Sometimes You Do Need To Quit

2013 started out with a bang.....in a bad way.  On New Year's Eve our van blew up on the freeway and needed a new engine.  We were without it for over two weeks.  During that time I drove our second car.  About a week into the repair the front left tire blew....once again on the freeway.  Then two days later our dryer broke.  And then about a week later my daughter Ellie (a Level 5 gymnast) broke her knee cap in half horizontally right across the middle during gymnastics' practice.  At that point I decided that this was not a good time to be training for a competition.  I often didn't have the energy to workout.  We only had one car between the six of us (two adults and four kids) and everybody had to be different places at the same time so going to the gym was not an option.  My kid's always come first, no matter what.

Ellie was at home bed-ridden for ten days after the accident before she had surgery to repair her patella.  She was home for another week after the surgery.  She has only been attending school half days up to this point but she is going back full time as of tomorrow.  She is finally able to get around without too much trouble although her knee aches by the end of the day, especially on her sport's therapy days.

So I have picked a competition in May because now that all of those fires have essentially been put out and I need to change my focus back to something that I want to do, which is compete again.  The competition is only nine weeks away but I am ready to go again and I don't want to wait until the next one which is in July.

I am going back to my old-school roots.  I am going to follow a very traditional weight lifting program.  What that means is I am going to choose three or four exercises per body part and stay with those exercises for the next two months and I will try to increase the weight every other workout so that I lift to failure.  It will be important for me to have a spotter for a few of my training sessions because I will want to really push to failure and that is pretty much impossible to do without a spotter on exercises like the bench press.

As for my diet the plan is pretty much the same as before except that I am going to be militant about eating every two hours throughout the day.  I am also going to add sweet potatoes back into my diet.

So that's the plan....let's hope we are done with all the drama for a while:)