A (Long) Day In The Life

Got up early, 5 AM, to get to work early. Walked through the snow with my MMA gear and caught an early train; in the office about 6:45.Long busy day. Hoped to leave work in time to meet my wife for a light dinner before training; no luck. Hoped to leave work early enough to make it to the first of two classes; no luck. Now on the way to the second, 8:15 class. Then it's back home to crash. TGIF.

End of Summer

A lot of changes are in the works here. Our daughter moves into her dorm in New York City on Sunday, and it's going to be really tough seeing her go, though she's nearby. Our son is starting to take a full course load farther out on Long Island, along with work and his own apartment, all of which is great.

To help pay for all this college, we're trying to live a bit more simply. For one thing, we've gone down to one car, which I kind of like; my wife gives me a ride in the morning to the train, and it's nice to see her even if she's sleepy.

New beginnings for my kids, and the fall season, call for new beginnings for me. In martial arts, my goals are to improve my close-range sparring, boost my conditioning, flow better in grappling, and shave off a few more pounds to get down to a fighting weight below 190. I'm not specifically aiming for my second-degree black belt--that may require more effort than I can put into training right now, given the growing commitment my work is requiring.

Cheers to everybody, and enjoy the end of summer.

Best Laid Plans

Was planning on going to grappling class last night. Long Island Railroad exploded instead. Made lemon out of lemonade--took the subway to my old neighborhood in Queens, my wife and daughter met me at a restaurant there. But got home way too late to make it to class.

I figure if I shoot for exercise six days a week, I'll get there four or five days.

Grappling Owies

Grappling takes some getting used to.

It's great cross training from striking arts because it's such a different workout.

But the body has to get accustomed to all sorts of traumas, ranging from the the very serious (e.g. ACL destruction) to, more frequently, the tiny and annoying. (My wife, who doesn't like hearing about this stuff, can stop right here!)

Since my body has become unaccustomed, I came out of my return to grappling with at least one little bruise on my arm (I never know how or when I get these), an abrasion on my shoulder from rotating on the mat underneath a guy weighing a lot more than me, and a couple of toenail slices on the top of my right foot. They're kind of like paper cuts, only from a toenail.

Three cheers, incidentally, for BJJ Steve, who recently went to a tournament as a white belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and won all three of his matches. He even has videos of his matches on his site.

I'm still trying to figure out a new martial arts schedule that will include "core," kickboxing, grappling, and still leave lots of time for things like family and sleep after my long work day and three-hour round-trip commute. But I think I'm going to another grappling class Monday night.

Guitar Hero Homecoming

This was my last day of commuting to work this year--what a relief. No more three-hour round-trip commute for the next couple of weeks.

My daughter turned 15 today--I'm sitting within earshot and eyeshot of a bunch of loud teens playing Guitar Hero at our house. Her age is why I can't move closer to work. I don't want to take her out of high school and away from her friends. When she goes to college, we can move--my wife is willing--although by then, who knows where my office will be, given that my company was just taken over.

I stood next to a teen boy in our living room whom I don't know earlier tonight. Suddenly he looked at me startled, realizing I had been standing next to him for a few seconds.

"I was joking about that," he said.

I had no idea what he had been talking about. I should have said, "Good." Instead I said, "Don't worry, I didn't hear you." A missed opportunity to intimidate a teen, alas.

I have been more careful this week about when I work out, and I feel much stronger. My schedule:

Tuesday night: Core karate/martial arts
Wednesday afternoon: elliptical cardio and body-resistance training with private trainer
Thursday night: Core karate
Friday afternoon: Jersey City Fight Club
Tomorrow, at noon, I've got another core karate class. I missed sparring this week due to a friend's going away party Wednesday night.

My trainer at the gym downstairs from work came up with a new routine after I told him I was missing cardio training, and that the other workouts were taking too long for me to complete. He responded well. I start with 20 minutes on the elliptical machine. Then I go through a sequence of push-ups, pull-ups (on a machine that offsets some of my weight), crunches, dips (also on the http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifmachine), and squats. Being a personal trainer, he always scrambles things up, but this is something I can do on my own.

I've always since I was a kid wanted to be able to do pull-ups, but I didn't work on them for fear of being embarrassed by not being able to do them. It's good to be working on them--and they'll help muscles that the push-ups don't tap.

This coming week, when I'm off from work and not traveling, I'll be able to do at least two of these routines during the week. I've been too busy at work to do more than the one private training session a week.

I'm not going to be able to afford a private trainer all the time--I only have four lessons left. But I'm learning some cross training from him for my martial arts.

I'm also really enjoying the Jersey City Fight Club. The other "members" are editors, like me, at my job. A couple are true athletes: One's a marathon runner, one's a triathlete. We do through a warmup, push-ps and crunches, shadow boxing, and a bag workout. I'm teaching them punching, moving and, just a little, kicking from kickboxing.

I enjoy it for the workout, but also because I'm making friends. I realized earlier this year that I was too close socially at work to the reporters working for me--I am doling out limited resources, and they will inevitably be disappointed sometimes in what I can do for or give to them. To protect me from the emotional trauma of their disappointment, I realized I need to look to other editors more for my social circle. This is one way of doing that, and it's been a lot of fun. Everybody agrees, too, it's a great emotional release.

The Contender, and Returning To Kickboxing

I spent much of the day getting caught up on episodes of The Contender, season three.

