Playing with 28" sharp things are good times

Cycling

12 miles of good solid riding today. Granted they were more or less in three mile chunks, but such is life when you commute by bike.

Weight lifting

Was thinking of going for a PR this morning, but decided against it when I sat down on the couch and fell asleep again for a few minutes (Toby's scratching at the window was the only thing that woke me up). Ah well, still got in my workout nonetheless. Oh, and I also just noticed that I'm now 3 weeks into a regular routine (Thanks Brendan for the gCalendar suggestion, it's really workout out so far!). I weighed myself this morning, and I'm down a solid 6 lbs since I started this routine. Nice, but we'll see if the trend continues (also probably helped by Kelly and my not going out to eat quite so many times this week — we should do that more often!).

• FTW Squats
• Pumps
• Halos
• Swing Ladder: 2x(10;15;20) — next week gonna bump it up up to 3 sets!

There's nothing in Enter the Kettlebell that prescribes how long on should stay on the RKC Program Minimum, but I figure I'll give it 6 weeks and see how I'm progressing. What does that mean? Well the next "Level", so to speak, is the RKC Rite of Passage, which adds the Clean & Press and Snatch to the workout. It also spreads it out into a 5 day week instead of 4. With the cycling season cranking away, it seems likely that I'll wait until after the Ride for Life before making this change, since there will likely be fewer long rides in my schedule... Though I may wait until the morning temps start to drop before really tackling the RKC-RoP. Why? Well one of the ways to tell that you're supposed to graduate to the next level of Kettlebell is if you can do 5x(1;2;3;4;5) C&P with the bell you're doing your normal ladders with. My next bell is going to be the RKC 24kg bell. If they were still making them, I'd totally get the Russian Red one... but sadly they're not. I love my 16kg kettlebell, and am very pleased with the gains I've made in this short time.

Need to remember to start making "hand care" part of my daily routine. I'm starting to get some nice blisters on both hands, on top of the calluses I already got from sword work.

Other Training

Karate: Good class today. Worked on some more sweeps, but nothing nearly as strenuous as last time. Many of the adults were still sore (not me!), so we took it a bit easier on them for it. Still sweat plenty though.

Sword: Fulfilling his seemingly once per week visits to the dojo, Scott appeared again today. I hinted to Shishou that we should do metal (since it's been a while), thus metal was indeed performed (man, that's an old pic...or at least it seems that way now). Hundreds of cuts later we performed all of the kata from our system in with Iaito (Scott), Masahiro (Shishou) and LastLegend (me). There's something about using a real live blade that makes the katas feel different. It's hard to explain if you've never done it.

GungFu: was just me and Danny. Did a lot of Chin Na for class, concentrating on getting Danny to focus enough to actually perform the techniques correctly...ugh.