Cry, Little Lifter
Aug. 15th, 2004 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tyggerjaiOr, "Thou shalt not suddenly realise that thou art doing bicep curls to the techno remix of _Cry, Little Sister_, lest thou recoil in horror and drop a 30 lb dumbbell on thy foot. Because it fucking hurts."
The trouble with good weekends, as I may have remarked ere now, is that they underscore just how brief and pathetic the weekends really are, and can plunge you into a fugue of depression as you contemplate yet another Monday morning at the office, or in my case at a conference full of sad geeks who are just going to bitch about how impossible the IMS LO spec is to implement, and look smug at having managed to extract information no-one will ever give a damn about from learning objects no-one will ever actually use because the entire concept of "shared content" between schools, let alone countries, would have failed to take off anyway under the weight of lumbering bureaucracy, hideously labrynthine international IP concerns, tha failure of Esperanto, and the fact that it's just stupid even had it not been technically all-but-hamstrung by the spectacularly useless "specification" that we could have predicted from a joint IEEE/IETF/GOTUS/random-academia committee.
Christ. I didn't think I could get any more cynical than I was when I started typing that sentence. Wasn't I wrong.
To take my mind off the encroaching morrow, herewith my weekend.
Actually, let's back it up a little, because you need some back story here. A couple of weeks ago, I woke up one Sunday with crippling knee pain. Well.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
qamar need have no sympathy for me, but for the rest of you, it was pretty bloody crippling. Couldn't get comfortable sitting, couldn't go down stairs, no damn way was I jogging or doing squats. So I took it easy for a couple of days, and it became bearable, but didn't heal up as well as I'd hoped. And after a couple of weeks without cardio, I began to fret, and feel bloated, so rather than, like, stop eating shit, I went to the physio on Thursday.
AND SHE STUCK POINTY THINGS IN MY LEG. Her diagnosis was patellar tendonosis, which is subtly different from tendonitis, in that tendonitis is a temporary (Yah, temporary. "Chronic" tendonitis actually just means you keep doing the things that inflame the tendon, which is silly. If it's truly chronic (ie, continues after you stop doing the root cause), then that's almost certainly indicative of actual damage to the tendon, hence tendonosis. Of course, it may be impossible to stop doing whatever causes the inflammation, but that's not technically the same as "permanent" inflammation.) inflammation caused by overuse (or use at a funny angle) where the tendon itself isn't damaged as such, whereas tendonosis is long term tissue damage caused by bits of the bone grinding away bits of the tendon, or by the tendon tearing under stress. Fun!
Fortunately, in my case, while the tendon itself is damaged, there's a treatable cause for the pain - my illiotibial band is excessively tight, and causing the kneecap to maltrack. Loosening the illiotibial band won't heal the damage, but it will remove the aggravation and allow the tendon hopefully to heal on its own. At the very least, even if the tendon doesn't heal, this will help prevent further damage, and relieve the pain.
So, deep tissue massage, and other ancilliary treatments, and lots of rest.
"Have you ever tried acupuncture?" she asked, wide-eyed and innocent.
"No, no I haven't", said I.
"Because if you wanted to go down that road, it would make the massgae treatment much easier and quicker. Up to you."
Well, heck, everyone says acupuncture doesn't hurt, right?
"Sure. You're the professional. If it'll help, let's do it."
So, I signed a waiver ( I am not pregnant, or epileptic. Which reminds me. The exercise bikes at the gym say "Stop using this equipment if you feel dizzy, nauseous, or short of breath." . What's the fucking *point*, then??), and she wiped my thigh down with a cold alcohol swab. That's precisely as erotic as it sounds, by the way. And I lay back and closed my eyes, anticipating sweet, hippy calm flooding my Chi meridians any minute.
When I stopped screaming, I mentioned to that I had been under the impression that acupuncture did not, in fact, hurt. Not that I was impugning her professional competence, but what the *fuck*??
"Oh no," she said, brightly, "that's the wrong kind of acupuncture. Real acupuncture hurts like a motherfucker."
