I done did another of these, and I’m planning to do a third at the end of the summer. Main takeaways were:
- Eat more during the event.
- Practice hammer a lot and open stone a bit.
- The numbers went up, but slower than I wanted.
Preliminaries
I got pretty strong by the end of February (squat 1RM was 450), but I got a girlfriend in early March and then hurt my back in early April by rounding my back on a deadlift. I’m happy about the girlfriend because she’s great and we’re pretty serious, but it means spending half of my one hour of gym time coaching her, which is a better use of the time. I’m not at all happy about the pulled back muscle, although I’m glad to have learned by experience that “work through it” is bad advice, and resting it for a few weeks is the right call. It all set me back by a few months, which is part of the game. Fitness is a marathon, not a sprint.
When I did get back to lifting, I focused heavily on power cleans to turn my existing strength into power production and brought my working sets up from 135 to 195 in the space of a few weeks. That’s probably why I was able to still eke out a decent performance. Wish I knew more about plyometrics though, I could stand to be a bit more bouncy. I was missing my cardio too, toward the end of the event.
I didn’t get nearly enough practice for the various throws leading up to this event, just the bare minimum to remember the basics I learned last Autumn. It was enough to realize small improvements in performance, but not quite the large improvements I had been hoping for. I especially need practice on the hammer throws, which will be the most amenable to improvement between now and the next event.
Results
Sheaf: 25 feet (16-pound bag)
Weight over bar: 11 feet
Braemar: 26 feet and something inches
Open Stone: 35 feet and 3.5 inches
Caber: 58 lbs, 17.5 feet, 12 o’clock
Heavy WFD: 20 feet and 9 inches
Light WFD: 49 feet and something inches
Heavy hammer: 55 feet and 4 inches
Light Hammer 75 feet and 8 inches
All of these are PRs except for heavy hammer, which was slightly lower than last time.
In context:
So I should definitely be in Amateur B, and I have a longshot chance at getting into Amateur A by the end of the season if I use the next couple of months wisely. I won the C division at this recent event by enough that I felt more guilty than anything, and if I’m scoring it correctly I would have won the B division too if I’d signed up for that instead. My hope is to crush the B division at the next event just as thoroughly, because the other guys train too haphazardly to make serious progress.
Event by event notes
Braemar: Locked in my form beforehand, so I got a nice throw. It’s more core strength and hip twist than I remembered from before, and improvement will come steadily with strength training and keeping the form up by practicing every now and then. 30 feet is a more reasonable goal for the future.
Open stone: I learned the spin but practiced it with a rock that was too light, and couldn’t reproduce it in competition. Ended up doing the foot drag for a decent throw, but was a bit disappointed. If I can get the spin right I can hit the 40-foot Amateur A mark. This will be priority #2 in practice sessions.
Heavy weight for distance: The judge said if I didn’t break 20 feet I had to put my shirt back on, which meant I had my audience to think of. I was surprised to get a really nice two-spin that went two feet farther than I was hitting in practice sessions. All that work from last year must have finally sunk in. Should update my next goal to 23 feet and try out the hook grip.
Light weight for distance: Always a great event for me, but didn’t quite break the 50-foot Amateur A mark. I can plan to win this one without much practice, so I’ll focus practice efforts mostly on HWFD.
Heavy hammer: This went slightly backwards from last time, and it’s for lack of practice. Success is about gripping hard with loose elbows, swinging wide from the hips, and arching your back in the throw, all of which are trainable. This will be priority #1 in practice this summer, which will also transfer to the light hammer. A gym bro made me a hammer to use, so I’m looking forward to big gainz.
Light hammer: Got a surprisingly good throw off. A 90-foot throw isn’t out of the question if I focus on hammer practice.
Caber toss: 58 pounds is very light, but 17 1/2 feet is very long and that matters more, so it was difficult enough that only one other person in my group of eight was able to turn it. I dumped the first one, threw way too late on the second one, and had a great throw on the third that the judge called 12 ‘o clock. I told him it was 11 ‘o clock in my book, but he said it looked like 12 to him. Still haven’t had a good pick because I had to reset my grip both times I got it in my hands at all. I ascribe my success to good footspeed before the throw.
Sheaf throw: A mere 1-foot increase from last time, and my three attempts at 26 feet were definitely short. All of my practice last year was with a 20-pound bag, which I can reliably throw over a 20-foot bar, but apparently that doesn’t matter. Disappointing. Need to get training advice on this.
Weight over bar: Came in a little too early and gassed out on my attempts at 12 feet, although I probably wasn’t quite strong enough to hit it even if I hadn’t made that mistake. A bit of practice will get this to 12, and I still think 13 is still a reasonable goal for the season so long as I get my lifts back up to what they should be.
Training plans
It’s tough when you only have half an hour per day to work out, which is my current schedule, so I’ll need to be pretty creative to sneak in some extra training time. Meanwhile, this is the lifting plan:
Monday: Deadlift
Tuesday: Squat
Wednesday: OHP
Thursday: Power clean
Friday: Squat
Saturday: OHP
I’ve been getting some throwing in over my lunch breaks, where I’ll need to focus 60% of my efforts on hammer, and the remainder on open stone, then WOB, then WFD. Maybe I can get some mental rehearsal time in too, although who knows when that would be.
Same chart again with updated goals for the next event:
Aeoli Pera 
NOICE BRO
CONGRATS ON WINNING THE WINS
BIG GAINS
ONE MIGHT SAY YOU ARE
ON FIRE
Congrats on the gf and competitive wins. Maybe you were right to focus on IRL projects since 2019 after you cited serious internet fatigue IIRC. I’m just waking up to the dangers of internet addiction myself. It’s every bit as insidious as chemical addictions but no one ever warns you about it.
However, fatigue does set in. Part of it is that online dissident activity has probably gone about as far as it can go these days. Many of the things we talked about 10+ years ago are mainstream with Gen Z now (PUA, knowledge of social decay, even a certain amount of racial awareness, etc).
Time to make gains IRL.
Also I used to think Aeoli was kind of a harsh person, but I see he puts up with hecklers and vicious insults on a regular basis without losing it, and without deactivating his comments like VD did, so I’ll say that my first impression was wrong — he is more of a Constitutionalist than most who call themselves that these days :)
I agree. Aeoli has been pretty patient with a wide variety of disagreeable people.
Online communities are and were great for people to articulate the problems with modern life. Solutions require a measure of IRL action that is hard to pull off in anoymous online settings.
Hard to spot someone at the gym if they’re in another state and also in hiding.
Have to learn Game from the websites and also go out and talk to girls.
What if the real Hero’s Journey was the obscure blogs we read along the way to work?
white man gotta lot of friends
We could all probably use more positive interactions with people. Good conversation is good, maybe.
either it is or it isnt choose one.
it takes a lot of expertise in realizing that what ive said is true. whatever it is i said.
Hey, that’s my line.