I want to get married now so that I can have a cake made of cheese.
So I may be accidentally leading a guy on/ giving the wrong impression.
I’m pretty friendly with most the guys that squat at the campus gym. It’s a small gym at a tiny school, I’m the only girl I ever see that squats & they just like to see other people doin’ work. I usually chat with them a bit. One in particular is super nice & pretty damn strong. I’ve asked him for advice in the past about deadlift form and whatnot. He told me that there’s a group of people that like to do strongman type training on Saturday mornings and that he’d been meaning to go and would I like to come. Strongman stuff looks awesome and I know they have a sled and tires and other cool stuff so I said yes. It hasn’t happened yet but I gave him my email and he mentioned it again when we ran into each other at the gym. I don’t want to be all like MY BOYFRIEND DID THIS AND THEN MY BOYFRIEND THAT but at the same time I really hope that he’s not under the impression that this is date-like or will lead to a date or asking-outage. Mostly it sucks to be turned down so I’d like to spare him that if that is indeed his intent.
#girlproblems
In a letter to a long-distance girlfriend while living in New York in 1982, a young Barack Obama writes about running:
Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.
From this Vanity Fair article.
Went to sleep annoyed, woke up pissed.
Urgh feel like I wasted a good night’s sleep.
Blisters on my right hand hurt a lot and I can barely lift anything. At least I can still squat tonight?
On the bright side, I’m on vacation by the end of the week!
Busy busy weekend.
Drove down to San Diego Friday evening to visit a friend of the boyfriend’s. Visited a winery and had lunch before going home on Sat. Got cleaned up & had dinner with the folks to celebrate my dad’s birthday. On Sunday I went to the market in the AM, got home and made marmalade with seville oranges (talk about authentic marmalade). It’s our second venture and this batch turned out even better than the first. The trick is to add a bit of salt to cut down on the bitterness instead of just loading up on sugar. It really brings out the citrus flavor.
After that I vacuumed & mopped the apartment, cleaned out the storage area under the kitchen sink and in a fit of pique ripped out the gross runner in the front stairs. We hardly ever use the front staircase & it’s behind a door so I don’t think about it much but it’s gross and a dust-magnet. So happy it’s gone. I did give myself two huge blisters on my third and ring fingers while I pulling all the staples out of the floor. There’s still work to be done to make it presentable -sanding, painting- but it’s way better. I didn’t make it to the gym, but I did get a whole lot of physical activity in!
Dragged myself to gym tonight…
…set a PR. 205 in the deadlift. I did my working sets and then just went up 10lbs at a time for singles, just for fun. I was happy since I managed it with a regular double overhand grip. No mixed and last time I tried hook grip my left thumb went numb for a week.
It went up well but wasn’t super pretty. A guy I’m friendly with that also lifts said it looked strong.
The deadlift is a funny lift. It feels so different when you go HEAVY. Up to a certain weight it’s hard for me to engage my muscles properly because it’s too light. Right above that range it’s solid and tight but my grip endurance is the weakest link. At 165 lbs, the bar is falling out of my hands by the 5th rep. Above that, starting at around 185-195 it’s like a whole different beasts. The effort in pulling that weight increases exponentially. It’s a total psych out to start the lift.
The deadlift may be my most impressive lift poundage-wise, but in many ways it’s also the most challenging.
I like basketball, I really do. It’s one of the few sports I will actually watch but I wish they would go back to the short shorts. I mean look at those legs! Now they nearly go down to their ankles, it’s bullshit.
zuky:
While you talk, I train.
While you eat, I fuel.
While you party, I recover.
While you take days off, I get better.
While you make excuses, I move weight.
While you talk big, I get big.
While you quit fast, I run fast.
While you act…
Fair enough, though if this someone is sitting around in a tub of beer and jouissance drooling and scratching his balls that’s not much competition, is it?Plus you gotta rest and take days off. Makes no sense to train more than is useful. Do you really need to be missing a party to take recovery time? Eh, doesn’t make sense to me. Except as a protestant work ethic thing, “devil makes work for idle hands” etc.
While you recover, I party.
While you get better, I take days off.
While you run fast, I think fast.
While you fuel, I eat sumptuous nourishing meals you haven’t dreamt.
While you talk internet trash about your idealized unattainable self-image of training so hard, I just listen.
I really like the above statement and why I do not follow any fitblr, strengthblr, or whatever the cool kids like nowadays just because I am bored of it all, bored, bored, bored.
