Last day of 2019, time for a review.
The thing I'm most happy about this year is that I didn't spent any significant portion of the year in pain. Sure, a few niggles here or there, particularly after competitions, but nothing that required me to stop or significantly change training for a while - I was able to just do what I wanted to do. So, at a bare minimum, I accomplished my goal of being less of an idiot.
TSC-wise, certainly a good year. Very pleased with my progress on the DL. On pullups, saw improvement, just not as much as I wanted. Snatch training, have certainly made some progress, but as far as feeling like I'm ready to sign up for the competition division... I haven't done an all-out test of my snatches with the 32, but I know I can do 30 comfortably in 5 minutes, that's easy training pace. So I reckon I could double that with a reasonable amount of discomfort. 60 will still put me way at the bottom of the board... but that's a good board to be on, top or bottom. I think about it this way - which would I be more proud of, breaking 130 snatches with the 24, or breaking 70 snatches with the 32? For me, the latter. So, probably time to just jump in and try it.
Wasn't a great year for running performance. Unfortunately, I really wasted my summer doing base building that really didn't build much of a base. Part of that was just due to time constraints - a lot of travel for business, long vacations with family, coaching commitments. But I blame it more on just not having a good plan/direction. The mix of running & calisthenics I was doing was too hard for real cardio training, but too easy to build any real strength endurance. But on the other hand, I think I've learned how to really accumulate "easy" miles, and started making some real progress in a direction that I want to go. My 10k runs stacked up like this:
- May: 60 minutes, sore for a week
- August: Failed to finish due to stupidity
- September: 65 minutes, sore for a couple days
- November: 64 minutes, not sore
Speed wise, it looks lousy. But I think getting to "not sore" is a big victory - if I can start increasing speed without increasing soreness, that's will be real progress.
OCRs... well, the short one was really encouraging (it may be that my "stupid" base building over the summer actually lent itself well to a short OCR). The Spartan was really not encouraging. It was definitely a tougher course than the one I did last year, but a real eye opener is terms of where I need to dedicate some effort in order to improve.
So, goals for 2020:
- Grip strengthening: an area where I really need to improve for OCR. I don't know if there's a reasonable way I can establish a measurement of grip to improve on, but the one thing I can easily measure if how often I work it. Aside from doing a lot of KB work, goal is to do 100 acts of random grip strengthening between now and the Spartan in August. That's averaging just 3 days a week, ought to be easy to achieve. Then the Spartan will tell me if it worked.
- TSC
- 500# DL. I'm pretty close now, and I think the grip work will help get me there as well.
- 15 pullups. But I'm planning to attack this primarily through pressing (see below), as opposed to chasing training reps.
- Man up and get into the competition division
- Pressing: my press seems to be relatively weak. If pullups are a good augmentation to pressing, I figure pressing ought to similarly be a good augmentation to pullups. So, a couple of sub-goals in the pressing space:
- 3x with the 40. Should put me in striking distance of pressing the 48 in 2021.
- 50 continuous pushups. I think my best ever was 35, but it's been a long time since I tested. I figure I need some strength endurance to improve my OCR performance.
- Running: 60min 10k without soreness.
Happy new year to all my StrongFirst brothers and sisters. It does my heart good to know that there's other regular people out there who obsess about performing better, not just looking good. Go get after it.