Sat, 10 Nov 18
Events @ ISCF
It looks like it's officially cold weather training from here on out. I was fully layered up today so it wasn't a huge deal, but the wind still sucked. I'm sticking with no pressing prior to event training and everything else strongman related is still feeling lovely thanks to this programming decision. I may try adding it back in at the end of event day though, since I want to shift the emphasis of my upper assistance day a little bit in my next block of training.
My training partner today, who shall remain nameless in order to protect him from undue shame and ridicule, and I started out on a more lung butter inducing event than usual, a medley of keg carry and prowler backward drag. This definitely got the people going, but the end result was a vomitous conclusion that ended training prematurely for my aforementioned training partner. It turned out he ate quite a well balanced breakfast immediately before leaving his house for training and he got to see and taste it all over again in exquisite detail following the first event. In his defense, I ate a solid 2 hours prior to training and even I was feeling a bit green around the gills after our many runs through the medley. In retrospect, starting off with this was not my best decision.
Keg Carry/Prowler Backwards Drag Medley
80'x150/80' x prowler + 90
80'x150/80' x prowler + 140
80'x150/80' x prowler + 180
80'x175/80' x prowler + 230
80'x200/80' x prowler + 230
Yoke
100'x345 - My shoulder didn't like starting at this weight after about a 40 minute interlude.
2x100'x255 - This felt much better.
100'x345 - Still feeling good after dropping down.
100'x435
100'x525
2x100'x615 - Second run was better than the first and my shoulder felt great on everything after the first warmup run.
Coach Skip Johns, my high school strength coach, used to get on us during summer lifting if we got too chatty and started taking long breaks with minimal lifting and maximal jaw flapping. He called it the beauty parlour effect, wherein 2-3 people would start talking and then more would go over and join, or walk in the weight room and start playing best 3 out of 5 sets of grab ass and fat fanny instead of lifting.
I most often prefer training with a partner or crew instead of solo for a number of reasons, but only when said crew are able to shoot the shit and also stay on top of loading, timing, spotting, and training. When there is too much talking and not enough lifting, it starts to piss me off because then I end up not getting in what I had planned for the day because I run out of time or I just cool down and everything is stupid. This happened to me today. It was my own fault, but it did cause me to do a little less than I probably would have otherwise on yoke and I ended up skipping atlas stones and conditioning (but I'd say the medley work got me a good dose of that at the start). This is also why I love having most of my equipment at my storage unit. If needed, I can always go train solo there or if others are with me, I can be a dick about getting actual training done if things get too derailed. If people want to sit around with their thumbs up their butts, that's fine, but I can tell them to go do it somewhere else if they can't also get some work done while their thumbs are up there getting brown and stinky. This is no knock on anyone but me since I was at Iron Strong. And while I had a good time at the beauty parlor, my training today suffered because of it.