Last year, I really got into the second season of The Contender. I was just starting to develop an interest in boxing, and it was fascinating to learn about the boxers on the show. I learned eventually that a lot of the TV tricks on the show are pretty standard for reality TV, which I hadn't really been interested in before. But I did enjoy that this show didn't have lame contests like building something out of coconuts or designing a dress out of dead chickens. Each contest boiled down to stepping in the ring and winning a boxing match. Underdog Grady Brewer (in the photo above) won the second season--and, according to BoxRec.com, hasn't fought in a bout since then. I wonder why not.

As a bonus, the episodes were for sale on iTunes; instead of staying up late to watch, I could buy them, download them onto my iPod, and watch them on my horrific 90-minute commute home by train, which made the trip a bit less horrific.

Unfortunately, this year, following complaints by hard-core boxing fans, they've cut back on the fighters' stories; interesting that boxing writer William Detloff writes here about how, by caving to the demands of boxing fans, the producers made the show worse. I would agree (adding that I sure wish this season were on iTunes again).

Still, it's fun to watch; and by getting to see more boxing, I get to study a bit more. Since I don't want to stay up late (starts 10 PM, when I go to bed), I caught up today, Sunday, when there were several episodes on the air in the afternoon.

I did some knee exercises today--home physical therapy--and I'm using the deck of cards to do push-ups, though I'm spreading it out over time rather than doing it all at once, just to see how that works.

This week, I'm trying something new in my martial arts classes. At the suggestion of my sensei, I'm going to attend a kickboxing class, do drills, and then work out with the level one students, rather than getting into free sparring. My new sensei says he'll be very careful about my leg, and working with at level one--where each strike is predetermined and done carefully--I shouldn't get hurt. I'll be able to work on my footwork and defense, and I'll start getting my timing back.

This will be the first time for me to attend kickboxing class since before my ACL surgery. I don't want to get hurt, and I won't, but I'm eager to see how it will go.

Back To Sprinting

For the first time since my ACL operation in March, I sprinted today. I think it's going to be great for my anaerobic endurance and weight; I can't say I did spectacularly well at sprinting, however.

When I was preparing for my tournament a fews years ago, my old sensei had me do sprints. I went to a track, jogged about half a mile, and then would sprint for 15 seconds, followed by walking for 30.

The difficulty in doing this is measuring time--even with a stopwatch it's tough when you're sprinting.

So I tried a tip from the book The Ultimate Boxer, and decided I would sprint set distances, rather than for a particular time. One set the book recommends is, after a warmup jog, sprinting 8 200-meter intervals (finish within 30 seconds), followed by a 200-meter jog; then something like 10 100-meter sprints, jogging back to the starting line.

Now the standard high-school track is 400 meters, so 200 meters is half the track. The book's recommended interval workout seemed, for me at 51 and recovering from ACL surgery, more like a goal to aspire to than something I can do now. I was right.

After stretching and a 800-meter warm-up jog, my first couple of 200-yard sprints took longer than 30 seconds, with the consequence that they were more of a run than a sprint by the end of them. And I was too bushed to jog in between. I decided to allow myself to sprint for 30 seconds and stop at that point, regardless of whether I had gone 200 meters, and then to walk to where the next 200-meter sprint would start. I got (I think) five of those done, and my knee began to feel a bit sore--not terrible, but not something I wanted to push to the point of being terrible. So I finished with one 100-meter sprint, then a walk around the track.

Besides there being limits to how well I can sprint, there are limits to how often I can do this. Given that I work a nine-hour day Monday through Friday, and I have a three-hour round-trip commute, I can only do interval sprints on the weekend. Ideally I should be running four days a week and doing interval training three days a week. Unless I became a professional athlete--cue laugh track here--I don't have time for that. My hope is that my interval sprinting will complement the anaerobic nature of the core martial arts classes I'm taking, with bursts of punches and kicks.

Interval sprinting really helped me a lot when I was preparing for the tournament--but at that point I was working from home one day a week, and I could go to the track and do my sprints that day, giving me two times a week.

But even once a week, it can't hurt (unless I hurt my knee), and it will probably help. (Actually, what hurts most now isn't my knee, it's the bottom of my foot due to plantar fasciitis.)

Back from Boston

I'm back from Boston, where I had a relaxing visit with some friends. My wife was with me the first three days, and my daughter stayed for the fourth day as well. We attended a concert one evening my daughter wanted to see; I liked two of the bands, Incubus and The Bravery, but truly should have brought ear plugs, my hearing is already suffering and my ears were still ringing the next morning. My daughter loved it, though, which was fun to see.

I was pleased to see my friend the Astronomer was going to the gym every weekday morning. His wife, the Moral Genius (really bright couple) has had just about all the cartilage removed from her knees, so climbing stairs and such is really painful. But she's been swimming (except now, when the pool is being renovated) to stay in shape. They were college classmates of mine, it's great to see them keeping fit. I'm happy my wife and my friends--including these two and another couple--get along so well.

I haven't heard back that my knee brace is ready yet, but that's not surprising, it hasn't even been a week.

Tomorrow, I'm going off by myself to the Catskills, to stay at a friend's place, alone for two nights. I'm going to read, do slow kicks, do knee physical therapy, crunches/sit ups, push ups, but generally just relax a bit.

Actually, per a prior post, I'm also going to figure out an exercise plan--how to fit all the different types of conditioning I want to do, including my return to core karate classes, into a busy schedule that includes my 3-hour round-trip to work each day. I may have to include some cardio and martial arts on the same day, but I really need pencil and paper to figure it all out.