Sweet Baby Jesus

New Years Eve hit pretty hard.

We had a bunch of family together, and sat about drinking and talking shit until about 3 or 4 AM.  I made good use of caffeine mixed with alcohol to preserve a wakeful state.  Because of that, I suspect my state the next day was slightly more ruined than it should have been.

You’ll be happy to know, dear reader, that this impacts Night’s Fall not a whit — that’s in the bag, so to speak, so there’s no drunken angsty writing going on here.  If you wanted drunken angsty writing, too bad.  Anyway, we got ourselves a new Weber barbecue — which is amazing — and cooked up a fairly massive feed along side drinking beer, wine, cocktails, and then back to beer again because we got thirsty.

In retrospect, that may have been a mistake.

Anyway, the various levels of despising oneself kicked into high gear this morning and I got back in the gym for the first time in a couple weeks.  Couple weeks because I managed to slice off the end of a finger a couple weeks back, which made our kitchen look like a crime scene, and then came down with some form of weaponised Ebola straight that knocked me on my ass for the first week or so of our staycation.

Today’s workout was a sort of rehab experiment.  I picked up Jen Sinkler’s excellent Lift Weights Faster 2 programme last year and have made great use of it as a training supplement for my existing programmes.  Today was one of her “Advanced” sessions called Right This Minute.  Basic gyst of it is that, on paper, it looks easy — what could be more simple than minute rounds with about half of each round as a rest?

Right This Minute from Lift Weights Faster.

Oh, my sweet, sweet child.

Anyway, I’m feeling pretty virtuous about now.  It’s raining outside and I feel terrible but I still hit the gym.  GO TEAM.

I know a lot of people get a bit obsessed with the idea of resolutions around this time.  I thought it’d be nice to share this for those of you who want something a little accessible for starting workouts — I personally find circuit training to be more fun that most types of workout, and Sinkler’s programmes can be adapted to various fitness levels and equipment stocks (yep, full set of just bodyweight things if you have no home gym).

You might be wondering what my resolutions for 2016 are, or if this gym session forms a part of one.  Nope.  There’s the saying that goes something like, warriors don’t do resolutions — they do their job.  Lord knows I’m no warrior, but the principle is sound: I try and be adaptive to my life in the best way I can at all times.  I don’t wait for January to make changes that are needed, and I don’t really cry a river about course corrections.

While we’re on pithy sayings, you might be wondering what my training goals are.  I’ve got a few, but the main one at the moment is to get my spine back in working order during 2016, so I can exercise without limits again.  It’s been holding me back since injuring it a couple years back, so my current workouts tend to be “functional” and core-heavy.  I like to think that I’m training for the zombie apocalypse, and zombies don’t care if you’ve got a crushed nerve in your spine.

“The more you sweat in training the less you bleed in battle.”
–Unknown