Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder

Since my last post I have almost done a full circle in terms of injuries. I think it was about 3 days after being pretty much injury free in London Alex came over for some training and it was wet. I climbed up to a beam about 10 or so feet up before my hands slipped off it, resulting in me falling a fair distance straight onto my arse. I got up after a few seconds feeling rather sore with bruised palms and of course a bruised bottom! Moving on I slowly found it harder and harder to walk and found I had pulled my groin sometime during the fall. I could barely walk for 3 days but slowly recovered. In the mean time I was doing some heavy arm curls and as I put the weight down after a set my right palm gave an almighty ache. I have no idea what I did but it just feels like a very bruised palm and now my groin is 100% my palm is preventing me from some aspects of training!

So far, since the end of August I have had about 3 days where injuries haven't restricted my training *sighs*. It doesn't help that I still train so hard with the injuries though. I am always putting weight on my injured palm and as a result, recovery is very slow.

Despite my injuries I am feeling stronger than ever, especially in my lower body. I have more confidence with jumping and landing than ever before and if it wasn't for my injuries I would be feeling very free and able. As it is I feel restricted by my inability to vault well because of my hand.

I am back in Leeds now for a month and I'm loving it! They do say "Absence makes the heart grow fonder!" I am even loving being back in the 'countrysidy' village of Methley. I have so many fond memories of self exploration/discovery here, it's good to get back and relive some of my earlier days. The training here is also very different to any urban area so it's good to put things in perspective and try and adapt my abilities to a much more irregular unpredictable environment in the form of a sand quarry.

I am yet to properly train back in Leeds but the time will come. Instead I have been taking trips over to the ghetto gym in Bradford. It's good to do some different training in a place where my injured palm is barely noticeable. The soft padding everywhere means my hand has little impact and therefore causes me no pain and restricts me not. As I am not used to this training it is very hard on my body and I wake up the next morning feeling very achy. I can only see this as a good thing but the lack of protein supplements at the moment doesn't aid my recovery. It's good to start to add a new range of tricks to my list as well after sticking to what I know for so long, I might even have to do a few gainers outside today for the first time since I bailed one in September 06! It has been a fair mental challenge getting them back I have to say. One I very much liked overcoming!

I got my new cam corder complete with a couple of nice lenses and I have been toying with video making of late:

The first video I made when I was still too injured to do much training, it was filmed over the course of no more than an hour on a very cold night in Manchester before we took a trip over to the gym in Stockport -



Ed came over to visit me in Manchester but it pissed it down, luckily I got Paul to give me some directions to a pretty cool undercover spot. This spot looks far better in the video than it actually is, it has very slippy walls and a loose rail and things but we wasn't complaining. We trained here for a few hours before heading back to mine for a good session with the weights. Ed benched more than he'd ever done in his life and we ran back to the station, which Ed failed on :P
The video is just me playing with the footage we gathered at the undercover spot.



I have been listening to Hurt by Jonny Cash whilst out training loads recently and have been picturing it in a video, so I went out with my dog and filmed a general days training for me here in Methley, got back and stuck it all together to the sound of Jonny Cash. There is a few clips from the sand quarry I talk about at the end of the video.


-I am aware my muscle ups suck! A year of not knowing about not going one hand then the other seems to have had an adverse effect on my technique. It is a 'two armed' technique that I am doing, just a very wonky version.
-Expect a video from the quarry in the next few weeks.

Peace