What a contrast – yesterday when I wrote, my energy was scattered, frenetic and unfocused, making it hard for me to concentrate on anything. Today, I feel calm and centered once again, ready to engage fully with each task I have ahead of me throughout this day. This highlights just how important pushing my physical being regularly is for me to maintain an even and focused keel on all fronts. When I don’t exercise enough, I start to feel insane. Funny thing, though – when I exercise too much, I also start to feel unbalanced and off-kilter in my mind. It’s all about the middle ground, maintaining the right level of exercise volume and intensity for my being’s current state of being…a delicately balanced tightrope act. I’ve made too many blunders and missteps off the high wire to count, in both directions. However, I’ve definitely landed far more times in the too-much category than on the not-enough side of things.

Yesterday, though, I was starting to fall into the not-enough-exercise mindset, making me irrational and illogical. I’d thought we were possibly going to climb outside, giving me the ultimate climbing fix – the Octagon! Sport climbing! All day outside! Laughter! Sunshine! Movement! Great cardio, too! – but alas, the clouds, wind and Kevin’s ongoing struggle to kick the flu conspired against us. While I was only sick for a couple days, this bug has bitten Kev with a vengeance, unfortunately. Though he wanted to try to put in at least a little bouldering gym session yesterday, his shivering, hacking body denied him even that escape, sending him straight back into the house and back to bed. What a bummer. I’m just hoping he can kick the sickness out entirely by the time we leave for Spain, since traveling ill would just plain suck.

Sitting alone in the bouldering gym, heated to perfect climbing temps, I felt totally uninspired and unmotivated, even after not climbing for four days. It’s so strange, this feeling – I’m realizing that I simply don’t really love or even much like climbing in the gym anymore. From someone who once spent more time in the gym than outside and maybe somewhere secretly deep down inside preferred climbing in the gym much of the time over climbing outside, this is an interesting development. I feel no love for fake climbing; something really important is missing from the experience for me – or maybe more than one thing.

Climbing outside means breathing fresh air deep into my lungs, inhaling the light scents of junipers or pine trees or wildflowers carried on the breeze. Climbing outside challenges my sensation of touch to the maximum as my hands feel for the slightest of indentations for better purchase on one-of-a-kind handholds, while my feet dance an at-this-point instinctive ballet to position my body efficiently for every (hopefully) fluid movement I make. Climbing outside treats my eyes to incredible natural settings, rendering the entire human world and all related concerns infinitesimal, inconsequential and insubstantial. Climbing outside wraps me in a feeling of oneness with the universe, self-completion, pure joy…and the experience is almost always shared with other like-minded souls, making it a deeply communal activity, too, which also feeds a crucial part of my humanity, the social animal.

Take away the social component of bouldering indoors and I guess you take away one of the key aspects of it that can make it truly fun for me, I realized yesterday, faced with all the gym’s holds glaring down at me but no one to climb with on them to make them seem fun. Plus, I struggle to make up the right kind of problems for myself in the gym – I usually make up stuff for myself that I think is hard at first but ends up being too easy/my style; my partners are better at gauging where I really am and what I’m capable of (and vice versa, to a certain extent). And I never feel like at this point that the best or most efficient way for me to develop more strength involves gym bouldering, honestly. I still struggle with straight-up upper-body strength, above all else – so throwing away a first-day on doing a half-assed strength session on my own in the bouldering gym seemed like not a good call, especially given my lack of enthusiasm (yup, the f’ing Octagon has ruined my winter bouldering gym tolerance for sure — totally spoiled now, want outdoor climbing and want it now).

Change of plans – after doing a few warm-up laps/campusing, I came back to the house to put in a full weight-training session, for the first time in three weeks. It dawned on me that this could be good in a number of ways. It would allow me to test my theory about Ocatgon climbing – does it really help develop strength, or am I kidding myself because I just want to climb outside? And it would allow me to test how close I am to doing a one-arm pull-up. And it had been so long since I’d weight trained without climbing first that I realized it might be fun to just weight train fresh, not already carrying some fatigue.  Finally, a weight-training session would help me assess how far along my nerve impingement is in the healing process, since the last time I weight trained, it was pretty pronounced.

To make a long story short: 1) Yes, the Octagon has helped me get stronger or at the very least, not lose any pure strength. I lifted as strong or stronger in all of my lifts than I did last time I lifted. Cool. 2) If I weighed 85 pounds, I would already be able to do a one-arm pull-up. Alas, since I’m 5’6” and weighing 85 pounds would mean I’d have a BMI of 14 (i.e. severely underweight/emaciated), this is never to be. (I’m being sarcastic; I’d never want to weigh 85 pounds, don’t worry). But I’m way closer to a one-arm than I was before, even three weeks ago – I’m taking off much less weight, and since the pulley system adds friction, it’s actually probably more like if I weighed 95 pounds (we’ll see when we make up our more efficient pulley system here soon). Not that I’ll ever weigh 95 pounds, either, mind you. Not a chance. Must get stronger! 3) Weight training fresh was awesome. I felt amazing. It was a total blast. 4) My left arm is WAY better than it was three weeks ago; way less fragile and more stable. I’ve rehabbed it properly by the choices I’ve  made; it’s improved tremendously, and it seems on track this morning for total recovery soon.

I put in a solid, lengthy workout, and I did it proper – proper warm-up (next Training Talk Topic, hopefully tomorrow’s post), great session “belly,” and proper cool-down, too. I trained my fingers/forearms after all the other lifts, as always training my strength after my weakness, which I believe is the right way to do it (this felt awesome, too). I also managed to exercise some restraint on myself in everything I did; instead of going for total destruction/annihilation, I opted for moderation, stopping before completely trashing areas of my body, which is a tendency of mine – especially with things I’m good at, like finger training. Instead, I gave myself a number of sets for each exercise and an intensity level prior to starting, and I stuck with it. When I was done with everything and I felt ebulliently high and like I wanted to do more, I managed to walk away, too – and that’s always been an issue with me and big workouts. Usually, I start feeling better and better and better the longer I work out, and  then, of course, I just want to keep on working out – and that’s when injuries can happen, especially the insidious kind that creep up behind you on the following day to tell you that you should’ve stopped sooner, if only your body could’ve given you that message in the moment instead of delaying the response until later.

Last night, though, I walked away feeling great, ate a nice dinner, and then did some stretching, self-massage and heating of the impinged area later on. Today, as I said at the start of this entry, I feel calm and centered again, confidence restored as I realize that I needed that weight workout to stabilize my mind as much as I needed it for my body; seeing that I’m stronger makes me feel more confident about the choices I’ve made this month (climbing outside in the Octagon instead of climbing/training inside) and more confident about my left side’s healing process, too. Today, I’m considering either a power endurance workout or a light restitution workout later on, but I’m holding off on that choice until afternoon – because sometimes it takes a while for the full repercussions of a workout to sink into my body, and I don’t want to overdo it right now, on the cusp of leaving for Spain.

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