Spartan New Dawn: 5 days on, 2 days off OmFlux Journal

[OmFlux]

Hi All;

Putting the Empire journal on hold while I test Spartan New Dawn.

Day 1, Part 1

Listened to Spartan New Dawn for 8 loops over night. A bit overwhelming, honestly. I’d had a pretty heavy Crossfit workout a few hours before going to bed. Heavy deadlifts (for me, at least) 225lbs, 3x5. My back didn’t feel quite right so I figured I’d be suffering this morning. There were also two shorter WODs. One, a 10m AMRAP, 10 over the bar Burpees plus 10 overhead squats, repeated. Then 2 minute rest followed by a 5m AMRAP of 20 Double-unders and 10 wall balls at 20lbs, repeated.

I should be feeling really beat up this morning. Even at 3am when I got up to pee, because I’m old, I felt my back was super stiff and that I was on the verge of throwing my back out. This morning, four hours later, I am only slightly stiff and am confident I will be fully recovered to work out at 6pm.
I’m a bit obsessed about planning out my workouts, anyway, and so it’s no different this morning after Spartan. I’m regularly thinking about how to augment my training. I feel like I have something to prove over the next 6 months as I was passed over to join some competitive teams and I feel like I’m good enough to do the work.

Also, for those of you who follow Crossfit as a sport, you know that right now we are in the middle of the Crossfit games. My performances the first two weeks have been dreadful. I attempted 19.2 four times over the weekend, in a 24 hour period, with each score getting worse, and I ripped open my hands badly during the Toes To Bar on the 3rd workout, bleeding everywhere. I wound up wrapping my hands in paper towels to keep going, and then even do a 4th workout. Point is, I’m driven to get better already, and I realize I have a LONG way to go as I still regularly finish near the bottom of my classes. The other point is that I’m curious how fast I will heal. I’m already pleased that my back seems to be healing faster than usual. My neck has been a bother lately too, and it feels pretty good at the moment.

I have trouble remembering my dreams but I can pick out a couple odd snippets.

I know I dreamed a lot and vividly, because I woke up a lot, and I would try to recall the dreams immediately but they faded away like mist. Here’s what I remember:

At one point I’m in my darkened home in the middle of the night and I’m binge eating. I literally attempt to eat two tank-tops (sleeveless shirts). I’m fine for a bit but notice one is stuck in my mouth so I walk out of the bedroom and pull each out from my throat and put them in a ziplock bag to wash later.

I also recall at some point throwing a football as if I was competing in the College Combine, that just occurred in the US. While I did play one year of Football in high school it was never really my passion sport, but sometimes I have dreams like this where I am playing football and am basically unstoppable.

I also recall one dream where I was working in my basement. I heard people upstairs and, thinking they were intruders, I ran charging upstairs with a 2x4. I scared some woman as I barged in. Turns out the people were “family” even though I recognized none of them and they were of various races that were not my race.

Not sure what to make of any of it.

[SaintSovereign]

A bit overwhelming, honestly.

Good journal post – this is very helpful. Could you elaborate what you mean by “overwhelming?” Is the sub tiring you out, or making you feel like 8 loops was “too much?”

Spartan New Dawn is a ridiculously, RIDICULOUSLY massive script (ya’ll would’ve cracked up if you saw @Fire’s development logs – damn thing was crashing all our software bc of the size) and it may be time for us to either consider multistage, or lowering the amount of loops.

The feedback provided will be very helpful with those decisions.

[anon65745546]

Or we humans just adapt to the subs

[OmFlux]

So I just felt more tired than usual. I already don’t sleep well. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I felt disturbed, almost haunted by the weird dreams. I felt really bothered that I couldn’t remember my dreams. I did not feel like getting out of bed and crushing workouts but I didn’t expect to; I don’t like working out in the morning.

[OmFlux]

Day 2 in the books.

Dreams-wise - I had some dreams about being forced to shower in a very public shower stall, meaning like it was in the middle of a mall or something. I showered with my pants on but it was still weird. Some young girl like my daughters age who I’d never seen before was asking me about what occult practices I was using and teaching my kids.

