Two Week Countdown Checkup

Since getting my official invite about a week ago I’ve filled out a bunch of paperwork for G4, and I believe am all locked and loaded to go to Venice Beach for American Ninja Warrior 2 in just two weeks.  Since I laid out a pretty detailed 5 point preparation program, I thought it would make sense to review my status on each of those tracks as I make my final preparations to compete in two weeks.

GRIP STRENGTH & ENDURANCE – I said at the beginning that there was “no substitute for a kung fu iron grip”, and that is still the case.  I was doing great in preparation for this until about three weeks ago when I strained my left hand during a climb.  After just trying to “train through it” for a while, I realized that I need to rest it, treat it, and rehab it if I was going to be able to run the course in Venice Beach.  After resting and treating it the last couple of weeks, including acupuncture twice (needles in the back of your hand hurts!), yesterday I worked out on it in some specific obstacle training and was happy to find that the strength has returned, although there is still some pain.  But as long as the strength is back, I can swallow the pain as long as I know I’m not doing further damage.

GENERAL STRENGTH – Feeling good, have been training harder and keeping to my plan for this.  Not trying to add muscle mass, but improve general strength.  Been doing a lot of core work too here, which has been great.

BURST CARDIO – Doing more here in the last couple of weeks, particularly since I’ve had to lay off my hand, and have been working hard at maintaining topline sustained cardio.  Been jumping some rope here old school too.

FLEXIBILITY – Have made great strides here.  Doing cardio more frequently and some heavy-duty stretching a few times a week have made me more flexible than I think since I was a teenager.  Didn’t even have to go to yoga to do it 😉

WEIGHT LOSS – Ummm…not so great here.   At the moment I am 216…11 pounds lighter than where I started three and a half months ago.  13 pounds shy on my goal of 203 which would have represented a 10% weight loss.  If I can get down to 210 for the event I’ll be feeling pretty good, but that’s still 6 pounds in the next two weeks.  Don’t know if I can do it, but I honestly only care a little bit about it at this point.  I’ve done what I could 😉

With two weeks to go, the only thing that really matters is getting my hand right so I can compete at 100%.  Weight, flexibility, etc., don’t matter a thing compared to that.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 25th, 2010 at 3:46 am and is filed under American Ninja Warrior 2, The Dream, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • James

    Cardio Cardio Cardio…. get that heart rate peaking and peaking… try new stuff..

  • http://route53.wordpress.com Route53

    How long are these courses? 5 minutes? 10 minutes?

    Seriously, if you don’t make top 30, you have to try out for: http://abc.go.com/shows/wipeout

  • http://americanninjawarrior.wordpress.com Matt

    The opening stage is typically a minute or two of some intense action. The next round is usually about a minute longer. The Japanese Ninja Warrior the stages are about that too, until you get to the 3rd stage which is untimed. Then the fourth and final stage in Japan is again timed. Not too interested in Wipeout, that’s more of a comedy obstacle course. Ninja Warrior is pretty serious, with the typical Japanese desire to have some people dressed in costume flail on the course before comedic relief before the more serious competitors do their runs.