Monday 25 February 2013

When Life Goes Sideways

"Don't dwell on what went wrong. Instead, focus on what to do next. Spend your energies on moving forward toward finding the answer."
- Denis Waitley, American motivational speaker and author

We all like to plan stuff, make schedules, mark stuff in calendars, but life seldom goes according to plan, right? What do you do when life goes to h***?
This past week has been a tough one. I've been moving my office and trying to work at the same time--never a good idea. Last weekend, sewage was spewing out of my basement toilet--seriously not good. Most of the week was spent monitoring the disaster cleanup people, making phone calls to my insurance company, and generally wondering how I was going to pay for everything. And just to make the week extra special, I had to put one of my cats to sleep. Zeke was a very old kitty (18!) whose health had been failing for a long time, but I loved him dearly and will miss him a lot.
Zeke

There were no workouts last week. I'm easily overwhelmed by stuff like this and my body decided to cope by just wanting to sleep, so I let it. I finally got my ass to the gym on Saturday morning, where a sweaty Hellcamp Circuit helped me work out some of the stress and sadness.

I'm now way behind in my goal to lift a million pounds by the end of the year, but I've decided not to stress (too much). I think that as I get stronger, I will lift heavier and make up some of the deficit. I also need to add another GS workout to ensure that I'm really ready for the two competitions I have scheduled in May (easier said than done because I'm no spring chicken and I need my rest days). Sigh.

It's Monday and I'm trying to see the coming week as a fresh slate. My office is shaping up and I have almost everything I need to do my job, the basement is clean and minty fresh (courtesy of aerosolized disinfecting enzymes that the disaster cleanup people put into the air), the sewer has been cleaned out and is working again (but still needs to be repaired--$$$), the insurance estimator is coming tomorrow to evaluate the situation, and Zeke is hopefully in a better place (do cats get angel wings?). This week has to be better, right?

"Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did."
- Newt Gingrich, American politician

**Disclaimer: I'm not a Newt Gingrich fan--he's much too conservative and right wing--I just like the quote. In his favour, he supposedly likes animals and is a dinosaur enthusiast. No one is all bad.

Wednesday 13 February 2013

How Much Is a Million Pounds?

"What we face may look insurmountable. But I learned something from all those years of training and competing. I learned something from all those sets and reps when I didn't think I could lift another ounce of weight. What I learned is that we are always stronger than we know."
- Arnold Schwarzenegger

A million pounds is...lots. But this much weight is tough to actually visualize, so here's a list of things that weigh a million pounds (or thereabouts):
  • 40 school buses (a typical school bus weighs 22,000 to 28,000 lbs, so I used 25,000 lbs for ease of calculation)
  • An Airbus A380, currently the world's largest passenger jet, has a maximum takeoff weight of about 1.1 million pounds
  • The Union Pacific Big Boy, one of the largest steam locomotives ever built, weighed 1.2 million pounds with a tender full of water and coal
Source
Other things that weigh a million pounds:
  • About 3 blue whales (a blue whale, the largest mammal on the planet, weighs about 375,000 pounds)
  • About 5 right whales (right whales are smaller than blue whales, weighing on average about 200,000 pounds; also, because I can't resist gratuitous trivia, right whales have the largest testes of any animal--each testicle weighs about 1100 pounds)
Blue Whale: Source
If you want to think of a million pounds from a monetary standpoint, here are the stats:
  • In Canadian pennies (now an extinct species), you would need 193,026, 903 of the 2.35 g coins, or $1,930,269.03
  • In quarters, 103,093,784 of the 4.4 g coins, or $25,773,196
  • In loonies, 72,343,196 of the 6.27 g coins, or $72,343,196
  • In toonies, 65,547,981 of the 6.92 g coins, or $32,773,990
  • And, because my son asked, one million British pounds (pounds in pounds, get it?) would be 47,746,941 of the 9.5 g coins, or $74,485,228 Canadian dollars at the current exchange rate of 1.56
But what about the kettlebells? Kettlebells are typically weighed in kilograms, and one million pounds equals 453,592 kilos, so that's
  • 28,357 x 16 kg (my current competition weight)
  • 25,200 x 18 kg (my competition weight for this fall)
  • 22,686 x 20 kg (sometime in the future...I hope)
That's a lot of stuff to lift.


Sunday 3 February 2013

Getting Started

I've decided to update my progress every month and it's the beginning of February, so here's my January progress report (remember that I started on January 15, so this is really a 2-week update):
  • Total lifted: 22,452 kg = 49,498 kg
  • Percentage of total: 4.95%

Most of the training we've been doing in class is targeted toward the upcoming Foundry Pentathlon competition on May 4, so I will be adding an extra Longcycle workout on Sundays.