the newest and nicest of the visitor residences. Other buildings have shared baths or shared rooms. We are mostly 40-plus-year-old men, and that doesn’t go over well.

The shower area is the corner of the bathroom where the shower head and the curtain pulls around. The floor is somewhat lower within the curtain perimeter, but the water knows no bounds. There is a squeegee in the bathroom to "dry" the floor. I wasn’t sure what it was for before I took a shower, but AFTERWARDS, yeah, I put two and two together.

The town area is flat, but the surroundings are not. The town is on the shore of a bay. Across the bay are mountains, at the east end are two glaciers, above the town are more mountains. Most of the snow cover has melted in the last week or two. A few patches remain in the town and on the mountains.

A while back Jason asked how useful or valuable the visits with the trainer have been for me. I haven’t seen her in a few weeks because of my work schedule, but I’m bout done with the visits I paid for.

She reviewed my form, provided an exercise program to follow, and demonstrated a number of the exercises for resistance tubing / cord that I hope to do in the coming weeks here in Svalbard. The program was a four-day split with alternating 6-8 and 8-10 each week. That was a useful experiment to try, but I don’t think the time with her was worth the expense.

She thought that experiment would be a way to keep my muscles guessing by mixing things up. Having tried it for seven weeks, not eight because of this travel, I can see that the muscles don’t care, it’s just work, but the brain gets messed up. Is it six or eight reps, maybe I can do seven or nine because I’m not sure how much I can do with this weight? It’s in the brain not the muscle.

Joesant also asked about the protein bars bought for the trip. I like the Pure Protein (chocolate peanut butter) and Detour (caramel peanut) ones but not the Carb Conscious Supreme Protein (peanut butter crunch). The latter have a thick caramel and are chewy so they don’t chew and dissolve well, but get stuck between my teeth. I have to remember to eat something after them to clean it up.

Last I wrote I was about to go out of town for a trip. That trip happened but I only had time for the gym there once, but squeezed in all my workouts when I came back. We were supposed to have another trip the week after, which didn’t happen, but I kept working out with no rest days as the schedule for the big trip kept getting pushed back a day or two again and again. All those delays wore out my patience when I don’t want to go on this trip in the first place. My last workout was the morning of 5 Jul. That evening was the flight to Longyearbyen, Svalbard, which is a "state" of Norway. I’ll be in Ny Alesund for the next month. Ny Alesund is at about 79d N 12d E. They supposedly can only work us 14-h days, on working days, but I don’t know how many of those there will be. I hope to make it to the little gym on off days.

On these trips with my PDA, I can’t log into BB.com, so can’t post blog entries or leave comments in my name, so I had discounting using it while on travel, especially if I can’t work out, so have no training-related stuff to write. Once our equipment arrives, apparently, I’ll be living with one of the laptops and can send this then. Another snag was that any blog posts are supposed to be coordinated through the project manager and censored, I mean filtered before release but I decided that’s for the project web site’s blog and not personal ones. I’ll try not to write too much about project stuff.

One thing I have to get used to is the Norwegian kroner, which is about 6.3 kroners per dollar, so the numbers are large.

Before I left I finished reading "This Charming Man", by Marian Keyes. The most interesting quote is from Grace, a journalist, who thinks: "It felt immoral to celebrate a woman who earned a shockingly large amount of money from the frivolous business of pretending to be other people."

Last week I saw a news article online about the scrawny guy who dieted and exercised to have visible abs as his primary goal. Fitness people commented on him because he didn’t do much for his health and fitness, but just to have visible abs. I don’t have Rippetoe’s book with me, but he wrote about that mentality, something like: you have to build the refrigerator before you can put the six pack in it.

On the plane I read an article in Fitness RX about the effects of combining aerobic and resistance training in the same session. The conclusion was that the combination, either cardio before or after caused interference in the anabolic effect, so it’s better to do the two types of training separately. However, following lifting with cardio reduces appetite, so doing them together helps with fat loss.