Saturday, February 2, 2013

Ride and 'Bells

Kind of a lazy start to the day workout wise.  I slept like an absolute ROCK last night.  The two prior nights I'd slept about a total of 8 hours so I was due.  I usually don't have consecutive nights of bad sleep, nevertheless anything really less than about 6 or 7, so I suppose I was due.

Again, I'm going to say, as much as I would never have imagined it, I'm really loving getting back into a 'training' mode again.  Hard physical work on the bike feels good, and even though I'm only a shadow of what I was the last time I was serious about riding on the road, it'll come back and I'm already feeling it.  It's only a matter of time before I start getting my kick back and really putting down some serious power.

I haven't been riding off road much, though tomorrow I will.  The trails should be back to normal for this time of year-frozen and fast.  I'd love to get up to some of the better riding upstate in the actual "mountains", but I'll make due with what we've got here on the sandbar that is Long Island.

After the ride this afternoon (which was about an hour and a half-I got a flat about 20 minutes in that forced me to shorten things because I was losing daylight) I got in a great strength workout with my kettlebells.  The sets were as follows:

2 sets of 5 reps of:
Cleans with 2, 24 kg bells
Clean and pushpress w/ 32kg bell
Long cycle Clean and Jerk w/ 2, 24kg bells
40 continuous one arm snatches w/ 1 24kg bell

All strength and all good.  I'm working a lot on my grip technique.  As I've moved into the "heavier for me" bells, I've found that my grip sucked.  I've been constantly ripping blood blisters and calluses on my palms-not good if you want to work on longer, endurance sets.  To combat all this, I've focused a lot on the "hook grip", using my thumb and index finger to do a lot of the actual grip work while the other three fingers on each hand concentrate on stabilizing the bell as it rotates.  It's more difficult that it looks, and requires actually letting go of the bell in mid flight as you re-grip.  Like all things kettlebell, it just takes patience and practice.  I'll get it, just have to keep working.

So that's it for today.  Sitting down to enjoy a nice beer (or 4) and watch the UFC.  Tomorrow I'll try and get my ride on the trails before sitting my ass down AGAIN to watch the Superbowl.  Not a bad weekend by any means.

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