My Original Plan Was to Lift All of the Heavy Things

[itsagoodday]

Saturday 9/16 - Gym

This workout brought to you by the letters "F" and "U". I was tired, hot, hungry and felt like I was sitting up in a chair all night two days ago (which I was), so I just did the minimum and got the heck out of there. I think I've been accidentally dieting the last couple of days, I've either been running around doing stuff or stuck at doctor's offices and I think I've missed some meals, lol.

DEADLIFTS
work up to
3x270
3x280
3x290

-- skipped my heavy singles. I should probably have added some back-off work or something without those, but whatever. Deads is the only thing I can skimp on volume and it still seems to work out ok in the end, so I'm not going to worry about it.

(ONE ARM) LAT PULLDOWN
8x 70's
6x 75's
4x 80's

(ONE ARM) DB ROW
8x 70's
6x 80's

(ONE LEG) BACK EXTENSION
8x BW+10 lbs
6x BW+10 lbs

Iron Maiden is in 5 weeks. Right now I'm going to keep training with it in mind. I'm going to assume I'll still be doing the meet unless it becomes apparent that I can't. Obviously if my mom winds up scheduled for surgery / radiation / chemo / whatever that week, I definitely won't be competing because I won't be able to leave her alone all day while I'm out of town. Unless I can talk any of my relatives into flying out for that weekend to help out, which is highly unlikely since they didn't do it for any of her other surgeries or cancer treatments over the last few years.

So next thing on the agenda is to make sure she gets to her appointments at the beginning of the week so the doctors can figure out what's going on, and we'll know what's in store for treating her. It will be an interesting week. I told my mom I was considering trading her in for a more boring mother, she is way too exciting for me

[SophieM]

Way to go getting in workouts with everything going on with you mom! One day at at time.

[itsagoodday]

Way to go getting in workouts with everything going on with you mom! One day at at time.

Thanks Sophie! Yeah, definitely one day at a time. Right now I'm just like... I have no idea what will be happening tomorrow or the day after that or the day after that. LOL.

[itsagoodday]

Monday 9/18 - Gym

PAUSED FRONT SQUATS
work up to
3x115
3x125
3x135
3x145
2x155
1x165
-- I was warming up and moving reallllyyyy slowly, and my body just wanted to hit these super deep and pause at the bottom of every rep. I said eh, why fight it. So I embraced that and did deep paused fronts today, lol. My strength was A-OK, better than I had expected actually. 165 was a little ugly but not a max. A deep paused 165 is only 5 lbs less than my last non-paused max @ 170, so hopefully that has gone up as well.

Also, shout out to my glutes, because I completely forgot to do any activation work or anything, and they were functioning really well. Definitely felt them working coming out of the pause on the 145+ sets, oy.

(ONE LEG) LEG EXTENSION - superset with hammy curls
8x #70
6x #80
4x #90

STANDING HAMSTRING CURLS
8, 6, 6

That's it. Kept it under an hour because I had to get home and take my mom in to her CT scan this afternoon. That's all done, so hopefully the doctor will get the results of everything compiled and we'll hear from him in the next day or two. Good news would be nice, but at this point I'll take any news so I know what we're up against. I started cleaning some excess stuff out my home gym area, I expect I'll need to start using that again while my mom's going through treatments, whatever / whenever that will be. Chest is up next for tomorrow.

[thehobbes]

Good job on the paused FS, just had to add the extra brutality with the pauses didn't ya?

YEAH! Go IAGD's glutes, drop it like it's hottttt!

Happy to hear your mom is being cooperative and going to the appointments!

[itsagoodday]

Tuesday 9/19 - Studio

BENCH PRESS - competition grip, feet up
work up to
8x115

feet down, arch
1x135
1x145
0x150

feet up
back off sets @ 135, 115, 95, 95

-- Meh. Feet up felt great, but that is how I've been doing all my training, so it makes sense This is the first time I've tried putting my feet down and arching in quite a while (4-6 weeks? I don't remember), just testing the water to see how my hip will tolerate it. Felt awkward AF. Hip was ok as far as I could tell, but the back of my right leg cramped hard every time I set up, my hamstring in particular was in agony. It would be great if I could practice with an arch regularly like a normal person :facepalm:

And man, do my front delts wear out fast still. My rep work dropped off precipitously after just those few heavy singles. I don't lose that much ground with close grip, geez. Warming up I got 12+ @ 95 easily (lost count), but when we dropped back to 95 at the end, I could barely do 3 with spotter assistance. Everything is still not quite back to normal with this grip, obviously.

