rooks and minerals

There’s not much lifting on this blog any more, mostly because 1. I’m stupidly busy and 2. snorting up vast amounts of phlegm while running a fever. (I did snatch 50 for a double the other day and then went home immediately after because whoa dizziness holy shit). Last week I also cleaned 67 for trips and jerks have been going well. I’m anxious to get better and get back to lifting as quickly as possible (also, midterms are next week).

Weighed in at 65.8 last week, but I’m probably up again thanks to shitty eating in the field and a mostly sedentary week. My muscles are shrinking up and withering away. Given that the comp’s in two weeks, this is not a good time for that.

In other news, I think I’m about to get fired from my job (for going on a school field trip and notifying the manager two weeks in advance). Exciting stuff. Except not really.

Also, meanwhile, in geology-world: fucktillions of reports to write and a research proposal to put together for an undergrad study thing. All I’ve got so far is:

1. regardless of what it is, get the cool French-Canadian prof to like me and like my ideas enough to take me on
2. aaaaaaaaaa
3. should be reasonable to get to from Toronto (Quebec or Northern Ontario probably, since all we’ve got over here is crappy-ass limestone from the Ordovician)
4. something to do with the Grenville orogeny or Archean greenstone belts?
5. or uh maybe something related to metamorphism around the Frontenac Arch or dat shield
6. like what?
7. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Just got home from Quebec. We’ve been looking at some of the Monteregian Hills — silica-undersaturated plutons formed as part of the Great Meteor hotspot track (except it turns out it’s a lot more complicated than that) jutting out through the Ordovician limestone you can see here in the St. Lawrence Lowlands below. This was taken with my phone around the time we got to the top of Mt. St. Gregoire, the smallest and simplest of the hills we looked at. I did bring a DSLR with me on the trip, but I don’t have the energy to go through all the photos right now. 

After three days of living in the car and eating sub sandwiches, Timmy’s coffee, hummus and apples for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I’m pretty glad to be home. I’ve got two sample bags full of rocks (the carbonatites at Oka pretty much made the trip for me, along with a really interesting nepheline syenite/gabbro complex around Brome and a weird banded hornfels I found as we got closer to the contact of the intrusion) and a report to write, but it feels pretty good to bust out the steeltoes again. I’m getting the sense that with a bit of practice, I might actually get pretty competent in the field. Especially since it turns out I’m pretty good with drafting maps and I’ve got a good grip on the chemistry and mineralogy side of things. Before this weekend I was pretty sure I was actually just terrible at everything.

Some exciting stuff: one, I just got an email this weekend about a geology company that’s offering part-time work through the school year, and two, I may get the opportunity to do some independent research as soon as next semester (which is a whole lot better than all the geography and mineral engineering courses I was planning on taking to try and get APGO accreditation). Three - I might be helping a few guys from class make an optical mineralogy reference website to help out the first- and second-years (atlases already exist online, but we want to make it interactive and have them actually contribute to its growth).  Four — there’s a professional conference coming up this week where I might also stand a chance of getting employed. 

My best academic decisions have been made recklessly, abruptly, and usually on a cell phone in the middle of the night. It’s how I got into this whole thing, and it hasn’t proven to be a bad decision yet, so I’m rolling with it. Last night in Mont-Saint-Hilaire I dropped the crap I was taking for breadth requirements after a conversation with one of the faculty members along for the trip. According to him — and I agree with him — my best bet is to focus on everything that will make me a good, well-rounded, highly competent geologist in this field first and accreditation second, and I’m not going to be able to do that if I’m stuck in a course learning for the seven fucking millionth time what a podzol is or how ecological change is, you know, totally a thing and stuff.  And I’m especially not going to be able to do it working a crappy retail job, or wasting my time, or half-assing my way through projects and avoiding responsibility. 

So far this semester’s been great for me. Time to make the next few fantastic. 

All it’s going to take is some begging and pleading for hundreds of departmental dollars in the next three weeks. Wish me luck. 

My geophysics survey got cancelled today, so this is about the most exciting news of my week. 

SWOLE LIFE

Here’s the link to the rest.

Quiet med student who is clean, organized, and almost even lifts (curlbro, but wants to change). We’ll see how things go, but he definitely seems alright. Especially now that we have a sweet chicken breast wholesale buying scheme in the works.

Some photo I took. I’d love to actually start taking pictures again, but I only have a long lens and so I can only take cheesy macro shots, or pictures of very far away things.

I’ve been clearing out the memory card on my camera (which hasn’t seen much use in a long time) and it’s slow going. Back in high school when I first bought it, I wanted to be a snooty artiste about the whole thing and only shot in RAW; now, I still shoot in RAW because it really is better, but processing in Ubuntu takes absurd amounts of time and I’m usually too lazy to do it.

Anyway! I turn 21 on the 11th, one day after school starts. I’m looking forward to it, although it’s shaping up to be a busy year. I have a job now (not especially noteworthy) along with an offer for a seasonal position at a place I’d much rather work at (we’ll see if it pans out) and potentially some tutoring gigs during the school year. I’m also helping out with a friend’s powerlifting club along with my department’s student union, and I’m hoping to compete in an Oly meet taking place in November. 

Lifting’s going okay. Gains have stalled out because I’ve been really tired these past few weeks. Cutting and severe fuckarounditis haven’t helped, either, and I have 8 weeks to cut weight for the meet and hopefully make some progress on my lifts. Snatches are as finicky as always, but my jerks are slowly getting better. I’m horribly inconsistent, though — I’m as likely to miss a 58kg jerk as a 63kg+ one, and my snatches start failing around 43kg even though I’ve snatched 48. I guess this can only mean one of three things: practice, practice, practice. Hopefully I can get some videos in the following few weeks.

Other than that, not many noteworthy things have happened in the past few weeks. School can’t start soon enough. 

So the cut’s really starting to get to me. I felt pretty good getting into the gym so I decided to try to go heavy, but even warming up felt really really wobbly and I ended up just doing a billion hang cleans and tall snatches.  Top sets were 43 for snatches and 55 for clean and jerk, followed by doubles of hang cleans (one from the knee, one from the hip, sometimes followed by a full clean) at 50kg. Nothing particularly impressive. 

Squats were pretty much the only thing that went well. I was exhausted even warming up and skipped some of my warm-up sets, going straight from 80kgx3 to 97kgx3, which, if I get it for five this Friday, puts me well on track to a 250lb/115kg squat by my birthday at the latest. It did take a ridiculous amount of grinding to get three triples at that weight, but I attribute that to FOOD. By the fourth set I just ended up dropping the fucking thing and called it a day. My back-off set was supposed to be 87kgx8 but that didn’t work out either, so I did two sets of four and finally wobbled out of the gym. 

Talked to an engineer dude at the gym who was working on some sort of apparatus that measures force and acceleration on lifts like squats and whatnot and feeds the data into your phone. Kind of cool. 

Anyway, more tunes. Life is boring otherwise: work work work, study study study, lift lift lift, hunger hunger hungnggnnggnngger. 

Above is a song that makes BTN push presses not suck. Therefore, it is a good song.

Things I did today:

- unfucked my snatch a bit more. My pulling strength is absurdly disproportionate to how much I actually snatch, so it’s nice to see that number go up from abysmal to slightly more acceptable. Things unfucked: changing my grip (like everything I do, it’s TOO DAMN WIDE. Bringing it in helped), changing my foot position ( narrow, heels close to wide and splayed out like an asshole), trying to fix my donkey-kicking problem. I just want to clean and jerk and squat forever; is that really so wrong?

- squatted 95kgx5 and was told I’ve easily got a 115-120kg single in me; followed that up by 95kgx4, 95kgx3, and 80kgx8. Good feels. This is the last time I’ll have a belt for a while, so I’m really not sure what to do with myself now. ALAS.

- shared my platform with snide assholes who couldn’t count plates

- BTN push presses should only be done with a bar with no center knurling (ie the women’s bar) unless you really enjoy scraping all the skin off the back of your neck in one fell swoop

- cutting blows but what else do you do when you’re too poor to buy food GOODBYE GAINS

deafasianqt asked: Hey, I'm blueshining from fito, I wanted to ask how important do you think it is to have a gym environment and coach for olympic lifting? The best one I could find was 150 a month. I'm a complete beginner that wants to learn, though.

I’d definitely recommend it, if you can swing it. The Olympic lifts are really technical and you need the proper equipment (bars, bumper plates, platforms, etc) if you want to progress. Coaching is invaluable, and Youtube will only get you so far, I think.