I eat well and work out as I want a body that can do things, anything else like fitting into size 10 skinny jeans is just a by product of getting my body back into its shape. I also have heart disease in my family so understand the importance to get into good habits early. I eat well, balanced, can switch between vegetarian and meat, drink more water and green tea to the point I pee on the hour. I run, I lift hard and challange my body, I walk, I sprint, I want to increase my flexibility. I want my body to be strong and do the things I want to do.
However the main reason why I got bored of this community was the amount of bullshit and guilt tripping about if you wanted to sit in and eat shit and take a break from this fitblr crap. I love running, but I love sitting on the sofa with Rorie and eating a whole tub of ben & jerrys while power watching heroes. Just because I choose to eat a fuck load of cheesy burrittos does not mean that I am unhealthy or that my goal is now 2 steps back.
My life is what I want it to be, I don’t want to spend life in the gym, eating to only fuel my work outs as that would be for lack of a better term ‘boring as fuck’ and there is more to life than that, I may live longer but I don’t want to spend that in a gym or eating something that prescribes all my micro-nutrients to the nearest mg.
In my opinion Fitblrs and the over-compensation of life being purely about healthy and body image and the idealized version of strength is summed up in
‘While you talk internet trash about your idealized unattainable self-image of training so hard,’
Just because you have bigger muscles, ‘eat better’, run longer doesn’t mean you are better than any other person.
Right? It just ceases to work outside of the gym, if it ever worked inside it.
So much YES to these responses I don’t know which to reblog. Like gearchick said, how is the post not a prime example of
While you talk big, I get big.
So yeah I’m gonna enjoy my delicious food and awesome rest days and parties and consistent physical progress and leave you to your sanctimonious ivory tower complete with BS megaphone.
I seriously don’t understand why people are getting so upset with this post.
If this is what I use for motivation, why do you care? Just let me do me. I understand if you don’t agree, but I dont see any point in calling me out for an inner dialogue I had with myself.
When I wrote this post the “you” is me. My whole blog is about beating yourself, and if you read it, you would understand instead of taking this out of context.
Well since we all dished plenty of dirt it’s fair for me to reblog your response, but I’m gonna be brutally honest. None of us took this out of context or failed to understand it. That’s a cop out response. We took it in the context of your blog, where you’re always dishing dirt on your friends for partying too hard, for drinking alcohol, for eating unhealthy, you definitely show off about being vegan and about how heavy you lift and so forth, and always about how much better that is than what other people are doing at the same time, specifically other people, not some phantom you who’s going around nabbing pizzas and six-packs and rolling around on his own cushiony belly while you train (plus that guy wouldn’t be too much of a challenge, would he?). Yes, you’ve had the opportunity to study under Chip Conrad and to hang out with a whole lot of strongman and powerlifting types, your mum holds powerlifting records, that’s all fucking awesome and you’ve learned a certain amount. You certainly don’t know everything though, and a lot of the shit you post is just completely stupid. What the hell was that “thigh gaps : do you even lift?” post? A good 90% of your one-line posts are completely inane. You act like you know better than everyone, even people who clearly know better than you (for instance, calling out semi-pro or at least experienced rugby players on the best way for a rugby player to do kettlebell swings). Your supportive attitude towards women is admirable but way clumsy. And most of all you act like you’ve got nothing left to learn even though I’m sure you agree you’re always learning.
And whenever anyone calls you out, your response is “you’re obviously too stupid to understand” or “you can’t read” or whatever, and then you have eight followers who say “wow, anyone who says that must be horribly jealous of you”. It’s just a massive circle jerk that is against everything you appear to claim to stand for. How are you in any position to tell other people that fitness is a philosophy and so forth? You’re a particularly sheltered 22-year-old upper-middle-class American white dude. Compared to most of your readers, who are mostly young college girls or women in their 20s with office jobs, you’ve had everything handed to you on a plate. You don’t fucking know why people get obese or alcoholic because for you it’s a question of “just” doing something or “just” not doing something else, you’ve got a response to cover everything when each situation has its own set of moral dilemmas. You know some things, about training and so forth, but by no means everything, particularly about why people do or don’t train, why they might be making what you’d call excuses, and so forth. Holding forth the way you do is a privilege that is earned through experience and studying and knowledge. And most people who have those would know not to hold forth the way you do.
That is the context in which we found your above post incredibly presumptuous and arrogant. Sure, it doesn’t preclude you from seeming like a nice guy, which you do, you seem well-meaning, hard working you’ve obviously got a feminist streak a mile wide, good for you. But get over yourself a bit or you’ll start getting a backlash and however tough you talk you’ll be crying like you have a pea under the mattress.
Well said. Thank you.
Etrog citron. Apparently they’re highly prized during Sukkot.
Gotta love southern California farmer’s markets. Now to decide whether to candy it or make limoncello.