I had some other very vivid dreams too, but I cannot recall details at this time. I’m hoping that the practice of writing down my dreams will help me remember them more in the future. At present, I am not seeing any real parallels to my Spartan use, except to be more diligent about my occult practices (I miss some days, including yesterday).

My performances have been pretty good in CrossFit the last of two days, but not my best. What is encouraging is that usually my performances suffer greatly by the number of days I go in a row without rest. Day 1 I usually crush it, Day 2 I’m middle of the pack, and Day 3 I’m nearly useless. I did Crossfit Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday without a day of rest, and I did not see my performances suffer. Tuesday I felt rough, but it went well. Wednesday, I felt better and performed as good or better than anyone in the class, even hitting a PR for my 1 Rep Thruster.

I will caveat that with I’d been working Thrusters a lot lately, like twice a week, at light weights, so I might have hit that PR anyway. It’s early in the Spartan process but I am pleased none the less.
Spent a few hours yesterday glued to YT during work, watching CrossFit videos, mostly the Day in a Life videos of top Crossfit athletes. I find them fascinating. Felt like I was compelled to watch them yesterday. Picked up a few tips, including how to structure multiple workouts a day. Today is a planned rest day, though I may fit in some supplementary work, depends as we have some family stuff planned after work.

[OmFlux]

So, so much for a day off. Went to the gym twice, rowed 2500m in the morning and some other cardio, then did some skills work with double unders/ Pull-Ups and dips in the afternoon. I did take the night off from doing any official WOD’s and went out to dinner with the kids.

I find myself sneaking time away from work to watch more Crossfit vids and I picked up a cardio course from highly respected CrossFit coach Chris Hinshaw, today. It’s 10 degrees Fahrenheit out right now, but still hope to start some outdoor cardio this weekend.

I daresay I’m getting a bit obsessed, though I was pretty enthusiastic before.

[OmFlux]

Apologies for the sell-serving post; I posted this in the Main dev thread, too, but after writing it, I’d like to track it in my journal as well.

I have noticed an improved focus on my diet. I’d been tracking my macros anyway. I am 5’9" and 183 lbs. I’m pretty solid but with some slight paunch from being 46 years old, and I was relatively inactively from age 25 to age 44, so trying to reverse 20 years of poor habits takes some time.

The Macros I’ve been tracking to since the beginning of the year are 180gm carbs, 70gm fat, 175gm protein. I’m historically apt to cheat, or fill those macros with bad food choices.

Since on Spartan the last three days, I am less likely to do so. I still fit in one small piece of organic chocolate dipped in organic peanut butter at the end of my night with my protein shake. I’ve had a life-time addiction to chocolate and candy bars. I recall one time last year where I relayed to my Crossfit Coach what I’d eaten in the prior 24 hours, and I literally astonished myself as I played it back to her. Burger King, pop tarts, Taco Bell, Pizza, Chocolate bars, all in one 24 hour block. I’ve slowly improved that but now I am 99% dialed in.

Typical day is Overnight Oats for breakfast, no added sugar, just some cinnamon, organic almond butter and chia seeds.

Protein bar two hours later for snack.

Chicken and vegetables for lunch.

Avocado on toast with pepper and a little olive oil for snack. Sometimes a banana or apple depending on where I am at with my macros.

Dinner is a meat and a salad. Sometimes rice or a potato depending on what macros I have to fill.

Protein shake in raw organic milk, and the organic square of chocolate as referred to above.

This has been my last three days, and more or less my last couple months, except I used to fill the gaps in macros with pretzels or candy. That urge is largely gone now.

Planned ahead for the night before so I’m not guessing all day long on what to eat. I use MyFitnessPal to track and plan.

Cool thing is I’m taking some photos every week, and have a photo for day 1 of Spartan. Will be interesting to see what things look like after 12 weeks on Spartan. Granted, I don’t work out for body/looks, I work out for sport, but I suspect things will change in my body for the better.

