It's been a while since I have written here. I have no reason except to say that life just got away from me. Anyway Happy New Year! (Do you realize that we are already 10% of the way through 2013?)
Last week we had a workout that I really wanted to nail RX'd, but I instead DNF'd. 5-4-3-2-1 275-pound deadlifts and muscle-ups. The deadlifts were actually quite easy for me--it was the muscle-ups I struggled with. I'm not positive why that is. Maybe the rope climbs and the ball slams we did the day before had taxed my arms and I was still sore/weakened. Maybe it was the heavy push presses we did earlier in the workout, just a few minutes before we started this delectable deadlift/muscle-up combo.
Overall it might have been all the time I have spent in Strength over the past 6 months. I put on a decent amount of mass in my lower body as my squat numbers went up (365-pound deadlift, 300-pound back squat ass-to-grass) but my upper body might not have been keeping up. I've been doing muscle-ups strict for the past year, which is actually a very different movement from doing them with a kip--which was how I got my first muscle-ups. A kip might require less pure strength, but it does require timing and coordination that wasn't there for me anymore.
Anyway I got the first 4 muscle-ups in one set, and then did the 5th. I got through the first 2 rounds of the workout and then as time was running out, I did the remaining 6 deadlifts touch-and-go.
I still couldn't leave well enough alone though. I stayed even while the Foundations class was coming in to finish the remaining muscle-ups. My forearms were aching and I was hardly getting anywhere--I think I got 1 muscle-up after several misses--and I haven't missed muscle-ups in a while. Finally I saw that this just wasn't working and all I was doing was risking hurting myself, and I gave up and went home.
One thing people might not know about me is that I can be very intense. It shows up occasionally in Strength class. For as hard as we work there, the atmosphere is actually quite laid-back. When we are doing 10 sets of 3 squats, a lot of people will be laughing and joking between sets. I just can't do that. I stare at my bar like a psycho. And I am obsessed with getting full-depth each rep. I'm not sure if that is good or bad really--I mean it's just a workout and we're not professional athletes forcrissakes, but each set is tough for me. I need to focus.
I'm not like this in every area of my life, but I am in a few areas of my life that I deem really important to me at the moment.
It has served me well though. I can focus really really hard on a goal and achieve it against the odds. But I can also take things too personally. (I'm now talking life in general.) The thing is, I've gotten so much better through the years in having my intensity serve me. I've gotten better in just giving it all that I have--and then accepting that there are things that I don't control, that the sun will come up tomorrow regardless, that it's not such a huge deal, and letting it go regardless.
