December
I was neglecting this blog a lot lately, contrary to what I promised myself at the beginning of the year. But, I will try and catchup now, most importantly with 2021 review and stats and with a few book reviews missing, hold on tight.
I tried to answer the life long question of How much abuse can your body take before it starts falling apart, the answer is more than 34 days. 34 days is exactly for how long I have been in Spain and for how long I have been training with exactly 1 rest day. I felt well and strong for most of the time, until I returned home and finally let my body rest. My legs refused to walk downstairs for 7 days and I had problems with any downhill terrain for over 2 weeks. The month of physical strain I put my quadricepses through left my with a case of Crush Syndrome. Overworked tissue of my leg muscles started breaking down and my body didn’t have enough time to recover accummulating large amount of residuals before it could finally let it float out.
Tissue naturally breaks down and rebuilds over time. When the breakdown process is speeded up through crush injury, strenuous exercise, or medications it results into Rhabdomyolysis - rapid breakdown of muscle issue. Strongest indicator and most reliable indicator of Rhabdomyolysis is the level of Creatine Kinese in blood. Normal level of creatine kinase in blood is 200 to 400 units per liter. For male athletes the upper bound can be around twice as high, up to 1000 units per liter. My stupid training approach lended me on 40,000 as measured from my blood sample week after I returned.
Needless to say I am going to pay much more attention to recovery from now on. Furthermore, I might as well stay in the endurance zone next time instead of having yet another dick-measuring contest on uphill segments with guys that are far above my performance level. And last but not least, this makes me want to learn more about the physiology behind my training, because so far I focused on the big picture of optimal training splits, heart rate zones, and performance measures completely neglectic the most important part - my body.
Reading
- Starship is Still Not Understood - the economics behind Starship, how it hompletely changes the space industry, and all the other implications of cheap cargo transport into the low Earth orbit.
Starship is intended to reach numbers as low as $1m/T and 1000 T/year for cargo soft landed on the Moon. Apollo achieved about $2b/T and 2 T/year for cargo soft landed on the Moon. Starship is Still Not Understood by Casey Handmer
- Death Note: L, Anonymity & Eluding Entropy by Gwern - analysis of the deathnote using Informatioin theory.
- Ad Astra - The coming battle over space by Rachel Riederer (report). Why we need Outer Space Treaty and why sattelites are the current Achilles’ heel of technologically advanced nations.
- Moo Card Player - NFC physical medium for music
- 100 years of whatever this will be - “in any system, if you don’t have an explicit hierarchy, then you have an implicit one”
- Lesswrong
- Sacrifice by Tynan
Watching
Pixer’s Soul probably wasn’t bad but either I missed the point of the movie or I wasn’t focused enough to understand it. Soul reminded me of my favority Inside Out that is already 6 years old (feels like yesterday). I think I owe this movie one more chance but lets leave that for when I have someone to watch it with.
14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible is finally giving the Nepali mountaineers and sherpas the recognition that they deserve in a movie about probably the greatest mountaineering feat of 21st century so far. I loved the movie, it’s heartfelt tone, and the beautiful imagery of the most impregnable parts of the Earth.
Don’t Look Up had a great concept but I wasn’t fond of the pacing of the movie.