part of the fun of training a lot is you get to come up with theories for how to make wild improvements and attain your dreams. It's these theories that get you excited about more training because you realize that you've finally figured it all out and everything will come together perfectly.
my latest and greatest theory came about through observing climbing. I've seen a lot of benefit from doing two different sports and each gives a unique perspective on the other. Here's what I'll say about both sports. A lot of people will tell you there's a ton of different aspects to running and climbing. For climbing you need coordination and strength and grip strength and good movement and being able to read a climb and how to use your feet. And for running you need to train your endurance and your speed and your technique and your core and do injury prevention. And that's all true and well and good but if you watch climbing for a while you pretty quickly realize that if someone can hang on to really bad holds for a long time, they're going to have a relatively easy go of it. You watch running and you realize that if someone can sprint pretty fast, they're going to do pretty well.
Obviously I'm oversimplifying things but that's kind of the point. If you don't isolate the main limiting factor to your performance, then you aren't maximizing the potential gain of your training. I was watching this video about climbing and training your core and this PT correctly pointed out that while the core muscles are engaged during almost every part of the climbing, those aren't the muscles that are being used the most and reaching their point of failure. In other words, your fingers and arms are going to give out long before your core does, so making your core stronger isn't really going to change the point of failure. A climber who has a limited amount of time and energy to train should focus more on grip strength. Just because there are a lot of things in both sports that we could train, it doesn't mean that they all contribute equally to performance.
I realized this myself pretty quickly in my own climbing. I can do big moves off of really good holds. It's when I can't grip the holds anymore that I stop being able to do the moves.
So I wondered if the same is true for running. I've learned in the past few years that I can't get away with not spending a lot of time training my aerobic system. I've been logging my miles diligently and I've seen some benefits. But I wondered if there was a "grip strength" equivalent in running. The main muscle groups targeted by running are your quads, hamstrings, glutes, hip flexors, and calves. And I looked into it a little bit more and found a few sources that pointed to the calves as the most activated muscles during running. This immediately made sense to me. After hard efforts my calves are the most sore. My injuries have tended to be lower leg injuries due to tight calves. I'm not very good at jumping or explosive bounding movements. I'm pretty sure my calves are the point of failure when I'm running.
So I've decided that I'm going to start dedicating time to strengthening my calves--something I've never really focused on before. I've had periods where I focused on lower body strengthening overall but not really progressive weight training targeted the calves specifically. We'll see if it makes a difference.
I did a bunch of calf raises and variations of calf raises today and I'll find out if I'm sore tomorrow. I felt really good on my run so maybe I activated the calf muscles more than fatiguing them but I wanted to figure out where my baseline was and work into it slowly. I'll keep posting updates. I have access to weights at the gym but I think I'll focus on single leg bodyweight calf raises for a while as they seem to be pretty challenging.
I had one last day to send this climb in the steep room that I really wanted to get and I didn't end up getting it. It's taken down now and I'll just have to wait for a climb to appear that's similar to it. It'll happen eventually.
It was kind of weird because normally when I climb in the steep room things follow a very linear process. I'll take a couple days to learn all the moves. And then I'll take maybe two more sessions to link everything together. And then usually after like 5 sessions, I do the climb. This one followed that trajectory pretty closely and then last Thursday I was one move away from doing the climb and felt pretty good. So you'd think it would be like a guaranteed send after that. But I put in two more sessions on Saturday and Tuesday (tonight) and was never really even close. Usually when something like that happens it's because the holds have become more slippery and the moves get harder because there's less friction. Maybe that was the case a little bit with this climb but maybe it was also that I just focused on it too much. I'm not sure. It just felt like I plateaued.
But my takeaway from that plateau and not getting the climb is that I'd rather spend my time just enjoying climbing and not doing it under pressure. I think it's more fun and better for my improvement overall to just climb a lot and feel good.
Our teacher work day mini-camp took a trip to the discovery science museum of virginia today and we learned many beautiful and wonderful things. But the most important thing that we did is that I found a little video kiosk in the middle of a hallway where I got to pit the beloved pokemon known as Pikachu against an AMC Gremlin in a race.
For those who don't know, Pikachu is the face of Pokemon, a wildly popular billion dollar franchise that features pokemon, or pocket monsters, that young children and adults of all ages capture and force to fight each other for large sums of money. Pikachu is an electric mouse pokemon that stores electricity in its cheeks which it then releases in a powerful shock at the request of its trainer who is hoping to defeat the opposing pokemon to receive a hefty cash prize.
Pokemon was conceived by Satoshi Tajiri who was a childhood bug collector and wanted children to experience the joys of catching bugs and forcing them to fight each other.
The AMC Gremlin was an automobile produced by the now defunct American Motors Corporation from 1970 to 1983. The AMC Gremlin boasted a whopping 128 horsepower and the best fuel economy of any American made car in 1970.
The American Motors Corporation was founded by George Walters Mason who once tied himself to the crows nest of a ship in a thunderstorm and was struck by lightning 27 times, apparently suffering no injuries other than his left eye turning completely white and allegedly being able to see the name of any person and how many minutes they had left to live.
Well, somewhat ironically, according to the museum, Pikachu travels at the speed of lightning which is approximately 270,000 mph and the AMC Gremlin travels at a speed of 80 mph and so Pikachu was the winner.
The real reason we go to camp is to do cool flips. What is a cool flip? That's not something a cool person would ask. A cool person would ask, "how cool was that flip I just did?" To which the answer would be, "heckin' sweet, my dude." I've changed my name legally to cool flips. And when I do cool flips, as I'm running down the diving board someone always shouts, "hey look everyone! Cool Flips is about to do one of his cool flips!" And then I heave my body up into the air and twirl around violently and erratically before crashing into the water with a loud slapping sound and taking a concerning amount of time to resurface. I then retreat into hiding for two weeks before returning to repeat the process once more. Cool flips.