DB INCLINE PRESS

INCLINE PUSH UPS

DB FLYES

CABLE TRICEP PUSHDOWNS

PLANKS

'Twas OK overall. No word yet from any of my mom's doctors about results of bloodwork / CT / biopsy. They said likely on Monday or Tuesday, so we'll give them through today and I'll probably check in with a call tomorrow if we haven't heard anything by then. It's kinda important.

Not sure what I'll be doing tomorrow. It's too soon to hit deads again, I just did squats yesterday and bench today. Uhhhhhhh. My schedule is all screwed up for some reason.

[Fiction2Fitness]

Nicely done. I don't even know if I could do it with my feet on the bench but have never tried. Have been attempting more of a flat foot approach since one federation I considered required it but takes at least a 35 plate on each side to put my feet on. My arch is small but it does bother my right hip just a little. Still envying that 135. ;-)

[thehobbes]

Current bp max OP? Looks like a good run on bp today.

[itsagoodday]

So we finally heard back from the doctor, and my mom's colon cancer is stage 4 and has already spread to multiple organs. Not looking good. She's being transferred to cancer specialists, who will be contacting us hopefully today or very soon to set up appointments. Immediate future will involve additional testing, talking about options, keeping her comfortable. She would need chemo to shrink things back before surgery is even an option. Ultimately *what* is done to her is her choice, and I am very concerned that she will turn down some, or all, of her options. I honestly have no idea what is going to happen.

[SophieM]

Damn. I'm so sorry.

One step at a time. Find out what the options are and go from there. Like I told Hobbs, I went through this with my great aunt. Feel free to PM here on or FB.

Big, giant hugs to you.

[thehobbes]

Aw damn, that's not good news. Yeah see what options there are. That sucks, sometimes with treatment of course you get a little more time but it wouldn't be worth it if you're going to feel even sicker during that time. :/ With my aunt right now they said 6 months with no treatment, and a yr or two with treatment. She chose treatment but the family is having a really hard time getting her out of a depression to do just the little bit of rehab walking and moving around that the docs said she needs to be doing to build strength. Still sneaking cigarettes too. Everybody is worried she's going to have a horrible time with chemo and either quit going right away or even die from doing it.

Big sweaty girl hug to you (lol my friend said that this summer when we were leaving from fishing on a 90 degree day, was sweaty AF, and funny. ) Anyway dudette I can see the cancer situation in my family is really taking a toll on the family members around the sick person. My uncle and dad are terribly stressed out and frustrated trying to get my aunt to do what the docs are telling her to do. It's really hard on the people around who are watching things get worse and feel helpless. I hope you're doing ok and can take a little time for yourself to rest and step away from the chaos for a moment.

[itsagoodday]

^^ Much appreciated, both of you. You guys are the best! As for me currently, if there is a fine dividing line between being sad / angry / sick about something, I am there, lol.

My mom got her new doctors assigned, so we've got some appointments lined up. Her regular GP on Wednesday, her new oncologist on Friday, and the oncologist surgeon in the middle of October. It would have been nice if she could have kept the team of oncologists she was dealing with from her endometrial cancer, but those were gynecology specialists, so she had to get new guys who are more GI oriented. The surgeon is a director at the hospital, so hopefully that means he's really good and experienced. We'll see how everything goes. I guess I'm ready for anything at this point, both in terms of what the doctors may say, and in terms of what my mom may have to say about what they say. Oh, mom However, I've been doing enough googling to know it will be an uphill battle, and she is dealing with something that only has about an 11% survival rate overall. One of the areas that the cancer has spread to is her pancreas, which is a fairly rare area for colon cancer to spread to, and may be especially problematic. I can only find references of a handful of people who had that happen, and they all passed away within 18 months of diagnosis.

In other news, I emailed Rheta to back out of the Iron Maiden meet, there was just no way I was going to be able to do it. In five weeks, my mom will likely either be involved with chemo or surgery, and as the only family / caregiver on this side of the continent, obviously I can't leave town for the day. Rheta was very understanding, refunded my entry and sent a really encouraging email back to me, which was nice of her. My training will just exist on the side for a while. It's important for me to do it for my own mental and physical well being, but I'll have to be really flexible about it, and will probably wind up using the home gym quite a bit for the basics. Not sure whether I'll log training in my journal or not, to be honest. I'm free floating a little on where to go with it right now, since my plans changed. And I don't have the energy to figure out anything new, so for now I'll probably do pretty much what I was already doing, just a more watered down version as needed.

Since I'm not doing the meet, I have gone ahead and started the diet I was going to do over the winter. It kind of started on it's own. Usually I'm a stress eater, but I've been feeling pretty sick about this and missing meals, so I guess I'll just roll with it and start to diet on purpose I'm not going to beat myself up tracking, I'll likely just pay attention to clothes / belt / mirror, and occasionally step on a scale enough to know if I'm trending in the right direction. I had gotten over 185 (~187) in the last month, and was starting to get some belly fat accumulating again, but I've already lost that so I may be back down to 185 again already, if not below it, lol.

And my quest for a 350 deadlift lives on for another day, since I won't be able to try for it at Iron Maiden. Best case scenario... I'll be ready for a spring meet, show up in a lighter weight class, and be ready to take 350 as a second attempt by then, rather than a third. We shall see

[itsagoodday]

Saturday 9/23 - Gym

Meh, I don't really want to track my workouts right now, but I guess I should keep a written record of them somewhere.

BENCH - close grip, feet up
work up to
3x115
3x120
3x125

feet down, arch
2x130
-- My feet down / arch bench is a disaster zone. I could have kept my feet up for that set and done a better job, I barely got the first rep up and then the second rep did a really weird horizontal windmill where it swung towards my feet on the right side and my head on the left side. Never seen that before. So that's what it's like to twirl a 7 1/2' long baton. Did I mention the left side of my back was really tight today? I'm guessing it came from that.

DB CHEST PRESS
8x 40's
8x 45's
6x 50's
4x 55's
-- left wrist / forearm was really tight again with restricted ROM there as well, I could see the dbs were at two different angles the whole time.

HAMMER LYING CHEST PRESS
10x 70's
8x 75's
6x 80's

CABLE ROPE PRESSDOWNS
10,8,8

DB OVERHEAD TRICEP EXTENSION
work up to the 35 lb db x a buncha reps
-- haven't done these in forever, and couldn't for the life of me remember how to get the db up / my hands in position properly without dropping it on my head. I guess I'll go heavier on those AFTER I figure that out.

I opted for a chest day today because my back was wicked tight, I had substantial back pain last night while I was working late (haven't had back pain like that for many months). I wanted to work on it with the lax ball, but I completely flaked and forgot to. So obviously everything is getting tight and out of control again, as soon as I stop working out all the time and doing constant maintenance. Grrrr. I need to get my sh*t together and take care of myself, too. Hopefully I'll get back into a routine once the shock and awe phase of my mom's diagnosis has settled down a bit.

[astronut96]

So sorry to hear about your mom. My mother lived with lupus for decades, then started suffering from other ailments, and her body just gave up slowly over about 18 months. It's so hard to watch a parent (or any loved one) suffer, and my heart goes out to you and her. Ditto what Ham said - be sure to take care of yourself and ask for and accept help when it's offered. Prayers to you both.

[thehobbes]

The tree fiddy DL will happen all in good time. Way to adapt and do the cut now. I agree when I'm really busy it's easy to do a cut and not get distracted dreaming about food all day lol. But make sure you DO eat. Don't make me call Papa Johns and send a barrage of pizzas to your house.

Lol'd at windmilling the bar, pretty sure Supple Leopard says nooooo don't do that! Good job on the db chest press, got up nice and heavy!

And for all the tight muscles you have going on I think you need one of those little Chinese ladies to tap dance on your back. I'm pretty sure that's a real thing, right?

[VO2Maxima]

Sorry to hear about your mom's diagnosis. Hoping for the best for her and your family. As everyone said, do make sure to take care of yourself, I know how hard that can be when you're also trying to take care of a loved one. We'll miss you at Iron Maiden, but you have more important things on your plate right now. Keep us updated when you can, but don't feel guilty or like you have to update this log when it's not something you feel like doing.

[anandagirl]

I'm so sorry girl. Sending your mom lots of good healthy thoughts.

Sorry about the meet too, but you know where your priorities are xoxoxo

[LunaLifts]

I'm sorry to hear about your mom, it's going to be hard, but hoping for the best for both of you.

[itsagoodday]

^^ Thanks everyone, your words are really, really appreciated. Lifting Family FTW. The guys I talk to regularly at my gym have been really nice as well. I feel like there are a whole lot of people who genuinely care what happens with my mom (and I), and for that I am very grateful.

[itsagoodday]

Monday 9/25

That day I channeled a lot of rage and 4 hours of sleep into 4 squat PRs in a row, lol.

