And this is perhaps one of the biggest differences between my current “training” (if you can call it that) and what I did before.
Before: I was so goal oriented. Now at 61…and dealing with the small injury wack-a-mole, (right now, shoulder, piriformis), I just don’t want a set back.
The shoulder came about on re-racking the weights; I could hear that “snap-crackle-pop” and thought “ok, there goes 2-3 months”… and so I am. Swimming in small amounts is ok; pulling is ok (e. g. deadlifts, rows, push-ups) and even light shoulder pressing is ok, especially with the multi-grip bar.
Push ups at an angle that amounts to a decline press are ok.
Other stuff: got a head start on grading; exams are take-home and so I can grade them as they come in. 20 done, 70 to go.
I hope to make a couple of baseball games this week..tomorrow night and Wednesday night.
Workout: swimming and lifting; a tough duo.
The swimming wasn’t that much:
200 free to warm up (slow as hell, but not that painful…shoulder issues)
200 drill/swim (side kick, swim) with fins.
200 alternating 50 free, 50 pull (higher body position)
200 strokes: 6 x 25 alternating breast, free, 50 side.
200 drill/swim (side kick, swim) with fins
200: 4 x 50 on the 1:10 (about 57 each..pretty sorry)
The whole thing was 1200 yards (just under 1100 meters) and took 32 minutes. Sorry…
These were the fins I took for a spin. I like them.
Then I walked home and tried to lift.
Pull ups: 10 singles (2 sets of those) and a lot of sets of 5; enough to get 50 reps; so-so quality. I was fatigued but I’ve had worse reps
usual rotator cuff, etc.
push ups: 30, 30, 20, 20 ok
bench; 2 sets of 10 x 94, 1 set of 6 with 116 (did not feel great)
rows: 3 sets of 10 x 134
curls: 3 sets of 10 x 50
shoulder with grip bar: 10 x 70, 10 x 75 (tough), then a bizarre set where I lost power going up on rep 6 and so rested it on the safeties, switched grip, and got 5 more to finish the set.
That is kind of how it went; I found a way to get it done without reinjuring myself.
Overall, well, I am making changes with a still tender..but improving..shoulder. I’ll have a minor setback next week due to an unavoidable medical procedure (routine..once every 10 years)
The real question is to what to do about deadlifting. I wonder if my attempted 5 sets of 3 at 90 percent is too much to sustain…do I need to back off a bit and include some high handle work?
Prof McWhorter on CRT and wokeness, Rick Wilson (and yes, I was wrong about Trump being dumped after losing), and Rep. Elissa Slotkin.
Other things were discussed, including the woke CIA recruitment ad which was just dripping with wokeness…and mentioned next to nothing about …well…service and being good at the actual job.
This, in my opinion, is a sorry, sorry look for the CIA.
But alas, the wokes are terrible at introspection. Evidently Elizabeth Warren released a book about her campaign, and blamed her failure on…sexism.
Too many times, liberal wokes think that politics is like corporate America or a college campus where one has deans or HR to complain to.
From the article:
“Warren’s account ignores the possibility that her campaign simply misjudged the electorate, both within the party and outside it. As a result, she positioned herself too far left, which not only cost her support among Democrats, but created well-founded concerns — even among Democrats who liked her ideas — about her ability to beat Trump. (I was one of those voters. My initial enthusiasm for her candidacy gave way to dismay at her apparent lack of political savvy.) Perhaps she would have lost no matter what she did, but her strategic choices seem to have hurt her chances in ways she does not acknowledge. […]
“The most painfully oblivious sections are when Warren describes her efforts to woo Black and Latino activists, whose endorsements she equates with wooing those communities as a whole. …. That disconnect became even more starkly evident the following November when Trump made shocking gains with conservative-leaning Black and Latino voters. That result produced a searching examination of the disconnect between the increasingly left-wing cadre of young, college-educated activists on the left and its voters, especially the party’s disproportionately Black and brown moderate wing.”
Alas, such criticism is doomed to fall on deaf ears.
COVID-19: the US situation, and FINALLY the local situation are improving. But getting a handle on what was going on was a long process…aerosol transmission appears to be the main culprit along with the droplets. Yes, masks are very useful, and the biggest worry is high viral load in indoor settings when the virus can accumulate.
Bradley baseball: I saw the first part of a double header on Friday, and then the first game plus 6 more innings of the second.
Bradley won the first 9-5 ..and in the second game that I saw, won 3-2 on a bizarre ending:
How's this for a 2-out, bases empty sequence to end a 1-run game: walk, E1 throwing failed pick off that advances runner to 3B, pitch to the back stop for a game-ending 2-1 caught stealing? Not giving it back!
And then, I came across some interesting discussion:
I recommend going over the whole thread.
I recently stumbled upon this panel on the topic of Critical Race Theory (what else?) hosted by The Manhattan Institute and was shocked by the lineup. Why the hell was Chris Rufo in the same conversation as Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy?!?!