I paraphrase, you understand. She may not have used the word "motherfucker", but she did give me to understand that the process of sticking BIG FUCKOFF POINTY THINGS deep into muscle tissue with the express purpose of triggering spasms and twitch reflexes carries with it, inherently, a certain amount of discomfort. Like a *motherfucker*, I tell you. Then she *flicked* them.
Anyhoo. Thank god for years of kinky sex - by the end of the treament she was complimenting me on my ability to look relaxed with BIG FUCKOFF POINTY THINGS stuck in my thigh. So much so, that she decided to illustrate the extent of the problem. With her thumb.
"Can you feel th... yes, I guess you can."
Like a motherfucker. And, apparently, I'm going back next week to let her do it again, and she's not even my type. What really kills me is that Ambrose, whose fault all this is, is a first-year myotherapy student, just aching (boomtish) for a chance to practise his deep tissue massage, so I'm paying him extra to rub my thigh, rather than going to the tall dark babe at the sports clinic. Well. Ambrose is tall, and dark, and two out of three ain't *bad*, but really. At least he's cheap.
Anyway. She replaced the sharp pain in my knee with a dull, aching pain in my thigh, which is a little better. But I'm still not allowed to walk down stairs. I made the mistake of saying, at work, that I wasn't allowed to "go" downstairs, and Our Resident Morris Dancing Chorister said, helpfully, "Well, you're allowed to go down stairs, just not to walk down them". But then this is the man who describes the problem of CPU cooling as "Not so much cooling the CPU as removing the heat from it.". Mostly, we ignore him. He's an electrical engineer, after all.
So that brings us to Friday. You'll note I'm not mentioning work, much. We had intended to go tofrou_frous shop opening - had, in fact, been looking forward to it - but I didn't get home till nearly 8 (see me not mention work. Though I did have a beer and a quick workout in between. But see me not mention work), and when I got home, I found a sleepy rabbit who'd come home early, sick from work. So mostly we slept.
Saturday, yay. To market to market, unconscionably early, to buy a fat ... carrot. Due to the aforementioned bloated feeling, I had finally succumbed to Ambrose's suggestion that I could perhaps afford to eat less of the stuff I actually like, and more actual vegetables. So, to market to market to buy lean chicken, fish, and shit with leaves. There's a reason that's not immortalised in popular song, eh? So dinner last night was roast chicken, and stir-fried vegetables. But a damn *good* roast chicken, I must admit. Golden and crispy, and so, so moist. Mmmm. And the trick (sometimes) to good stirfried vegetables, as Mary Poppins will tell you, is a spoonful of honey. Try not to imagine Melly Poppins floating high above the chimneys of Beijing, borne aloft by her trusty wok. Oh, wait. It was a spoonful of sugar, anyway. Never mind. And dessert was fruit salad, albeit fruit salad with a topping of Baileys & yoghurt.
I did not buy fish at the market - I don't *do* fish. I can discourse for hours on the relative merits of "Chinese" vs "American" style pork ribs, (I actually prefer Chinese style. The ribs from the belly are in fact longer, and if you choose carefully, just as fat and tender. The trouble is, they have a tendency to be all bone if you don't choose carefully. "American" style ribs are generally loin ribs, which are more expensive, and leaner. Ironically, in the U.S. they tend to use "Chinese" style belly ribs. Since to my mind spare ribs should be great, dripping hunks of tender juicy fat wrapped around a convenient bone handle, you understand why FISH DOESN'T FUCKING CUT IT), or boned loin vs leg roast (boned loin is great for stuffing, much better than leg, but leg has better crackling), but fish? What's exciting about *fish*? But, upon my return home, I dug out the fish cookbook my apparently-prescient-or-perhaps-just-not-too-subtle father bought me some years ago. And there's some half decent stuff in there - lots of tuna with lemon and cracked pepper, etc. So. Learning experience, right? Make fish taste like pork. I can manage that. Oh, and I built a flashy LED chaser, too. The last robot attempt didn't go so well, so I decided to start from something more basic. So saturday was good.
