Babbling about my life
68 days until I leave... time is flying by. It looks like I won't be as prepared as I wanted to be, unfortunately, but I think I'm going to be in good enough shape to make it through OSUT/Airborne and have enough left over to hold my own in RIP. We'll see around the end of November, I guess.
I've got a ton of shit on my plate, and sometimes it feels like I will NOT finish it all no matter how hard I work. Maybe I set my standards too high. I really wanted to have about 9 months to get ready, but I thought 6 would be fine, and didn't really adjust my training plan to fit the shorter time period.
Most notably, my running will be nowhere near as good as I wanted: I'm running a bare 15 miles a week right now with several days of rucking, mostly because I do so much other physical labor that's not targeted at PT. If I work too hard before 9 AM I'm too drained to do the other stuff all day, see. For the last week I've spent 4-8 pm daily in a state of exhaustion/dehydration because the fucking weather changed and it went from cold and bleak to SUMMER IN ARIZONA in the course of two days. Ugh.
I'm bitter because the sun ruined a day of shooting and carrying shit around in the rain, leaving me almost hating shooting utterly and sunburned horribly. Isolated thunderstorms and cloudy? Yeah. Right.I'm good enough on pushups, maxing around 60 or so these days, and improving slowly. I'll be happy maxing at 65 on my own before I leave, because I know in a test situation I will be able to do more. Situps suck (I can't even hit 40...), which may be a mental issue, but I'm not worried about them; I'll be fine before I leave. The problem is I spent far too much time on arm/chest strength and practically ignored my abs for a few months, and now I'm suffering.
Pullups, the other area I really need to improve, seem impossibly difficult. I believe it might be a problem with my grip (the bar I'm using is either too narrow or too squishy, depending on where I grip it) or my abs. You use your abdominals to balance your body quite a bit in the pullup motion. My back, arms, and shoulders are not fatigued when I can't do anymore pullups. ...Yep, I just did a set using the squishy part of the bar and I feel the fatigue a great deal in my inner forearms, as in the muscles that contract your fingers into fists. My hands are just not strong enough to do many pullups on the narrow part of the bar, and I'll avoid going into the mechanics of grip; suffice it to say that the midpoint of your grip--say grasping a 1-1.5 inch bar--is the strongest because (as is true of all muscles) the midrange of the contraction is the most powerful.
Okay, so I solved my own problem. Funny how things come to me when I'm writing about the problem... I should do this more often, even if I don't post it. It changes my way of thinking.The good news is I'm much lighter than I thought I would be. 178-182 depending on my hydration, and I've maintained this weight for about three months now. I'm still losing fat and slimming down, but obviously by increasing muscle mass at the same time I can keep my weight about level. I'm not making any effort to bulk up, though, and it would be foolish to do so. As far as I'm concerned, the less muscle I need to do a particular job the better because that's less weight my legs have to cart around.
