January 25, 2009
Sara's Birthday Weekend
Sara's Birthday was this weekend and I went out to Hood River to celebrate it with her and her sister MaryAnn. On Saturday we ate Cheezits and went cross country skiing at TeacCup Lake. We got lapped two times by one gal. But we had hot cocoa and sandwiches and she didn't. On Sunday we went up North towards Mt. Adams and skiied in the sun up to some ice caves. It was very cool and it'd be nice to go back there with some crampons and a helmet. It was a cool weekend hanging out and learning which muscles you normally don't use while skiing.
January 22, 2009
Workout
I'm reading about strength building in Extreme Alpinism by Mark Twight. His book says (if I read it right) that you need to get warmed up and then do 6 sets of 2 reps of your almost max. This is supposed to increase your neuromuscular pathways and in turn increase your strength but not mass.
It takes 9 or so sets of warming up before the set of 6, for a total of 15 sets. As you need to rest the muscles inbetween sets I tried throwing in other lifts or exercises. It also takes close to 1 1/2 hours to get through the lifting. I'm focusing on biceps and lats as I'm not wanting to hurt my shoulder with bench. I'm not doing legs as the gym doesn't have enough weight to do low rep/high weight for legs (serious, I plate the press machine with 1 leg.)
This is my second workout like this, but I think I've seen a change already. In the first one I could barely get out 2 curls of 95lbs, but this time I got in 6 sets of 105. Hopefully it's not a fluke and continues.
warmup:
pullups x8
pushups/pullins on ball x15
curls 45x8, 50x8, 55x8
jumping jacks 1min
1 arm pulldown 50x8, 55x8, 60x8
1/2 ball shuttling 1min
curl 65x8, 70x8, 70x8
calf raises x15, x20, x25
1 arm pulldown 65x8, 70x7, 75x5
behind head tricep 40x15, 40x15, 40x15
curl 75x5, 85x4, 95x3
fly on ball 25x15, 30x15, 35x15
1 arm pulldown 80x3, 85x3, 90x3
1 leg press 175x15, 190x15, 205x15
curl 100x2, 105x2, 105x2, 105x2
crunches on ball
1arm pulldown 100x2, 105x2, 105x2, 105x2
1 leg press 220x15, 235x15,250x10
curl 105x2, 105x2
1 arm pulldown 100x2, 110x2
jog 15 min
January 17, 2009
Devil's Rest
Ingrid and I went up to do Devil's Rest on Saturday. There was a lot of snow on the path which slowed us down a bit. There were lots of nice views of the Gorge as we hoofed it up to the top. Up top it was pretty cold but the cocoa worked its magic again.
January 16, 2009
Angels Rest at night
On Thursday night I wanted to hike Angels Rest in the gorge and went up with Karen and Matt. It was uber windy and once we got to the top we had to walk on fours and crawl from rock to rock. We figured the gusts were near 45mph (with nothing to guide us besides being pushed over.) After some Cheezits and hot cocoa we headed back down.
January 10, 2009
Angels Rest and new camera case
I recently bought a new camera case called the Alpinist case for schleping my camera when climbing. As I'm in no shape to climb outside yet, I thought I would go up the grueling hike to Angels Rest to work off 2 Cheez-it crackers and try the case. It's designed to be used with one hand for climbing and such and after a bit I got it down and it's pretty slick. So it should do on my 5.2 climbs this summer.