But the real highlight of the weekend was Sunday. Not, I hasten to add, becausebunnikins was out all day. I finally cleared out my bedside table, which was covered mostly in bunnikins books. Mostly, they went back in her incoming pile, since that's where they'd come from. Her incoming pile now has more books than many people (though few of our friends) own. I reckoned, not counting the Cadfaels (which aren't really incoming, I just dumped them there with all the rest) half a 6'x3" worth (6' by 3", in case any of Beloved Readers don't know, is the stock size for domestic 5-shelfers. They generally hold between 150-250 paperbacks, depending on how you stack them), near as dammit. Which is awkward, because we currently have negative shelf space. I sense a trip to Office works in the offing. Though it's nearly spring, and I have Power Tools. All the wrong power tools, but I wanted an excuse to buy a compound mitre saw.... Anyhoo, she's been at me for months to do that, and if they'd collapsed, we could have been trapped under them, and with only our emergency bedside chocolate rations to sustain us we would soon have succumbed to adult-onset type 2 diabetes.
And I did washing, which may not *seem* exciting, if you've never smelled my gym kit. And then, oddly enough, gym.
Yes, I'm still going. Yes, there are photos at the end of this post, as a reward for reading this far. I figure I've been going for 6 months, it's about time for some "Before" photos. Today I was inpsired. I suspect that my recent lack of enthusiasm (though I've still been going, but only twice a week, outside of Ambrose) has been due to weather, as well as illness and injury. Hm. Maybe just illness and injury :) But I haven't been pushing it, it's seemed almost a chore. Today, not only did I go back to my old routine, but I liefted well, and did lots of ab. stuff and extras to make up for no cardio. And I really enjoyed it. For those not playing in Melbourne, it was a glorious, glorious day today - almost felt like spring. So I think as spring/summer approach, I'll get more inspired, which is just as well. I've hit a plateau, and this diet thing isn't going to help, but if I can see a Vin Diesel shaped light at the end of the tunnel, I can stick it out for 6 months, by which time I should, in fact, be able to start eating properly again, since I'll be back to maintenance, rather than caloric deficit. Huzzah.
Then an hour in Joe's Garage. When I write my Steampunk Car Wars computer game, it will have "Mistress Josephine's Automotive Repair Centre", just so players can go to Jo's garage. Boomtish. And did I mention it nearly felt like spring? I haven't killed an hour in the sun in the window at Joe's
for what feels like forever, and it felt *good*. Ah, Brunswick St. Ah, Fitzroy dykes. Ah, Fitzroy.
Home again, betimes, and a quick spin on the moto-velocipede. Enlightenment. I don't know if it's the increased upper body strength, or just listening to the bike and being receptive to learning, but I *got* riding, at a whole new level today. And it really is about riding with the pelvis. Arms relaxed - which is always my problem - elbows in and down but *neutral*, not forced, and let your arse do the real work. At every level. Lean, don't turn - don't even *think* turning unless you're countersteering, but lean from the hips - pull the bike around from your crotch. Eh. It's impossible to explain, really. But I think I got it. Now, more practise.
Then home, and El Pollo Diablo, as described elsewhere. The perfect weekend, really, especially since I can hearbunnikins cleaning the kitchen as I type :)
Right. I promised pictures. This is me, not looking as buff as I would like. Ignore the goofey expressions - I hadn't realised my face was in shot :)
I'm sure, btw, that I look buffer than this in real life, andbunnikins confirms that :)
Frontal pose
Actually, the shoulders in this one are ok - you can see the delts sloping down and then the shoulders bulging. And the biceps aren't so bad, just sheathed in a little too much fat. And that belly is much less than it was six months ago.
Back pose
Again, the delts are ok (Uh, I think they're delts. The bit sloping down from the neck to the shoulders), and the lats would actually be pretty impressive if I lost the love handles. Though then I'd probably lose half the lats, too :) You can also see, I think, on the right arm some definition starting to happen on the shoulder/bicep area, too.
Front pose, again
Again, I think that particularly on the right side, you can start to see definition between the shoulder and the bicep, rather than just a contiguous bulge. That's pretty exciting, let me tell you. Also a little from the shoulders to the pecs.
