Owwwww-ch!

Now that I'm officially in my off-season I decided to skip a cardio workout yesterday and spend the morning pumping some iron to get the definition back in my muscles after a season of spotty training and strength training that's been half-assed at best. Now, I'm not unfamiliar with the inside of a weight room since for a year it was my job to teach people how to use one. In Santa Cruz it was my job to spend 40 hours a week teaching fat old housewives to do bicep curls, low back extensions, leg presses (always re-rack your weights, thank you), and the like. It was also my job to stop the following women from hurting themselves:

• The woman who would arch so far back doing bicep curls that gravity would bring the bar the last 45 degrees to her shoulder.
• The woman who risked neck injury in addition to massive head trauma by crashing the lat pull bar behind her neck.
• The ladies who would do back extensions so far back that they surpassed the cobra pose and held their arms out, back arched far enough back to look like some strange worshiping ceremony of the fluorescent lights behind them.
• The woman who always wore sunglasses (actually a really cool lady) and said that the fluorescent lights made her sick so we would drag the bench to a fire exit and I would spot her doing skull crushers with her eyes closed, telling her where the bar was and if her arms were even before each set.
• The women who would do endless sets of leg presses with their toes on the bottom-most edge of the sled, sticking their knees out 8 inches or more over their toes and shredding their meniscus to bits.
• Telling the woman who wanted to hang upside down on the Smith bar that that was absolutely prohibited; that, no, ma'am, you're going to have to get down now, can I give you a hand? And then finally finding the manager to talk to her and coming back to see her her doing the butt blaster with two legs at once.

I'm not intimidated by a weight room. I even used to ENJOY lifting weights since I'm stronger than I am fast. But this season, since I wasn't spending 90% of my time with competitive power lifters and I was kidding myself into thinking I was training for at least a half ironman if not longer, my weight routine was limited to one set of one upper body group and one core exercise on the days I had 10 minutes to spare at the end of my workout.

So back to yesterday when I spent an hour or more in the weight end of the exercise floor (more time than I'd spent there in the whole year combined up until now) doing a full body strength workout, complete with even a bit of stretching. Not to be one to admit that I might not be as strong as I used to be I picked up one shade less than I used to lift in the name of "starting off easy". I did the ab machine (ball was taken), the captain's chair for low abs, 3 minutes of plank, oblique side bends, low back extensions, bicep curls, hammer curls, cable tricep extensions, low rows, overhead shoulder presses, pec flies, lunges, calf raises, and finished off the whole thing leg presses with 85 kilos (187 lb) plus the sled. When I got off the leg press machine I was woozy and needed to sit down for a minute.

Down in the showers I still felt like I was floating a bit. It was kind of cool, a kind of tired that I hadn't felt in awhile. Since I only have about a week left I decided to cancel my membership starting in October on the way out. I started explaining myself to the plucky receptionist who always wants to speak Spanglish with me. "Let me go get the form," he said.
"I just lifted weights for the first time in a long time, am I going to have to write a lot?" I asked, showing him my trembling hands.
"No, just sign your name. Don't worry, that happens to me too after I lift weights," he said, but he was looking pretty concerned or serious and I don't know if I believed him. He got the sheet and filled out all the fields and then handed me the pen. "Sign here".
I got a shaky C out and took a deep breath. "Don't worry, take your time, I'll be back in a minute," he said. Some 20 seconds later I'd squeezed out something that looked like an abstract interpretation of my signature and floated down the hill home. It was like my body weighed half of what it normally did, but somehow I knew that this feeling was not because I was stronger, yet.

I did everything I was supposed to do: ate lots of carbohydrates right after my workout and loaded up on protein all day. And I felt pretty good...

...until I woke up this morning! My arms feel like someone tried to rip them from their sockets, my low back is only bending in a rusty 2 degrees at a time, my lower abs feel like I'm giving birth, my hamstrings straight down through my calves to my ankle are one giant river of sore, my quads burn if I try to flex them (I haven't tried stairs yet), and my adductors (inner thighs) feel like someone tried to make my heels touch my ears. Even my left eyeball hurts, but I have a feeling that that's unrelated. And the worst part of Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS)? It's going to be worse tomorrow!!!

To conclude I will leave you with the following clip. You're going to have to watch till the end to see the relevance (start at 4:20)...