Know yourself

You know it's been a good few day of workouts when your arms are still pumped 6 hours after your last workout ended.

Or maybe this is a bad thing. Given the choice, I'll interpret it in a positive light, m'thinks.

Life has been incredibly busy, and very interesting, to say the least. Between all that's going on with school and training and various changes in my life, I feel like it's been ages since I simply sat and had nothing I had to be doing, or somewhere I needed to be. It feels sometimes like there's always people that expect me to be a certain way, or do certain things, and if I fail to adhere to their expectations then I'm nothing. In the past this would have bothered me, particularly if the people were individuals that I cared about. Yet I find as time goes on, that I have less and less tolerance for such self-serving behavior. I make no claims of being perfect, nor of knowing the best way of things; yet if I've given my all to a situation and know that I have, and there is still toxic energy there, then I have no problem letting it go.

Despite this though, I'm so happy. I feel fulfilled and complete on so many levels, in so many dimensions, and the busyness is good in most aspects. I certainly need to remember to stop and take a breath, as it's my tendency to forget to do this... but I'm happy. Very happy.

This week has been solid workout-wise, despite taking a couple days off in the middle. Monday night consisted of the RKC graduation workout done by participants of the San Jose RKC Cert.: with your snatch-weight bell (16kg for me), 1 snatch, 1 rack squat, one press, and 10 two-handed swings. Rest the bell down until the instructor says go, and switch sides. We ended up doing it for 25 minutes straight, which was doable -- I just have a tendency to sweat and melt. I probably could've done another 10 minutes though. This was after TGU and for the life of me I can't remember what else we did.

I didn't train Tuesday or Wednesday.

Thursday was BJJ, and it was a really good class. I'm loving the art more and more as I become further exposed as time goes on. I also received my second stripe in class, which was pretty neat.

Friday I did the SJ grad workout again for 20 minutes, followed by a few sets of double cleans and double snatches with 16 kg KBs. Later on I went bouldering at the climbing gym.

Today was brutal. KB class was full of grinds -- low rep sets of MP, BUP cleans and presses, renegade rows, heavy double front squats, bear crawls in the sand, side-stepping walking swings, overheard carries. This was all on the beach, and it was beautiful and warm and I certainly can't complain. I was a bit melty after class though, and decided to dive into the water to cool down. I walked out until I was almost waist deep and came upon a storm drainage pipe that was exposed due to the low sand levels. I walked up to it, stared at it for a few moments, and walked right back to shore. Talk about a turn off!

After this I drove to Ventura and attended a BJJ seminar, led by Daniel Gracie. There was a lot of great information offered, and it's always a pleasure to learn more and have the opportunity to become further educated about BJJ. He certainly knows an immense amount about the art of BJJ, and it was fantastic to be able to learn some of it.

I was at the seminar for about two hours, and by the end of it I had run out of gas. My arms were SO PUMPED!, and I just felt physically toasted. I didn't eat enough last night, and I didn't have a chance to have anything after KB class. A little Muscle Milk did the trick though, so no worries.

As far as the Warrior Diet goes... things are going well. It is interesting though: I've gained 7-8 lbs. scale weight since I started. Yet I don't notice anything physically different, except maybe I'm a little leaner in the midsection. So I'm not quite sure what's going on there, I'm going to have to tweak things a bit and see what's up. My energy has been good though, and overall I'm really enjoying it. The last few days have been a little tougher for me to not eat during the day because my whole family is home and I'm constantly surrounded by food and snacking -- I'm sticking to my guns, though.

As I said, the entire family is in town, so it's a full house with all seven of us here. I adore my family, and it's always a special time when we're all together -- who knows what that'll happen again, considered we're all over the country. Below are a couple pictures of the clan.