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today is two years since my brother killed himself. hard to believe it's been that long already. gonna spend some time this evening skyping with my parents and other brother. no workout.

on a lighter note, i'm taking the occasion to back through some old things i wrote, in the months after he died, and came across some found poetry i pulled from this forum. i'm pretty sure it's from scooby's journal. it's verbatim, no edits of any kind, i only added line breaks. enjoy:

Quote

I wish, I mean, I hope
no
those word is not strong enough.

I must regroup myself now, now
that half of 2018 is gone. I must
pick up the pace and finish
2018 in a strong way.

This is a message to myself
on 180608, a Friday afternoon
where I slacking/recovering from
my exam 2 days after finishing it.

It will be raining for the next 7 days or so.

Keep a close eye on the market and you'll find something eventually. I was searching for about 12 months before I purchased my current home.

side note: i will destroy microsoft. piece of shit company making piece of shit products that rob me of hard work. death to microsoft.

okay then.

happy new year everyone! 2019 was a good year goal-wise, in that i met my main athletic goal of running a sub-20 minute 5k. did it two weeks in a row, in fact. go me.

in 2020, my athletic goals will be the following:

1. increase maximum strength. i haven't lifted for more than two years and i'm down about 10 pounds from my average weight while training to dunk (and all the other tangents i went on). the heaviest i ever saw on the scale was 183, iirc, but that was a long time ago. ~175 was my weightlifting set weight. i'm now ~165. always been lean, so the weight loss is substantially muscular and i'm definitely weaker than i was a few years ago. so goal number one will involve a few months reversing that process. not sure about exact targets yet, but it'll probably be something simple like a squat target, a bench target, and an upper pulling target. a trip to the gym will let me know what my baseline is and what i should be shooting for.

2. run 5k under 19:00. this might be a bit of a reach, given that my newbie gains only got me from 20:53 to 19:42. but i hit that goal while almost never touching the 30 mile-per-week volume that's generally cited as a minimum for a sub-20 time. so if i can push the volume a bit this year, just by adding a couple of km per run and staying consistent -- plus getting some more practice racing now that i live near a literal weekly race -- perhaps the gains will continue to come fast.

3. do a clean handstand and a barefoot pistol on both legs. these are a lower priority, i'm adding them mainly to give myself an excuse to work more on mobility and joint health (lifting will also help with that in the form of warming up, which i do not do for running). handstands i've done before but had to stop when my right wrist started acting up too much. the ultimate bw strength goal for me is still a flag. OAC would also be cool but it's distant: my shoulders can barely tolerate single-arm holds. it'd be rad to get a kip-up as well. and a backflip. would need a gymnastics gym to learn that, i think.

there's a time sequence to these, because working on strength for a couple of months will mean cutting back on running volume and probably intensity. i can consistently work out five days per week, so a three days lifting/two days running schedule seems feasible. once i've hit whatever strength goal i come up with, i'll dial back the lifting and focus again on running. the bw stuff can be thrown in around the edges, i'm not too fussed about it.

yesterday:

- food poisoning x vomiting and diarrhea
threw up so hard i got a lump in my throat. only got 4.5-5 hours of sleep. joint aches and muscle weakness. blah. feel better this morning, at least.

I just figured out what caused the fat loss plateau a couple of weeks back.

It was my Fitbit One - I had been keeping it in my shorts pocket when the hip clip broke, which I know now inflates the calorie count quite a bit!
This week I received my replacement clips, and it's back clipped on my shorts waist, and noticed a drop in calorie burn.

Instead of 3500-3700 calorie burn on training days, it's now down to 3000-3200
so my metabolism hasn't slowed down by 400-500, I was just measuring it wrong for the last 5 months...

BW- 91.2

Squat-
60x3
80x3
100x3
120x3
110x4
92.5x6 for 2 sets

Calf Raises-
70x5 for 3 sets

Chin Ups- 10
Pull Ups- 7
Roman Chair Crunches- 18

Treadmill-
Jogged for the first time since May 2019! I did 800m @ 10km/h than walked for 700m. Did this 3x. Hopefully my Achilles pulls up alright tomorrow. It felt fine today.

Tomorrow the gym is closed because I guess the 80 year olds that work the front desk are getting shit faced tonight.