[OmFlux]

Got out of bed less than an hour ago. It’s finally beginning to be light out in the morning. I live in New York, in a small city that is renowned for our snow. It’s been a rough winter. I have to get kid #1 on the bus in a few minutes, followed by kids 2 and 3 an hour after that. I have a strong urge to go running outside after kid 1 is on the bus, but it is literally 3 degrees Fahrenheit out and the wife is giving me some grief about having a heart attack out in the cold, which I get, it’s feasible.

Not sure what I’m doing yet. I have to do Crossfit Games 19.3 later, or fit it into a small gap of time tomorrow where it’s being tracked at my gym at 10:30. We have a social engagement after work. All I can think of is that I have no desire to go to the social engagement, or work for that matter, I want to get my workouts in. In fact I got into a little passive aggressive battle last night about my workout plans for today. If I do 19.3 at the time when I can fit it in after work, it has to be at 19:30. Our social engagement is at 19:00. Optionally, I can try to sneak out of work early, but then there’s logistics of picking up the kids from the Boys and Girls club before it closes.

I get that nobody cares about my logistical issues. I share to illustrate that I appear to be trying to revolve my entire life around working out…and I like it.

@SaintSovereign I want to make sure I count the days right. Is this my 4th or 5th day? I started listening at 9:30pm Monday night when it was released and I downloaded. I listened as I slept and then initially treated the morning of Tuesday as Day 1. I’ve technically now listened overnight on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday as well, so that’s four nights. I also listen for 3-4 hours each day. Am I listening again tonight into tomorrow? Seems elementary but I am not sure when to cut it off for my two days of rest?

[OmFlux]

I took the weekend off from listening, per the 5 on, 2 off manner of testing. Saturday’s workouts were good. One part of it involved 10x 200m rowing with a 20minute time cap. For two years I’ve been one of the slowest or the slowest rower in any given class. I’ve been working at it, though, getting some extra work done in the mornings, and then also concentrating on form during a cool-down.

I managed to catch the attention of the coach with how well I was rowing on Saturday to the point where he said “you’re going to be one of our best rowers, yet.”

I’ve also noticed a lot of complaining about the WOD’s from other people, mostly as a defense mechanism…like let’s all commiserate about how difficult everything is, and I’ve been refusing to do that, lately. Part of this comes from recently reading Ben Bergeron’s Chasing Excellence, which is an okay book I guess. Good stories but light on practical advice, but the part that did stick with me is trying to find the benefits of any workout, especially if it’s something you normally dislike. So while people are complaining, I’m responded with “well, it’s a good opportunity to work on X.”

Rowing is something I previously hated. Wall balls last night, usually hated. People were bitching up a storm about the wall balls, but not me. I injured my neck during a competition last year doing them and it still bothers me today. I almost surprised myself with how dismissive I was when the usual commiserating started, “Hey it’s a tough modality but it gets easier the more we do it so let’s make it happen.”

Yesterday I managed a 4km row in the morning and then the class at night with three WODs in it, and then immediately after my team worked on some WOD’s for an upcoming competition in April. So there was a LOT of work yesterday, very taxing on my Central Nervous System and by the very end I was shaking and barely able to get the weights up. By all rights I should be in a lot of pain today, but I feel great right now.

I’m also very coachable lately. This, I really feel is attributable to the Subs. The past two years of Crossfit, I’ve been prone to angry outbursts, bad attitudes and flat out quitting. Now I’m very positive in the gym and always stop to take the coaches’ feedback and put it into practice during a workout.

My diet has been on point. If anything, I’d like to increase the macros to help with the amount of work I am doing but since I’m following the directions of a nutritionist I’m sticking to the plan for now.

Dreams: I’m not noticing much in the way of helpful dreams or related to my goals here. Last night was a fairly vivid dream of me moving to Alaska and joining an Ocean fishing team. It is quite frankly not at all a desire of mine. I’m scared of the Ocean and have no desire to fish, so not sure what to make of it, but it was pretty vivid. I suppose I could live in Alaska but I was under the impression that I was struggling and had to flea whatever my life was at that moment to go there.