More in 6 months, when I look like teh Vin.
sol.
.
The trouble with good weekends, as I may have remarked ere now, is that they underscore just how brief and pathetic the weekends really are, and can plunge you into a fugue of depression as you contemplate yet another Monday morning at the office, or in my case at a conference full of sad geeks who are just going to bitch about how impossible the IMS LO spec is to implement, and look smug at having managed to extract information no-one will ever give a damn about from learning objects no-one will ever actually use because the entire concept of "shared content" between schools, let alone countries, would have failed to take off anyway under the weight of lumbering bureaucracy, hideously labrynthine international IP concerns, tha failure of Esperanto, and the fact that it's just stupid even had it not been technically all-but-hamstrung by the spectacularly useless "specification" that we could have predicted from a joint IEEE/IETF/GOTUS/random-academia committee.
Christ. I didn't think I could get any more cynical than I was when I started typing that sentence. Wasn't I wrong.
To take my mind off the encroaching morrow, herewith my weekend.
Actually, let's back it up a little, because you need some back story here. A couple of weeks ago, I woke up one Sunday with crippling knee pain. Well.
qamar need have no sympathy for me, but for the rest of you, it was pretty bloody crippling. Couldn't get comfortable sitting, couldn't go down stairs, no damn way was I jogging or doing squats. So I took it easy for a couple of days, and it became bearable, but didn't heal up as well as I'd hoped. And after a couple of weeks without cardio, I began to fret, and feel bloated, so rather than, like, stop eating shit, I went to the physio on Thursday. AND SHE STUCK POINTY THINGS IN MY LEG. Her diagnosis was patellar tendonosis, which is subtly different from tendonitis, in that tendonitis is a temporary (Yah, temporary. "Chronic" tendonitis actually just means you keep doing the things that inflame the tendon, which is silly. If it's truly chronic (ie, continues after you stop doing the root cause), then that's almost certainly indicative of actual damage to the tendon, hence tendonosis. Of course, it may be impossible to stop doing whatever causes the inflammation, but that's not technically the same as "permanent" inflammation.) inflammation caused by overuse (or use at a funny angle) where the tendon itself isn't damaged as such, whereas tendonosis is long term tissue damage caused by bits of the bone grinding away bits of the tendon, or by the tendon tearing under stress. Fun!
Fortunately, in my case, while the tendon itself is damaged, there's a treatable cause for the pain - my illiotibial band is excessively tight, and causing the kneecap to maltrack. Loosening the illiotibial band won't heal the damage, but it will remove the aggravation and allow the tendon hopefully to heal on its own. At the very least, even if the tendon doesn't heal, this will help prevent further damage, and relieve the pain.
So, deep tissue massage, and other ancilliary treatments, and lots of rest.
"Have you ever tried acupuncture?" she asked, wide-eyed and innocent.
"No, no I haven't", said I.
"Because if you wanted to go down that road, it would make the massgae treatment much easier and quicker. Up to you."
Well, heck, everyone says acupuncture doesn't hurt, right?
"Sure. You're the professional. If it'll help, let's do it."
So, I signed a waiver ( I am not pregnant, or epileptic. Which reminds me. The exercise bikes at the gym say "Stop using this equipment if you feel dizzy, nauseous, or short of breath." . What's the fucking *point*, then??), and she wiped my thigh down with a cold alcohol swab. That's precisely as erotic as it sounds, by the way. And I lay back and closed my eyes, anticipating sweet, hippy calm flooding my Chi meridians any minute.
When I stopped screaming, I mentioned to that I had been under the impression that acupuncture did not, in fact, hurt. Not that I was impugning her professional competence, but what the *fuck*??
"Oh no," she said, brightly, "that's the wrong kind of acupuncture. Real acupuncture hurts like a motherfucker."
I paraphrase, you understand. She may not have used the word "motherfucker", but she did give me to understand that the process of sticking BIG FUCKOFF POINTY THINGS deep into muscle tissue with the express purpose of triggering spasms and twitch reflexes carries with it, inherently, a certain amount of discomfort. Like a *motherfucker*, I tell you. Then she *flicked* them.
Anyhoo. Thank god for years of kinky sex - by the end of the treament she was complimenting me on my ability to look relaxed with BIG FUCKOFF POINTY THINGS stuck in my thigh. So much so, that she decided to illustrate the extent of the problem. With her thumb.
"Can you feel th... yes, I guess you can."
Like a motherfucker. And, apparently, I'm going back next week to let her do it again, and she's not even my type. What really kills me is that Ambrose, whose fault all this is, is a first-year myotherapy student, just aching (boomtish) for a chance to practise his deep tissue massage, so I'm paying him extra to rub my thigh, rather than going to the tall dark babe at the sports clinic. Well. Ambrose is tall, and dark, and two out of three ain't *bad*, but really. At least he's cheap.
Anyway. She replaced the sharp pain in my knee with a dull, aching pain in my thigh, which is a little better. But I'm still not allowed to walk down stairs. I made the mistake of saying, at work, that I wasn't allowed to "go" downstairs, and Our Resident Morris Dancing Chorister said, helpfully, "Well, you're allowed to go down stairs, just not to walk down them". But then this is the man who describes the problem of CPU cooling as "Not so much cooling the CPU as removing the heat from it.". Mostly, we ignore him. He's an electrical engineer, after all.
So that brings us to Friday. You'll note I'm not mentioning work, much. We had intended to go to
frou_frous shop opening - had, in fact, been looking forward to it - but I didn't get home till nearly 8 (see me not mention work. Though I did have a beer and a quick workout in between. But see me not mention work), and when I got home, I found a sleepy rabbit who'd come home early, sick from work. So mostly we slept.Saturday, yay. To market to market, unconscionably early, to buy a fat ... carrot. Due to the aforementioned bloated feeling, I had finally succumbed to Ambrose's suggestion that I could perhaps afford to eat less of the stuff I actually like, and more actual vegetables. So, to market to market to buy lean chicken, fish, and shit with leaves. There's a reason that's not immortalised in popular song, eh? So dinner last night was roast chicken, and stir-fried vegetables. But a damn *good* roast chicken, I must admit. Golden and crispy, and so, so moist. Mmmm. And the trick (sometimes) to good stirfried vegetables, as Mary Poppins will tell you, is a spoonful of honey. Try not to imagine Melly Poppins floating high above the chimneys of Beijing, borne aloft by her trusty wok. Oh, wait. It was a spoonful of sugar, anyway. Never mind. And dessert was fruit salad, albeit fruit salad with a topping of Baileys & yoghurt.
I did not buy fish at the market - I don't *do* fish. I can discourse for hours on the relative merits of "Chinese" vs "American" style pork ribs, (I actually prefer Chinese style. The ribs from the belly are in fact longer, and if you choose carefully, just as fat and tender. The trouble is, they have a tendency to be all bone if you don't choose carefully. "American" style ribs are generally loin ribs, which are more expensive, and leaner. Ironically, in the U.S. they tend to use "Chinese" style belly ribs. Since to my mind spare ribs should be great, dripping hunks of tender juicy fat wrapped around a convenient bone handle, you understand why FISH DOESN'T FUCKING CUT IT), or boned loin vs leg roast (boned loin is great for stuffing, much better than leg, but leg has better crackling), but fish? What's exciting about *fish*? But, upon my return home, I dug out the fish cookbook my apparently-prescient-or-perhaps-just-not-too-subtle father bought me some years ago. And there's some half decent stuff in there - lots of tuna with lemon and cracked pepper, etc. So. Learning experience, right? Make fish taste like pork. I can manage that. Oh, and I built a flashy LED chaser, too. The last robot attempt didn't go so well, so I decided to start from something more basic. So saturday was good.
But the real highlight of the weekend was Sunday. Not, I hasten to add, because
bunnikins was out all day. I finally cleared out my bedside table, which was covered mostly in bunnikins books. Mostly, they went back in her incoming pile, since that's where they'd come from. Her incoming pile now has more books than many people (though few of our friends) own. I reckoned, not counting the Cadfaels (which aren't really incoming, I just dumped them there with all the rest) half a 6'x3" worth (6' by 3", in case any of Beloved Readers don't know, is the stock size for domestic 5-shelfers. They generally hold between 150-250 paperbacks, depending on how you stack them), near as dammit. Which is awkward, because we currently have negative shelf space. I sense a trip to Office works in the offing. Though it's nearly spring, and I have Power Tools. All the wrong power tools, but I wanted an excuse to buy a compound mitre saw.... Anyhoo, she's been at me for months to do that, and if they'd collapsed, we could have been trapped under them, and with only our emergency bedside chocolate rations to sustain us we would soon have succumbed to adult-onset type 2 diabetes. And I did washing, which may not *seem* exciting, if you've never smelled my gym kit. And then, oddly enough, gym.
Yes, I'm still going. Yes, there are photos at the end of this post, as a reward for reading this far. I figure I've been going for 6 months, it's about time for some "Before" photos. Today I was inpsired. I suspect that my recent lack of enthusiasm (though I've still been going, but only twice a week, outside of Ambrose) has been due to weather, as well as illness and injury. Hm. Maybe just illness and injury :) But I haven't been pushing it, it's seemed almost a chore. Today, not only did I go back to my old routine, but I liefted well, and did lots of ab. stuff and extras to make up for no cardio. And I really enjoyed it. For those not playing in Melbourne, it was a glorious, glorious day today - almost felt like spring. So I think as spring/summer approach, I'll get more inspired, which is just as well. I've hit a plateau, and this diet thing isn't going to help, but if I can see a Vin Diesel shaped light at the end of the tunnel, I can stick it out for 6 months, by which time I should, in fact, be able to start eating properly again, since I'll be back to maintenance, rather than caloric deficit. Huzzah.
Then an hour in Joe's Garage. When I write my Steampunk Car Wars computer game, it will have "Mistress Josephine's Automotive Repair Centre", just so players can go to Jo's garage. Boomtish. And did I mention it nearly felt like spring? I haven't killed an hour in the sun in the window at Joe's
for what feels like forever, and it felt *good*. Ah, Brunswick St. Ah, Fitzroy dykes. Ah, Fitzroy.
Home again, betimes, and a quick spin on the moto-velocipede. Enlightenment. I don't know if it's the increased upper body strength, or just listening to the bike and being receptive to learning, but I *got* riding, at a whole new level today. And it really is about riding with the pelvis. Arms relaxed - which is always my problem - elbows in and down but *neutral*, not forced, and let your arse do the real work. At every level. Lean, don't turn - don't even *think* turning unless you're countersteering, but lean from the hips - pull the bike around from your crotch. Eh. It's impossible to explain, really. But I think I got it. Now, more practise.
Then home, and El Pollo Diablo, as described elsewhere. The perfect weekend, really, especially since I can hear
bunnikins cleaning the kitchen as I type :)Right. I promised pictures. This is me, not looking as buff as I would like. Ignore the goofey expressions - I hadn't realised my face was in shot :)
I'm sure, btw, that I look buffer than this in real life, and
bunnikins confirms that :)Frontal pose
Actually, the shoulders in this one are ok - you can see the delts sloping down and then the shoulders bulging. And the biceps aren't so bad, just sheathed in a little too much fat. And that belly is much less than it was six months ago.
Back pose
Again, the delts are ok (Uh, I think they're delts. The bit sloping down from the neck to the shoulders), and the lats would actually be pretty impressive if I lost the love handles. Though then I'd probably lose half the lats, too :) You can also see, I think, on the right arm some definition starting to happen on the shoulder/bicep area, too.
Front pose, again
Again, I think that particularly on the right side, you can start to see definition between the shoulder and the bicep, rather than just a contiguous bulge. That's pretty exciting, let me tell you. Also a little from the shoulders to the pecs.
More in 6 months, when I look like teh Vin.
sol.
.