Quick ones

Internets have been busted here at the homestead for a few days now. Back online as of today.

Despite the furious pace of work, the training has kept up mostly intact.

Kept with the heavy plans last night for the Sumo DL's

5 x 3 @ 199,199, 209, 209, 219

I think I'm getting the hang of these. Opened up the stance a bit and pulled real hard. I think the wider foot position helped me to be a little more stable with the weight as the urge to come onto my toes was not as bad as it was with the more closed stance. Weight stayed mostly on the heels except for flubbing one or two of the reps @ 209. My friend Amelia showed up and said the DL's and the Carrharts coupled well with the beard.

You take 'em where you can get them.

All told a pretty good sumo workout for me. The last set of 3 at 219 was brutal for me. The DOMS didn't even wait until tomorrow to show up.

Everything else was fairly uneventful. Training last week was the usual speed + assistance to close down the week on Friday/Saturday.

I took off tonight to work and because I didn't sleep that well last night.

Of note last week: I've been bumping into a guy at the gym who was without a doubt either a rockstar high school athlete who has opted to no longer play football now that he's in college, an ex-college Football player now at UW grad school, or a UW football player who is training with the peons for some reason. He's not huge, but leaps and bounds more powerful than anyone I've ever seen lifting at the student facility.

Anyway, one night he was doing jumps where he was sitting down on a bench and then leaping onto a platform he'd constructed using a few plyo boxes and a couple other odds and ends. I decided that any workouts he's doing are good enough for me, so I finally got around to doing some jumps instead of the usual cleans or power snatches.

I did 8 sets of 4 all out maximum jumps alternating b/w jumping step ups onto a platform and jumps from a box like my athlete friend was doing (albeit to a much lower platform). All told I think I prefer power snatches, though I think I'll start rotating things a bit. Maybe do split power sets of Snatches and Cleans on high vol. weeks and do some jumps on low vol weeks. I just enjoy the clean and press quite a bit.

Anyway, I measured my peak power (I'm about 185 with my clothes and shoes on) at an ~18.5" vertical leap (very, very, very rough estimate of how high I jumped) using a velcro board sans marker to be ~4400-4600 Watts.

I'm going to keep an eye on that. Not that cycling is pure power, but I've certainly been trounced in a sprint before. My sustained output is generally good for my level because a) I trained a lot of threshold intervals in the 12 - 20' range in the fall and b) I like to race cross.

Year prior, I think I'd gotten up to where I was doing maybe a few 12' intervals at threshold. This year I can remember doing a lot of 4 x 12's, 4 x 15's and a couple 2 x 20's, so I'm hoping the sustained output bounces back quick in the spring.

Not that I'm ready to start training on the bike yet. But I'm almost ready to start thinking about it.

And with that, I decree that instead of LT muscle endurance in the off season, I need more raw, fast twitch power. Last year, I could hang in a sprint, but I'd like to be a little more dominant. There is no way that I'm touching base miles until grad school is over or mid February, whichever comes later. In the meantime it's all been power work, force work, and bike handling riding to work every day in the ice and snow.