Now, I’d say the unforeseen side effect of this Sub is that I’ve been skipping out of work to get to the gym. Snuck out after a meeting in the morning to do my rowing, and snuck out two hours early to catch the evening workout classes. The nature of my job is kinda weird, in that it’s not necessarily a 9-5. Some weird hours and extra time are put in as the basis is that the job needs to get done no matter what, but I find I’m shifting the work to be done at times where I should be spending time with my family, and I’ve been kinda blowing off my family.

[Niles]

Funny man, about a week after starting Ascended Mogul I got a job offer in Alaska as a Sea Kayaking guide.

[OmFlux]

Made it through another week of 5 on/ 2 off, and so am back on today, for week 3. What I’ve noticed this past week is that I am very much locked in on my nutrition and macros. It feels almost like a sin to miss my macros and so I don’t dare do it. Today is my birthday. A fine day for some cake and to partake in some of my favorite not so good for me foods, but I’m not doing either, and it is already into the late afternoon.

What I wanted to do, as part of my birthday, is really start cracking on 3-a-days. Some cardio in the morning, some weights or skill work in the afternoon, and then a Crossfit class at night.

Unfortunately one kid woke up with pink eye, had to go to the doctors and get meds, and another had an allergy incident and so life got a bit in the way today. I guess I could treat today as a mapping day for the next year, and get at it tomorrow. Unless something comes up in the next couple hours, I should be able to hit the late Crossfit class.

Crossfit 19.4 occurred over the weekend and it was really in my head. Due to lifetime shoulder mobility issues I don’t snatch or overhead press very well. Shoulders are typically my least favorite to work, and 19.4 had Snatch’s and Burpees, with Muscle Ups to follow after…lots of shoulders. I was not feeling this workout walking in. Not at all. I even failed to get the prescribed weight up in the snatches during warmups.

I was about to go scaled when my judge talked me into going RX anyway. Even if I could get one rep as Rx, it was better than a scaled score in the standings.

So, I agreed, and I don’t know what changed when the bell went off, but not only did I get one, but I got all 30 snatches in and all 36 burpees and finished a minute and a half faster than anyone else in the class. That left me with a couple minutes to try and get a muscle-up. I’ve never gotten close before to a muscle up. On five attempts I was very close on a few, but still not able to nail it. I’m very confident that if I can work on the form for a muscle up over the next month, I can get it. It wasn’t a strength issue, it literally was trying to figure out how to get my hips back on the way up. I know how it’s supposed to look, I just don’t have the body coordination quite yet, but very encouraging.

Also, I’ve been preparing for a competition coming up in April, a team competition. We’re just doing the scaled division, but training has been going great. We’ve all pushed through some self-perceived limitations.

All told, I’m very pleased with how things are going so far. I’d say my only issue is that I wish I was allowed to try Legacy and the Spartan bonus during this experiment, but I can’t.

[SaintSovereign]

You may try the Legacy — very curious see how you respond.

[myspace123]

Happy birthday om well I’m guessing it’s gone by the time u get this so happy belated birthday

[OmFlux]

So I owe an update sorry. I am still doing the 5-on, 2-off. I’ve added Legacy 2x a day on the “on” days. I listen to nothing on the off days. I’ve been gearing up for this CrossFit competition this weekend. I am very pleased with my training and how I’m performing. I wish I could use this weekend as an objective barometer but it is a 4-person team competition so really I can only opine on how I feel my performance will be.

I’ve become the de facto leader of the team which is nice. They even made t-shirts for the competition with only my face on them…which is kinda weird.

I’ve had people comment on how my shoulders seem bigger in the last few days. I’ve been working on them because they are a limiting factor for me on a number of lifts, so visually it is paying off, and I’m getting more comfortable with olympic lifts.

One anecdote that is interesting to me, regarding rapid recovery. I was doing a workout last night that involved a lot of sustained time under tension with squats…basically nine minutes of not putting the bar down at all. I started cramping up in my quads badly, to the point where I thought I screwed myself for the competition this weekend. I came home and slept horribly (it was a night time workout). Woke up still feeling horribly but as the day wore on and I did some active recovery things, I was amazed to feel back to normal less than 24 hours later and had a couple good workouts tonight.

I can’t say whether a few weeks of listening will make all the difference in the world for this competition coming up, but I can very much see how this can be an integral part of my training going forward. Who knows how much difference it can make when the next Crossfit games come this autumn but I am looking forward to finding out.

[OmFlux]

I’ve kept the same five days on, two days off and I like the pattern. Seems to allow my brain to breathe a bit on the weekends. Since my last post, I’ve been in two Crossfit competitions. The one that I’ve been leading up to in my previous posts went very well. We finished in the top half of a 40 team division, and beat all the teams I was expecting to beat coming in, and also did better than we did in any practice simulation. I feel I performed as well as I can at my current level of training. I’m just not there yet. I can say that several people came up to me and said that I was the most valuable person on our team but still, as I said, I have a ways to go.

Today I did another competition that I did not train specifically for. Only decided two weeks ago to go in and do it and the WODs had been posted for 6 months so every one else had an opportunity to train but we did not. It showed. We performed well for not training but we were in the back of the pack, basically.

I feel that this Subliminal is helping instill the desire to be better. I work out a lot, I do a ton of extra work, and I eat well (which hasn’t always been the case). But a sport like Crossfit takes time to master the skills, and everyone else is trying to get better, too. This is to say that the Sub works, it keeps you focused, but is not going to take you to the top of your sport in only a couple months. Nothing short of time-in-training will. This Sub will give you the motivation and mindset to keep at it. There was never a day I wanted to skip the gym. It used to be that there would be movements/modalities that if I saw them coming up in the day’s WOD, I sometimes made the decision to stay away. During the time I’ve been using this Sub, I’ve looked forward to improving myself in those same skills. I became excited for the opportunities to make myself better.

I’ve been using this Sub exclusively for 7 weeks. I’m anxious to try the new Ultimate Artist, but won’t switch gears till @SaintSovereign says I can. I’m hoping to get back into fiction writing with it. My thought was to run both Spartan and Ultimate Artist.

[SaintSovereign]

You should be able to add Ultimate Artist to your stack. It’s a much “lighter” sub as opposed to Spartan New Dawn, but please take note that adding UA may “diffuse” Spartan’s results a bit.

[OmFlux]

Closing the loop on this journal as I am moving on to Ultimate Artist.

I enjoyed great success with this subliminal. My level of fitness was the best it had been since my mid-20’s. I was performing well and progressing with my skills and strength, but my priorities changed after a pair of CrossFit competitions that were two weeks apart in late August.

The first of the two I would say was the penultimate of success for this sub. I’d been training as an alternate for a four person masters team for this competition and then literally at 7pm the night before the competition I got a call from another gym saying they had a guy drop out and could I join the team?

This would normally be an automatic No from me, because I don’t like the unknown. I don’t know these guys, never trained with them, etc. but for whatever reason I said yes, after checking with the team I was an alternate for, asking for their blessing.

So 12 hours later, I was competing with three guys I never met before, never trained with, in the largest competition in my region.

Long story short, despite some nagging injuries, we were in third place after three workouts, going into the finals, and we finished one point out of third after the Finals. I feel like if we had been able to train together even once or twice, we would have taken a medal, which is what my goal of this sub really was. So I consider this a success.

In retrospect, I should not have done a second competition so soon afterward (about 2 weeks). I was banged up, a little mentally burned out, and as such, I bounced around between 5th and 10th place, never really being a threat for a medal.

For the past two months I’ve been letting my brain detox a bit so I could be ready for my Ultimate Artist journal which I kicked off today.

[rising]

Amazing results. What goals you have with UA?

[OmFlux]

My goals with UA is to build a business as a fiction author, so that means repeatedly writing and publishing novels, along with all the marketing and advertising that goes with it.