These past few days have been incredibly draining and the most randomly mixed bag of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Mostly good though. Yesterday, I managed to PR on my deadlift at 205lbs, which is stellar for me. I’ve been stuck at 195lbs for the past few weeks, and I finally managed to pull heavier for one solid rep. Sunday, my lady and I quite accidentally ran 10 miles on a trail. “Accidentally” because we had to retrace our steps due to a blunder on my part which ended up with us doubling our mileage. Super Smash Bros and Mario Kart with one group of friends one night and Borderlands 2 with another group of friends the following night are all highlights as well.
But speaking of “accidentally” running too much. One friend and I often trained and ran together. She’s an elite athlete, so we would push our mileage liberally whenever we could. We once ran a trail to the very end, and instead of turning around and leaving the canyon the same way we came in, we decided to bushwhack our way to the ridge line. “It’ll be fun,” we said. “It can’t be that far,” we said. We fought our way up over 3.5 miles through underbrush, spiny trees, and the constant illusion that we were almost there. And once we arrived at the top? We had another 6 miles to run to get back down.
That was fun.
There was another run we did where we ran the ridge over some foothills expecting to be spit out onto the main fire road at some point. That never happened. We missed the juncture, passing over the lane and ended up getting lost, adding several more miles to our run as we scrambled back and forth across different trails before we finally found a safe way back down.
That was fun too.
There was the time we crossed over some foothills into a valley only to find that our destination was substantially farther than we had clocked it when scouring the maps. It was supposed to be six miles in, six miles out. It was not. I don’t remember the final count but it was over 15 miles round trip.
15 to 20 miles doesn’t seem like a lot when you consider there are mad fuckers out there running 100 mile ultramarathons. But to me, running 12 to 15 miles with 2000-5000 ft elevation is a fuckin’ haul. I wanna deadlift, throw some kettlebells around, swing my steel mace, run a few miles, drink a few beers, eat some trashy bar food, and then fuck off the rest of the night.
You know?
Anyway, here’s a poster of the sexy @brypunky rocking a deadlift in her set No Pain, No Gain: