23 March 2018 - Bench
Barbell Bench 6x2 255lbs
Shoulder Mobility + Chest Stretches
Notes
Easy day today. I got ~10 hours of sleep last night and took a 1.5 hour nap after class before my lift, and somehow I’m still tired at 10:30pm. I’ve cut my caffeine dose in half (from 400mg to 200mg) and I think it’s making it a lot easier for me to fall asleep at night without compromising how much energy I have in the gym. All I need is a slight boost to get me out of that “just woke up, just ate, I’m sluggish” vibe so 200mg seems to be doing the trick.
I just had a cheeseburger and chocolate cake shake. Holy Jesus was that fantastic. After I’m done putting my thoughts down, I’m going to take my iodized sodium and drink 4-6 cups of water and then watch The Office until I get too tired to laugh anymore.
Benching today felt fine, but I think 6x4 would’ve been a challenge and 6x5 would’ve been nearly impossible, but that’s why we have our 6x2 deload!! My lower back was a little sore (absolutely nothing compared to the day after a lot of conventional deads though) but it’ll be fine tomorrow. I stretched my hamstrings a lot today to help loosen all that up, and I’ll probably foam roll and do my lower body mobility exercises while I watch TV.
Spring break is upon us, and my only friend still at home has his girlfriend coming back from LSU for her spring break this week, which means I’ll be all alone with my chicken and netflix. Thankfully my professors were pretty merciful and I only have one assignment to do over break. The two biggest events of my spring break are occurring tomorrow: 6x6 front squats (aka death) and texting my ex, which I’ll elaborate on in a little bit. It’s probably not what you think. Anyways, the gym schedule will be weird this week. So far, it’s looking like I’ll only be able to train Saturday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. So 6 days out of the 9 days that I have off. Not bad. This is what I’m thinking right now:
Saturday: 6x6 Front Squats 270lbs, a couple sets of 25 for back squats, hip thrusts, and rows
Tuesday: 6x5 255lbs Bench Press, 60 reps with the 80lb DBs (4x15?), tricep supersets until death, deadlifts 6x2, and some OHP.
Wednesday: Front Squats 6x2 275lbs + Olympic lifting
Thursday: Bench 6x2 + olympic lifting variations off high blocks to save my back
Friday: Deadlifts 6x5 365lbs + tons of back work
Saturday: We’ll see. I’m doing a lot this week so it depends how I feel, I might end up needing 2 extra days off before my 5x5 front squats at 285
Bottom line is that I’m extremely excited for this week. I’ll have a ton of down time to do whatever I want which will be freakin SUHWEEEET. I’m going to try to keep my sleep schedule reasonable (asleep by 12 or 1 every night and up by 9 or 10 every morning) so getting back into the school schedule in a week and a half isn’t hard.
Now for the good stuff. About my ex and why I’m texting her. Here we go.
Junior year of high school, I was preparing for the sectional meet (hoping to qualify for state) and our coach took us to a school where one of his friends coached. We practiced with their athletes. It was me and two other guys from our school. I met a girl who was more interested in one of my friends (our greatest discus thrower at the time), I thought she was cute, but whatever. Nothing happened.
Fast forward 10 months to the indoor conference meet of senior year. I now have a beard and am slightly bigger so I look like a different person. This girl comes up to me (we have not talked in the entire 10 months) and hugs me in front of all 35 of our throwers in the middle of the field house. Wow. Was not expecting that. We talked for a solid half hour. She cheered for me when I was throwing. She followed me on instagram and twitter and we began talking. I had a girlfriend at the time and she knew that, but she was persistent. I didn’t cheat or anything, didn’t even hang out with this girl. My girlfriend and I broke up about 2 months later, and I began talking to this girl more seriously. We started dating in May.
Admittedly, I was head over heels for this girl, definitely more than I should have been. It’s a special feeling that you get when you meet someone who supports you unconditionally. The feeling of being wanted and appreciated is unreal, and something I had not felt before. The previous 2 girlfriends I’d had were each toxic in their own way, but this girl wasn’t at all. It was absolutely incredible. I felt like I had finally found the one, because we had a lot in common, we went out of our way to do things for each other, and I was never bored when we hung out. To clarify, we never did anything sexual besides making out a few times. That’s how I knew that she was special. It was all the little things she did that made me feel good.
All good things have to come to an end, and when your head is stuck up your ass in the name of love, it’s pretty easy to get blindsided. So I did. And it fucking sucked. Looking back on it, there were a million red flags that I dismissed at minor character flaws, which ironically is my biggest character flaw in this instance. As an example, we never hung out after 10pm unless we were with her friends. More often than not, if we were hanging out, I would drive 25 minutes to pick her up, 25 minutes back to hang out with my friends and her, then 25 minutes to drop her off around 9pm, then 25 minutes back to meet up with my boys and girls again. Moral of that story is that she probably didn’t even want to hang out with me. There was another time when she told me she was going to a lake in northern Illinois with her cousins for the day, so she couldn’t hang out, which was fine. We continued talking all day, and around 5pm she sent me a snapchat from her room, so naturally I asked her if she wanted to hang out. She said she was too tired, and that was fine. One of my good friends (who talked to her as friends while we were dating) thought I seemed upset (I wasn’t) and asked her why she was treating me like this. She naturally thought that I had been complaining about her not wanting to hang out with me (I wasn’t), and an argument ensued. It consisted of me telling her that I wasn’t mad, and her getting mad at me for saying that I wasn’t mad when she was 100% certain that I was mad at something that I shouldn’t have been mad at (which, again, I wasn’t). It ended with her telling me I’m too clingy. That stung a little bit. The FINAL red flag (thanks for reading this far boys) is that she went to Poland for 6 weeks, basically the second half of the summer. She told me we should take a break, and that I should pursue any girls that I think are cute. Smart me thought that this was a test, and since the universe is cruel, I declined plans with 2 girls while she was gone because I thought she’d be happy to hear it when she got back. We barely talked while she was gone. She came back, I drove over to hang out with her (was hoping to get lucky of course), and she sat down on the other of the two couches. Ouch. We broke up two weeks later after she “wasn’t able” to hang out with me for two weeks.
But THIS is why I’m going to text her tomorrow: when we broke up, I couldn’t get her to tell me why. It was the single most painful and simultaneously confusing episode of my life. I asked “was it something that I did?” and she replied “I’m sorry”. I asked her if this had anything to do with her ex (he cheated on her and she admitted to still having feelings for him while we were dating… another red flag), and she responded with “I’m sorry”. I asked her if I was her rebound. She said “I’m sorry”. I asked her if she knew the whole time that she was just using me to make herself feel better. Can you guess her response? “I’m sorry”. She even had the audacity to tell me that she loved me as we were breaking up. The entire conversation consisted of me asking questions, her saying “I’m sorry,” and then ending it with “I love you.” Bitch. Please.
I haven’t talked to her in over a year and a half because my friends all told me that the best way to get over her was to pretend she doesn’t exist. It hasn’t worked. I’ve prayed, I’ve talked to other girls (5 total I think??), I’ve talked to my friends, I’ve drank myself into a stupor both with friends and alone, and I even got my first blowjob, and nothing helped at all. Dedicating myself more to lifting is the only thing that lessened my longing and regret by any noticeable degree, but I’m not sure how much more dedicated I can be when it feels like my life revolves around it already. All that being said, I believe, and my best friends believe, that it’s time to use the last resort, which is talking to her again.
It’s not something that I’m looking forward to. About 6 months ago, my friends and I all got hammered and slept over at our buddy’s house. I woke up and realized that I’d had no desire, even thought, to text her while I was sloshed. From that point on, I was genuinely proud of myself and happy that I’d made it as far as I did; an entire year of suffering and knowing that any night that I’m drunk and/or up past midnight carried with it a large potential of me texting her something stupid and poorly worded. I dated a girl recently for a month, things moved pretty fast, but I realized that we had very little in common. Although the blowjobs were fantastic, I had to do the right thing and cut it off. I didn’t see a future with that girl, so what’s the point of dating her? An unforeseen side effect of that relationship is that I now realize that I compared every girl I’d been with or talked to or hung out with to that original girl who broke my heart a year and a half ago. No girl has even come close. Not at all. There have been nicer girls, hotter girls, cooler girls, and girls that were more fun, but none of them were her.
I’m texting her tomorrow to get answers to the questions that I never had answered. I need to know why she did what she did to me. I don’t lose sleep when my parents get into an enormous fight. I don’t lose sleep with North Korea says they’re going to nuke our entire country. I lose sleep because of her though, and it has to stop. Sorry y’all. I might’ve taken this “be personal” thing a step too far. If you read the whole thing though, thank you. I really truly appreciate it. God bless
