Weekly Round Up: Solstice Countdown

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads. We're so close to the most wonderful time of the year.  No, I'm not talking about Christmas, for me it's all about December 21st.  Let's get the darkest day of the year out of here and start working on getting our daylight back!

Food

The only exciting thing that I have to report is our Sunday dinner.  Flat iron steak, air fryer roasted frozen broccoli, and mashed potatoes.  It's simple but it's so good.

Up next: I've got my Christmas baking narrowed down and ready to start later this week.

Workouts

I finished Caroline Girvan's six week Fuel series, and overall my thoughts are...that I was ready to be done!  No seriously I have good things to say but by the end I was getting burned out on burpees.  I like strength and I like cardio, but the further that I went the more I felt like I was serving two masters.  As I mentioned last week, a lot of the cardio moves aren't things that I do well, so at best I was just going through the motions and at worst I felt like I was wasting time that could have gone to more strength or to better cardio.  But that's fine, it's only six weeks out of my fitness life and I want to get in a variety of workouts so it checked the box that I was looking for.

The Bullet Points:

• I'm finding myself reaching for 15 and 20# dumbbells a lot more than when I started the series.  
• Biggest improvement: hip thrusts.  I've had issues with these from the start.  Caroline rests her back on a chair so she's got a good range of motion to work through, but I just don't have anything down in the basement that I can lean on.  She puts a dumbbell on her pelvis with a towel for padding and I've always just been like "dude, I dunno about you but I've got bones there and BTW there isn't a towel in the world that's thick enough to make that comfortable".  So I had been rolling my eyes anytime hip thrusts have come up and phoning it in flat on the floor with body weight.  But thanks to seeing the same complaints on her Facebook group + reddit, I figured out that the workaround is to prop my feet up.  That gives me the missing range of motion which takes things from boring to "oh hey glutes, welcome to the party!".  Just for grins I'm suddenly willing to use an 8# weight, though I'm not sure if it really increases the resistance that much.
• I'm going to take a break from the HIIT workouts for a while.  Like I said last week, they're just not my jam.  I'm not saying that I will never do one again, just that I'm taking a break.  TBD if I'll make Sundays a straight up treadmill power walking day or if I'll just start the next workout in the series a day early.
  
• Pushup report: I've worked up to three sets of 10 that I do three times a week outside of the workouts.  The good news is that I feel decent at keeping good form and that I'm getting stronger, and the bad news is that I cannot ever imagine the day when I'm going to be able to do pushups within a workout after I've done any other upper body exercise.  When pushups come up in the workouts, I either do triceps dips (something that I'm OK at and would like to get better at) or wall sits (has nothing to do with upper body but I just like doing them).
• FWIW my tolerance for cardio is increasing.  By the end of October I was fed up with high intensity cardio so I took a few weeks of just walking at a moderate pace on the treadmill for 20 minutes after the strength workouts.  After a few weeks of that I found myself craving the good stuff again, so I'm back to fast incline walking.

So what's next?  There are two weeks left in the year so I'm going to knock out a couple of the one week series.  Tempo week is up next, and then I'll do Pure Endure.  After that if she comes out with a new series in line with the new year that might be my next stop, and if she doesn't then I've got the 10 week Epic III penciled in.  ICYMI she has a bunch of 10 week "Epic" series but the word is that they don't have to be done in order and the workouts in Epic I and Epic II are closer to an hour but by Epic III she had things down to the 30-45 minute range, which is where I want to be for workout time.  Overall my goal is to keep lifting as the focus and to get as much variety as I can.

Watching

I'm plowing through False Flag at a rapid rate.  Of all of the Israeli shows that I've seen, I think that Shtisel will always be my favorite and Fauda has the #2 spot on lock.  False Flag is in the #3 spot and yay there was a new season this year though of course there is no word on when it will get to the US.  All of the other shows that I've seen ranged from excellent to "worth my time".

On the movie front, we kicked off a Christmas movie spree with The Muppet Christmas Carol.  I've had a longtime grudge against A Christmas Carol that dates back to my freshman year of high school where we spent an inordinate amount of time on it, but I have to admit that this thawed me out and I might possibly consider reading the original again some day.

Reading

I'm still working on Station Eleven, which if you're not familiar, is a dystopian novel about a pandemic that wipes out most of the world's population and takes the power grid with it.  I am certain that I would have found it too far fetched if I had read it in 2015 when it was published, I would have found it too close to home if I had read it in 2020 or 2021, and now is exactly the right time to have finally picked it up.

I love this book and I wish that I could put a pause on everything else in my life to gobble it down - as it is it will probably take me 2-3 days to finish it.  But I do have a quibble, and it's a consistent one that I've had with three out of the three books that I've read by this author.  My requirements for a book are: good writing, plot, and believable characters (I didn't say likeable characters, I just said believable ones).  With St. John Mandel there's no issue with writing or plot - she's got both of those on lock.  But IMO there is something about the way that she does people that's cold and makes it hard for me to bond with them.  I'm interested in the characters and their story lines, but there's nothing that's drawing me in to care about them. But in spite of that, I think that this is a book that will stay with me for a long time and if you haven't already I think that you should pick it up.

Question: have you read Station Eleven?  If so, did you read it before COVID?