I feel you on the financial front, though. Talk to the coach running it or see if you can ask around in the community; if you’re lucky you might be able to bring down the cost a little? Good luck.

My legs after hill sprints in the dark. This is probably why I shouldn’t be allowed to run any more.

I’m back! I survived orgo, along with everything else that got thrown at me in the interim. Some vague updates:

• Squatted 200lbs/91kgx3 on Friday. Tuesday was pretty disappointing in that I only managed to get doubles and singles at that weight despite it feeling fairly light. I’m hoping by the end of this month or the middle of the next my 1RM will be around two plates, or 220lbs/100kg.  That said, it’s cool not to stall out and lose speed on my heavy sets, which are almost always a brutal grind. After changing my high-bar squat stance (from feet wide, toes at ~30 degrees to feet close, toes at ~5-10 degrees, being careful not to hyperextend my hips) squats are feeling fucking awesome. I still have some trouble internally rotating because of whatever impingement I’ve got in my hip, but foam rolling and mobility work is helping with that. 70’s Big has a great article on the matter.
• Holy balls, mobility work does make a difference. I’m still fumbling out what works for me right now; if I warm up too much it feels like I destroy some of my ability to keep my heavy squats tight, but overall I’m recovering super quickly from lifting, which is new. I’ve been doing this to warm up, along with various banded stretches (ie, using a band tied around a machine or something to stretch out my hip — similar to this demonstrated by Chris Bell). That plus a PVC pipe = ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow fucking ow. But it helps.
• Canada Day, Pride, and the brofriend’s month-long stay in Canada is over, meaning I suddenly have an influx free time while I try to accrue money and work on passing my chem pre-reqs. Not looking forward to this shit.
• My body has forced me to go on an involuntary cut. Well, not entirely involuntary. But something weird’s going on with my appetite these days and I’m definitely not eating enough to fuel my lifting sessions. No bueno.

Today’s plan: light squats and mobility, maybe some Oly work, then hang out with my good pal Barbell Babe and then maybe run some sprints or hit the books.

Snatch pulls and clean pulls feel okay, but my cleans are clumsy. I think I’ve gotten stronger, though, because a 55kg clean feels like easysauce at least when it comes to the weight of it, but it’s just not good enough to muscle things around like a klutz. 

Other problem: I moved away from my old gym. This gym had great coaching and wonderful people. I’m now where I need to be for school, but coaching isn’t easy to come by.

Word on the street is that if I show up at gym A and do something impressive, the coach may take me under his wing and train me there for free. Otherwise, it’s $250/month at a time in my life where I’m barely making rent.  The coaching there is great, but the facilities aren’t - the guy’s running his gym out of a shoebox, but at least it’s a good shoebox.

Gym B is staffed by a kind of creepy dude who the rest of the community isn’t terribly fond of.  It’s also expensive, and far, and just all in all really not a viable option.

Gym C seems to consistently produce amazing lifters but is, again, incredibly far and probably expensive. I say ‘probably’ because they seem pretty insular and I have no idea how I would even get in with them.

My old gym is still an option, but making it down there in time for coaching isn’t really possible when I’ve got class and doing odd jobs to worry about. Eating and having a place to sleep are pretty high on the priority list right now, along with getting good grades. I’m also incredibly nervous about showing up and being bad, which is stupid, because of course I’m going to be bad. I guess that’s really the main thing here. Everything else could conceivably be rearranged in order to make getting to training work.

I miss that gym, though. I miss the people. The downtown folks here are great, and the facilities are pretty good — most of the time I’ve got access to a clear platform and enough equipment to shake a Shakeweight at. But none of that’s really worth shit if I’m just half-assedly trying to teach myself to do somethingI really don’t have any idea how to do… and it especially blows to be doing it on my own. 

Womp womp.

Either way, time to suck it up and try some snatches. I mean, I’ve probably lost a lot of progress, and progress was already pretty slow, but if you like something enough you don’t care how long it takes, right?

Looks like I’ll just have to make it my goal to become very, very impressive. Once I can feel my legs.

More for me than anything else; I gotta start incorporating some of these into my gym time along with all the dumb-looking unilateral glute work my physio’s been hounding me to do. I’m still trying to get out of the mindset of heavy fucking squats = warm-up, which isn’t really helping me at all, ever.

Oh, and fellow shitty-hip-mobility-people: I’m probably the last one to the party, but MWOD’s stuff is legit.

Also, this: