Thanksgiving week lifting

 Happy Thanksgiving y'all! What a fun week (so far). We have both daughters and a daughter-in-law in town. Add to them my wife's sister and her husband, and we had a wonderful Turkey Day. 

100% random my BIL getting that glass

Lifting doesn't stop, hopefully, on holiday weeks. This week, it kinda got adjusted though. November 21, Heavy day:

SQ: 3x4 @250#

OHP: 1x3 @90#, 1x3 @102# 1x3 @108#

Rows: 4x6 @90#

AP: 4x10 w/20# db

BAR: 4x8 w/25# plate

The squat felt rough the first set, but I settled in by the third set, which felt great. OHP was doable. The landmine rows I hadn't done for weeks and weeks. The last time I did them I did 4x10 w/2 x 45# plates on the bar. Tried that Tuesday, and no, only 4x6! Arnold press was easy, may have to move up to 25# dumbbells next time. Bent-arm (plate) raise was good. Will do the 25# plate till I do 4x12 then move to the 35#.

Should have done Light day on Thursday but, Thanksgiving. Wife and I had too much to do to get ready. Therefore, I skipped L day and did Medium day today:

SQ: 2x5 @225#

OHP: 6x3 @96#, 1x1 @105#

CR: 4x10 @24kg + 20#

Squat easy-peasy. OHP wore my arms out. Programmed for 1x1 @102# but thought I'd try 105#. Went up easy. Calf raises again wearing my 20# ruck and holding the 24kg kettlebell. Theoretically today should have been deadlift vice CR, but I've found doing DL heavy once a week is wearing, so I'm floating it to every 9-11 days. 

• Songs this week: "Life's What You Make it," by Talk Talk; "Keep Me A Space," by Glasvegas; "Smog," by Indigo De Souza. 
• Books this week: Finished True Grit, by Charles Portis (#72 for 2023). Reading King Rat, by China Mieville. Listening to American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis.

Search for Big Mack Rogaine

 The wife and I competed in a fun, tiring orienteering event in September. A rogaine is an endurance orienteering event that lasts for hours (and sometimes days) in which your team has to find as many control points as possible in a very large area. The Search for Big Mack was held in the Blue Ridge Boy Scout Reservation, all 17,500 acres of it. We had from 8am to 6pm to find as many controls as we could. We didn't find many! They were hard. But we did walk a lot. And I mean, a lot. Over hill and dale. Up and down (the worst). We ended up walking a bit over 18 miles in those 10 hours, with but one 20-ish minute break to eat and refill water bottles. I ended up walking 50,830 steps in that 10 hours. (My week's total step count was over 124,000!)

So this is our map before we marked it up. (Click on it to follow along.) The start (S/F) is way over on the left by that lake. Each black-outlined square is 1km x 1km. To give you some context, if you take the straightest possible trails from the S/F to the lake on the east side (right), that's 5 miles of walking (elevation gain and loss along the way).

You will see small purple circles peppered throughout that map. The tens digit of each control is the point-value of that one, 4 the easiest (supposedly) and 9 the hardest. Here's our map after we planned our route:

Plan was to head south along Big Mack's trail and make our way about halfway across the map, then cut up Gumstand to Greenwood Road for a bit, then up Oak Hollow till Little Laurel Creek all the way to Ottari camp. There was a standard orienteering course set up over there. Figured we could get over there by noon, run the O course to get a lot of points, then head back along Little Laurel, take a right to get control 87 (at the summit; my wife wanted to do one "high" control), then back down Little Laurel back to Greenwood Rd to Sidewinder trail back to the S/F camp where we'd do the orienteering course there, to be done before 6pm. (For every minute past 6:00 the team arrives, they lose 5 points.)

How naïve! The first two controls we got (84 and 44) took us about two hours. We looked for 65 for way too long and never found it. We went on to 55 then up Gumstand. 56 took us forever because we went down the wrong (mostly dry) creek first. But we finally found it after going up the wrong reentrant. Once we hit Little Laurel Creek trail we had to make a decision. It was well past noon. We could skip the Ottari camp and head back, but I only had one bottle of water (of three) left and wasn't sure I could make it all the way back to camp and find controls with only that one bottle. So we made the decision to walk to Ottari, fill our water bottles, eat something, then head back.

Water refill & apples!

We learned something there. We should have taken our Lifestraw bottles so we could just grab some creek water. Or iodine tabs, because we ended up at Ottari around 2pm. We still thought we had time to get back. We tried for too long to get 47; that wasted time and was thirsty work. We were excited that we got 97. It was up that reentrant quite a way, but 9 points! Then the long slog up (those contour lines are 5m apart; from 97 to the intersection was about 100m of elevation gain. I got us lost then. I thought we were at the intersection of two trails a bit SW of 85; but our intersection had a trail going WNW and one going ESE, but that made no sense from where I thought we were. Plus there were signs for trail North Ridge and Matheny's something, neither of which is anywhere on the map. So we took the WNW trail and boom, ended up at 87! That wasted plenty of time and those 8 points weren't worth it in the end (spoiler alert: we were 6 minutes late, thus lost 30 points).

So down we went along Little Laurel, knees hurting, something like 200m of elevation loss. I was limping by the time we got to Greenwood Rd, at just about 5pm. There was no more looking for clues, we just fast-walked up to Sidewinder, then switch-backs till we ended up on the back side of the start building (dining hall), checking in at 10:05.44. 6-minute penalty.

Our score sheet

We ended up getting only 7 controls totaling 45 points, but with the time penalty of 30 points, our final score was 15. (We're particularly proud of 97 and those two 8s!) The after-party was funny to look at. Even those teams who got 18+ controls and ran both orienteering courses were walking around like my wife and I. One of the volunteers (thanks Lora!) made fantastic chili, both vegetarian and "mammal and poultry" chili. (My wife asked her about that. Lora has a friend who got bit by the tick that made her allergic to meat from mammals: my nightmare!)

And we weren't last! We were 27th out of 30 teams. I'll take it. Not so bad considering our relative newness to orienteering!

My chili with Doritos: been years since I had those!

Wife's chili with standard tortilla chips. And she had beer!

Fall Foliage Adventure Race

 On October 14, wife and I did the Fall Foliage Adventure Race. This group (Broad Run Off Road) puts on two a year and offers a "no bike" option, which is nice. Most adventure races have at least three elements: foot, water, bike. Bikes are kinda expensive so it is nice to be able to try one of these out w/o having to commit to two mountain bikes. (The organizers provide the kayaks/canoes.) It was a blast. Usually these races have stages that you progress through, e.g. stage one Trek to the boats for stage two, then get out of the boats for stage three, trek again. But as our area didn't get enough rain and the lake wasn't full enough, the organizer decided to make ours a "choose your own adventure" type race. 18 checkpoints (CP), get them in any order. The only rule being if the CP is blue, you have to get that from a boat.

There were 49 teams, from solo to a team of four (and lots of families with kids which was great to see). To prevent all 49 teams (100-odd people) from hitting the trails or boats at the same time, the organizers devise a puzzle to delay the start. Last year they gave every team a Lego set (number of pieces based on size of team, I believe) and you had to build it then turn it in before you could start. This year, each team got a lock with their team number on a tag and you had to use a hint sheet to figure out the lock's combo, then go turn both the lock and the tag in before you could start. Wife and I solved ours in less than a minute! We chose to Trek first.

We knocked the first five CPs out in about an hour and had to make a choice: continue around the lake? (We were only about a quarter around.) Run back and get a boat? We decided to go back and get a boat. We ran back, got the canoe in the water, and to the other side of the lake (it's about 3km long) in less than an hour. But we were horrible canoers. We couldn't go straight. Then we spent over 50 minutes finding a "land" CP from the shore, not getting lost but way off course (thus the 50 minutes), which got us just past 3 hours.

Time limit 4:30, and we didn't want to be late; 1 point lost for being late, then another point lost for every 5 min till you're 30 min late which means DQ. And each CP was only worth 1 point, so you really had to decide if that last CP you were going for was really worth losing its worth by showing up late.

We got a couple more CPs off the water and were about to start for another one when we realized we only had a half hour left and were about a kilometer from the boat launch, so we headed back, turned in the boat and ran to the finish.

Clocked in at 4:08.11. Somehow we only got credit for 10 CPs even though we went to 11. (The one we didn't get credit for, CP4, did only faintly beep so I think maybe the battery was dying.) Ended up covering 13.5km and a shit-ton of steps! And soaking wet as it rained the entire time.

Unsure if we'll do the one in Spring, but maybe? Oh, and before you ask, dear reader(s), No, swimming was not allowed. (It looked so nice, too, and close.)

Greetings!

 Good day, dear reader(s). Me again. This time writing on everything not reading or language related, which I cover in my other blog, A Handful of Eels, but Where Did I Park My Hovercraft. However, that's not completely true. Not everything. More like, IronMike's fitness blog. Sure, I've got IronMike's Marathon Swims, thanks to the wonderful folks at the Marathon Swimmers Federation, who host it. But I don't write there regularly. I do, however, do much more in the realm of fitness that is not swimming, and I wanted a place to track these activities. Thus, this blog.

I've always been a dipper, or as the late Barbara Sher called it, a scanner. I like dipping into different subjects, learning what I want about it, then moving on to other things. Fitness has been similar: through the years I've tried many things, like rugby (not good at it), lacrosse, triathlon, speed skating, biking, volleyball, 10K racing. I had varied success in each of those, but not many stuck. I've probably done open water/marathon swimming the longest (first half-marathon in 2010 and still going). Lifting I (finally) started in early 2018; I say finally because I'd lifted in fits and starts over the years, to include in my late teens with Time-Life's fitness book series (see pic below). But I lifted seriously and heavy for two years before COVID shut everything down (including beaches!) in Boston in early 2020. Started back up when we moved down to northern VA in 2021 and have been lifting steadily for over two years now. 

I've wanted to orienteer since I was a kid in Boy Scouts. I think I even tried it once, but it really wasn't available, or at least I couldn't find it, in the Houston area in the early '80s. Helped my boys with the sport when they were Scouts in northern CA in the early 2000s and had a blast. Started up for real in Boston, during COVID! (they ran the meets no-contact using QR codes) then started again here in NoVA with Quantico Orienteering Club. Really enjoying it.

So here I will write about my attempts to stave off atrophy, sarcopenia, laziness, and other issues related to age and, frankly, the relentless pull of a comfortable, sedentary lifestyle.