HOW IT USED TO BE, HOW IT IS

I wanted to blog about how much my days changed since last Summer: the long hours at work, the double schedule of teaching and practicing as a lawyer, with some translations thrown in for good measure. 

But I won't. 

Some things change, some others don't. I'll tell you about the second ones. 

I still want to train and to get strong, even if I don't climb on rock basically anymore.  

Temps are still awful. Luckily humidity is high... As my sense of humour. 

I still want to tweak my routines, namely the foot-on campusing, so I added 2 kg and switched to old, flat shoes instead of downturned ones. Train heavy, climb light. Still working the full crimp.

I am still a cool motherfucker. Or at least I try to be.

On the side of the many changes, I introduced some Finishers to my training. 

What is a Finisher? As the name suggests, it's something that terminates your session. What the name does not suggest, is that a Finisher terminates your session by terminating you. After a well done excercise, or series of excercises, you should be lying on the ground, crying for your mamma to make you dinner and put you to bed. You don't look at your bulging muscles eager to go out for a drink and some girls, you just lay there and cry. 

A Finisher has to be very short in duration (less than 10 minutes they say, but just 6 minutes leave me properly finished) and very high in intensity. Being performed at the end of the session, with muscles already fatigued and poor in glycogen, these excercises creat a very high metabolic stress that induces, teamed with proper eating, anabolism and fat loss. Yay! 

For my finisher I chose to perform two excercises, back to back, in two sets of 2 minutes followed by two sets of 1 minute. I do Spider Crawls and a complex of Half Squat, Biceps Curl and Overhead Press. All with a 6 kg weightvest, that I wear under my sauna jacket. Just 6 minutes in total, but I can assure you that they are some very, very long 6 minutes. They seem to last an eternity. 

You, my dear reader, may be sitting there wondering why I still keep training so hard, instead of dedicating my time to (enjoying) climbing: I'll tell you why. 

Beyond trivial matter-of-fact reasons (hours to go to the boulders, lack of doable projects, etc.), the main reason is: Delusions of Grandeur. 

No, not the famous boulder problem. The other problem. The mental problem. 

I can't be the best at climbing, so I want to be the strongest. I don't mean overall best and strongest, like in the world (I'd like though); I mean the best I can be. The strongest I can be. 

To be the best I can be at climbing, I would need to climb loads. I should travel to many destinations, try many problems on different rock types, different prehensions, different angles (from 45° onwards). Refine my technique. 

But I can't. I have no time and no money. At least for the moment. 

So I want to be the strongest, because I have time and tools for this. 

I can't be the best I can be without being very very strong. I could simply go climbing and punter around, maybe even have some fun. 

I don't want to. I want to be as strong I can be, ready to seize the opportunity, if it will ever dawn on me, to try and be the best I can be.
Luckily, I don't even care about if and when I'll be able to create this opportunity: as I've said so many times, I love training as a goal in itself, and sometimes, the more useless it is, the more I enjoy it. 

Finally, I got an MR for my left knee, and it showed a tear in the posterior horn of my medial meniscus. I will need surgery to fix it, still don't know which kind of: it's not too bad, so they could simply file the damaged part off, or cut it off, or stitch it, or combinations of the above. Recovery times will depend on which one they'll choose.