SQUATS - with 65 lb squat bar
work up to
3x185
3x205
3x230 new 3RM PR
1x245 PR
1x250 PR
1x255 PR (vid)

--That was actually not my plan going in. I figured I'd get up to maybe a triple at 205 or 215 at best, but I think my squat appreciated having a week off. The bar felt light on my back, so I just went with it. I guess the nice thing about having my meet called off is that I can do whatever the hell I want for a while

I don't think I've ever attempted anything over 240 without wraps before (and my old 240 PR was from like 1 1/2 years ago), so thus the flurry of unwrapped PRs. Based on how 255 felt, I suspect my actual max is 260, maybe 265. I'll try those another day. My right hip was starting to hurt and it was taking my left knee with it, but I couldn't be happier to confirm that my unwrapped max is officially 250+ now. The bad news is that if my unwrapped max is probably in the 260's, and my wrapped max is 275... wtf why am I only getting 5% out of my wraps???? Geez, I guess I shouldn't have bought Placebo brand wraps.



FROG STANCE HACK SQUATS
6,6,6

(ONE LEG) LEG EXTENSIONS
(3x) 8x 70

(ONE LEG) LYING HAMSTRING CURL
(3x) 10x 25's

I wound up taking especially long rest breaks in between my squat singles. I got joined in the back room by some guys taking turns doing 225x25 deadlifts on a nice 91 degree day. I wound up watching them because I was pretty sure one or two of them was either going to puke or pass out at some point, but kudos to them all for not dying, lol. And I felt like a slacker because each of them did two rounds, so 50 deadlift reps within 5 minutes, and it took me more like half an hour to do 3 squat singles. #totalslacker

Probably no lifting tomorrow. I'm trying to rush to get some extra stuff done before my mom starts whatever treatment she'll be doing, since that's when it will get more interesting around here. Her car needs work, so tomorrow I'll be taking it in and hanging out at the car place until it's finished, it hopefully shouldn't take too long though. I'm thinking I'll hit bench Wednesday and deads Thursday. Squats liked having a week off, maybe deads will like having almost two weeks off before I get back to them, lol.

[anandagirl]

Nice PR's! Choo choo!

[thehobbes]

Damn, flurry of PRs is right, way to rage it out with the fury of 1,000 angry suns!

Interesting about the wraps only being slightly higher. How long have you been practicing heavy singles with wraps? Maybe it's simply not being that comfortable with them yet?

[VO2Maxima]

That looked super easy. Why didn't you go up again??? Being smart, I guess. I won't encourage being dumb.

As for 5% out of your wraps...
1) If your sleeved max went up, your wrapped max most likely increased too.
2) Your wraps are loose.
3) I've seen you wrap, you'd squat more with a tighter wrap.
4) Are your wraps actually any tighter than your sleeves?
5) Did I mention your wraps aren't very tight?

I realize you wrap the way you do for a reason so I'm just giving you a hard time lol. But seriously, very nice job, congrats on the PRs! Also it takes me more than half an hour do to 3 heavy singles probably so no judgement there.

[tina722]

Congrats on the PR! and I'm sorry to hear about your Mom. Keep getting to the gym, it'll help you stay sane.

[itsagoodday]

Fun points from this week...

I'm afraid I've barely trained this week, other than my squat session. My mom, who has stayed strong through so much previously, is having a horrible time emotionally with all of this. I can't say that I'd be doing any better if I were in her shoes though. Unfortunately one thing that I personally don't deal well with is other people's anger, and she's going through a lot of anger. I'm trying to remember back to my days when I was briefly a psychology major, and I do remember that there are seven stages of grief, of which anger is one of them. I'm hoping we'll see our way past that one soon.

As she is struggling, I don't like leaving her alone for lengths of time, so I'm going to finish cleaning up my home gym today so I can start using that again. Yesterday I went to the gym to do deads, did some, talked to someone briefly, and went home right away to check on her. Yeah, never going to get anything done with my training that way, lol.

We did find out my mom has a genetic mutation showing up in her bloodwork. It's super complicated, but the gist is that elements in her own DNA which should be protecting her, are not. One of the things I need to find out is whether they have sequenced the DNA, which would allow us to know more specifically what is effected. There are genes that do specific things like inhibit the growth of tumors and self-repair damaged DNA strands, if those are mutated or missing, obviously that can lead to tumor growth and increased cancer risk. So the genetic issues are likely behind why she has had so many health issues so fast, and two kinds of cancer. My uncle happens to be an upper level cancer research geneticist, so he's all over that news. I'm trying to learn enough on the subject to be able to relay questions and answers accurately, and my head is swimming. My uncle is sending me tons of data, links to raw cancer research databases and research studies, and I'm like... sh*t I never took Genetics 101 and this is like being thrown into post-grad work, lol. I've got some of the basics figured out at this point. I think???

Oh and related to that ^^, I'm going to need to get genetic testing done on myself at some point. Sigh.

My family is willing to again discuss chipping in to help her financially, so I'm not continuing to carry 100% of the financial burden as well. Hopefully that will happen. Lately I've been feeling like everyone just keeps piling stuff on me, stands back and waits for me to either crack or take care of it. Help would be appreciated. I don't know if they thought I was kidding before, when they'd ask if she'd "gone out to get a job yet?" and I'd reply that she wasn't well enough to do that. I had been trying to tell them that she hasn't been well for a very long time, and maybe people finally understand that, because stage 4 cancer certainly didn't grow overnight.

In forwarding me genetics related articles, my uncle accidentally forwarded me an email mentioning my father's surgery. Huh??? My parents divorced many years ago, I've had reasons to not stay in contact with him, although my brother does occasionally. I asked what was going on, found out he is also going through major health issues right now and just had brain surgery. I'll send him a card, he did send my mom a card when he heard she'd been hospitalized previously, so I figure it's appropriate.

What a sh*tty week. This afternoon is the first appointment with her new oncologist. I'm sure that will be loads of fun, and my mom isn't in the most stable emotional state if she hears anything she doesn't want to hear. Good times.

[anandagirl]

Oh now, that's gotta be overwhelming. It's great that uncle is so interested and knowledgeable, but I wouldn't be able to get through too many scientific studies. Sorry you now have to consider your own risk too And hopefully family does chip in. (((HUGS))) to you

[SophieM]

I'm sorry things are so rough right now. I hope your family starts giving you more support, financially and emotionally.

[itsagoodday]

So the oncologist turned out to be quite a nice guy, which is good because we'll be seeing a lot of him Right now he is focused on her liver. He wants absolute proof that the multiple lesions on her liver are from the colon cancer, before proceeding. We have two MRI appointments scheduled for next week. If it looks like cancer on the MRI, there will be a liver biopsy following (simple - done by a needle through the skin) for absolute confirmation. And if the MRI + liver biopsy show that the liver lesions are indeed from colon cancer, then unfortunately that would mean that the disease has progressed too far, and we would be looking strictly at end-of-life decisions. In this scenario, any treatments or surgery done would be purely for comfort purposes, with no hope of her getting better.

The flip side is that if the MRI *doesn't* look like the lesions are from cancer spreading there, then they would have no idea wtf is going on with her liver. At that point, the next step would be to send her into surgery soon, where the surgeon would open up her abdomen and try to figure out what was going on with a more hands on/ visual approach, and take biopsies of anything suspicious. While the second scenario still sucks, obviously it's preferable to the first scenario.

Cancer doesn't always follow it's own rules, but there are several points of confusion. One is that they aren't seeing any lymph node involvement. Typically with stage 4 and a multiple organ metastasis, you'd see lymph nodes involved as well. Also, despite having multiple liver lesions, her liver blood panel came out totally normal. A cancer-reactive antigen in her blood was also normal, but an inflammation marker was high. These things may mean something, or they may mean nothing. (And if you ever hear anyone say "why don't we have a cure for cancer yet?" it's because they're all unique and really really complicated.) We know she *has* cancer from the biopsied tumor in her colon. The rest is up for debate at this time. In b4 my mother is a freak of nature.

So everything depends on the MRI at this point. We also have an appointment with a genetics counselor the following week, for more testing and I think possibly gene sequencing, to try to determine if her genetic mutations are the type that are hereditary or something that occurred spontaneously in her own body. If it's the first, my brother and I will get some extra concerns of our own added in. Lynch syndrome is still on the table as a possibility, which would mean that, if we had inherited that, we'd be at higher risk for like 12 different kinds of cancer later in life. Ugh.

Anyway, this week was chaos. I've fallen behind on some of my work, hopefully I can catch up and I won't have pissed off too many customers. While I'm sure most people would be extremely understanding if I explained things to them, there's a point where I just don't want to constantly talk about it one-on-one with a bunch of total strangers.

Oh, and I am hoping to update my journal with fairly legit lifting day this weekend. We'll just see about that.

[LunaLifts]

Happy to hear that you're getting some financial help from the fam, and that your uncle has been able to help so much. I'd be lost in the info too, but it's better to have at least a bit more insight. It's really good you're looking into your risk as well, I can't imagine how scary it is, but being prepared for the possibility is better than potentially being blindsided. That said, I hope your risk is low.

Good luck with the MRI appts, hopefully they provide some information that can help clean up some of the confusion.

[Fiction2Fitness]

Rough week and beyond. Good that the new oncologist is sounding much better and not just jumping in with the one diagnosis but taking steps to try and get answers. Hopefully things improve with the family too. As much as we want to be able to, we can't always do everything ourselves.