Go back to the the discussion on CRT that I linked to. The intellectuals on the thread seems to think that the reporter got owned by those more intellectual critics. He may have..if the debate/discussion was being analyzed by intellectuals.
But the public doesn’t give a fig about the theoretical/intellectual underpinnings of Critical Race Theory.
They care about possibly being fired because you celebrated winning three contests in a row with the wrong finger symbol.
Now the intellectual might say “wait a minute”; these are isolated stories ..and this is NOT what “Critical Race Theory” is about. But while such claims might be important in scholarly circles, they are NOT important in the public sphere nor are they important in politics.
This reminds me of the battles atheist scientists have with the more liberal religious people. Said scientists claim that a big impediment to the acceptance of evolution is…religion.
The educated liberals respond that the scientists are using a very crude, primitive version of “faith” and need to study “sophisticated theology.”
But, the atheist scientists point out that the “sophisticated” word salad deities of the philosophers and educated theologians has almost nothing in common with the “God, please cure my brother’s cancer” deity worshiped by actual worshipers…to THEM, a God performing magic tricks to snap the universe into existence is unsurprising … and THAT type of deity is the one that science educators have to face.
The same goes with the public getting irritated with sanctimonious liberal “activists”; said activists might be getting CRT wrong, but that is not the point.
Black people have, on average, less wealth and income than white people, anything that redistributes wealth and income from the haves to the have-nots reduces racial gaps. But the politics of these framings are perverse. It’s particularly perverse because the kinds of people who spend a lot of time thinking about race from a progressive point of view are precisely the people who in other contexts are inclined to emphasize what a big deal racism has historically been in shaping American politics.
That’s why liberals from FDR and LBJ to Obama tried to downplay it when possible — they were trying to win and help people! After all, there’s no special features of unions or Medicaid or the minimum wage that leads them to close racial gaps — all egalitarian economic policy has this effect.
My suspicion is that this is a weird tic of campus politics that has followed graduates into the professional arena where they unconsciously started deploying it in less appropriate contexts. If you’re in a dorm at a fancy college and you can convince an administrator that something is racist, the administrator will probably put a stop to it. At the same time, “this is bad for poor people” just isn’t going to get you far as a campus argument. After all, these schools more or less openly auction off a number of admissions slots to wealthy donors (while, of course, practicing affirmative action to keep things diverse) so they can hardly take a hard line on class politics.
But electoral politics in a democracy isn’t like that. And to the extent that the US political system isn’t democratic, it’s mostly tilted in favor of over-representing white people with no college degree. So if you actually want to close racial gaps by raising the minimum wage, expanding union membership, expanding Medicaid, and reducing student debt, the last thing you want to do is to sell people on the idea that this is really all about race.”
I got just a bit of shoulder ache at the moment..wonder if I hit the pool a bit too hard, given where I’ve come from?
Yesterday: no fins (old Zoomers tore up) 1000 of mostly drill with 25 swim between drill sessions; did in pods of 200 yards each (side, back, breast, various drills). And yes, yoga with Ms. Vickie.
Today: swim; 1200 yards:
4 50’s (alternating pull and swim)
200 of alternating TI drills and swimming
200 of alternating stroke and free (breast, back)
200 of alternating side and free
200 of alternating TI drills (SFS) and free
200 of 50’s on the 1:10: 54, 56, 57, 57 (not typos..I was that slow)
Then a 2 mile course on a bike (about 10 minutes) just to give my legs something to do.
Pre-final grading is done and now to see what final exams bring. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of next week might be a whirlwind…and the Monday after..ugh.
For now: time to catch up just a bit. I think. Generally, when a block of time appears, someone notices and attempts to fill in the void.
Workout notes: somewhat sore shoulder workout; I only felt the shoulder during the final set of overhead presses:
pull ups: one set of 20 singles, on the “10 second”, 10, then 4 sets of 5
push ups: 30, 30, 20, 20 (challenge)
deadlifts: 10 x 134, 10 x 184, 10 x 224 (all ok)
curls: 3 sets of 10 x 50
shoulder presses: close grip, 10 x 65, 10 x 70, medium grip: 10 x 75 (felt the deeper reps here, especially the final one).
rows: 3 sets of 10 x 134
I might stick with the narrow grip for a while.
Also, I need to do my glute/piriformis PT even though I am not walking.
I have just a little bit of time to think and I wondered about the concepts that have lead me to having the most peace of mind:
Evolution. We evolved and have certain statistical traits…there IS a human nature.
Copernicus. We are NOT the center of the universe (yes, I know; the original was about heliocentric astronomy.)
Outliers. Yes, the famous people we read about are usually outliers and, by definition, few of us are outliers.
Perceptions of others: mostly immutable. Yes, I can do my best at something, but I cannot FORCE someone else to perceive me in a certain way. We can pass laws about behaviors and treatments, but not about perception.
Basically, 1-3 are: “you ain’t that special” and 4 is “what others think of you really isn’t your business.”
These ideas give me peace, but they don’t make me popular.
Life of an old goat 