One Year Surgery-versay

Next Tuesday is a double decker anniversary.  It is mine and The Other Half's 10.2 anniversary...  10 years together followed by 2 years of marriage and it is my first year following my surgery for Gastric By-Pass.  It has also been over a month at what the Gastric folks cal "Onederland"...  That being your weight starts with a 1 vice a 2 or 3.  In my case I've stabilized at about 196ish + or - 2 pounds any given moment.  

The surgery, with out a doubt, was the single greatest contributor to the weight loss.  For me, I don't think it could have happened any other way.  But...  Here is the tricky point.  In October I was 214.  In that time I have lost ~18 pounds, but my body fat level has gone from +30% to 16%.  For that I give thanks to the 6am morning workouts.  They are hard, constantly varying, and truly enjoyable in a sick and twisted sort of way.  I think I can count on less then one hand the number of workout days that I've missed since October.  Traveling, vacation, work, training...  Doesn't matter, I'll get them in.  Equipment or no, something can be worked out.  Using the handy-dandy Air Force BodPod, I know that although I have lost 18 pounds of weight, my non-fat weight has gone up almost 17 pounds, which means I've gained 17 pounds of muscle and lost 35 pounds of fat.  

Happy snaps to follow:

Like I said, couldn't have done it without the surgery...  I was just too addicted to all the foods I loved but didn't love me back, but the workouts are what helped re-shape the body afterwards.  I won't be posting weight stuff here anymore...  Over at the workout side as things progress.  Surgeon thinks I have pretty much leveled off.  He may be right, but I would like to drop another 10 pounds of total weight while gaining some more upper body strength.  My next six month goal is to complete 'Linda' as proscribed.  Better known as three bars of death, it is ten rounds of decreasing sets (10-9-8-7...) of 1.5 times body weight Deadlifts (That would be ~300, my one rep max is 280ish), body weight Bench Press (200, but have no idea on the Bench as we don't do it very often), and .75 power cleans (150 while I currently am working out around 95...) so lots of room for growth!

Thanks to everyone that has been supported, it means a lot!

We now return you to your normally schedule geeky stuff! :)

jp
Keep on truckin'

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On Saturday I got a full day of gaming... It was enough to make any gamer jealous! The day started off with me at the Gym working on the Cross Fit Total. Max weights for back squat, shoulder press, and dead lift. My total was still pretty low and it put me in the beginner category, but that makes since given I just started about a month ago.

Afterwards I met Phillip, Adam, and Dan for our minor little farewell to MkI game. We played a 2K point game with Phillip and I playing against Dan and Adam. Phil had Epic Feorra and Kreoss and I ran Epic Caine and Halley. Not very fluff, but that is OK. Adam had Epic Magnus w/ Bart and Dan had Epic Butcher with Irusk. I got very lucky. By all rights I should have been dead with Haley on turn two from a Obliterator and eCaine on turn three from a supped up Mariner, but Adam's damage dice just couldn't pull it off, leaving each of my casters with ~5 points each. I ended up gatecrashing Bart with eCaine and having a bunch of stuff pick on Magnus. Phillip put alot of effort on eButch and needed eFerrora in the front to finish the brute off. We called the game with Team Adam/Dan only having Irusk left but us needing to wrap up the game. It was a hoot to play, just felt bad that Adam couldn't capitalize on my bad play! Farewell MkI!

Afterwards I purchased a few items. A set of the Italian P40 tanks for the mid war monster tournament for Flames of War in January. I also got the girls their Christmas presents and picked up a pair of board games for myself. I 'hope' to do an unboxing, after my business trip, of Factory Manager and Dominion as well as a detailed review of the game when Steve and I can give the game a go.

I headed over to the 'Man Cave' afterwards and Eric, Mark, Steve, Rob, Kyle, and I played that EPIC board game that had been itching at us. We chose Conquest of the Empire and had a pretty good time. Some really interesting mechanics in the game that I really liked and some that were a bit old... The premise of the game was Caesar had died and each player was attempting to take control of the empire. I really liked the alliance format. The real interesting mechanic that I really thought gave the game a twist was the alliance bidding. You had to form an alliance with half the players on one side and half on the other. You could not attack members in your alliance, but you could choose to lend support to attacks. This would not stop you from stealing influence from your alliance members, but you couldn't go all commando on them. Additionally although the game had huge armies, it wasn't about combat capability, but winning influence and victory points. I was able to gain control of Italia early which allowed be three scoring rounds at the max value, that allowed me to 'recycle' senate votes giving me a prime position to win more votes, especially the ones or additional victory points and chaos reduction. Once I got the solid lead, it was too late for the others to counter to any affect. Here is were the alliances become interesting as I was trying set up players to be on my side that were the biggest threat. The troop and combat roles were a little uninspiring, but like I said, it really wasn't the focus of the game.

Afterwards we introduced Kyle to Agricola on the family setting. It was another good game with each player being within 6 points of each other. I won in the end, but only because I stopped Steve from grabbing enough foods and forcing him to slaughter all his sheep to feed his family.

A great, fun filled day of gaming by any measure.

On Sunday The Other Half and I took the Dog to meet a co-workers dog that will be visiting over Christmas. It was a good encounter with dogs and people all getting along.

Icy as snot out today, and cold, with more cold to follow. I suppose you got to love winter, but I'm not sure why. :)

jp
Game on!

On the road again...

I feel like a zombie now... Three time zones in three nights. My body is just phhhhtttt!

Finished up Seattle trip with a visit to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and Museum and the Experience Music Project. It was one of the coolest museum trips I have taken. I could have spent another hour or so looking it was that neat. You got to see alot of the cool props used from the early days of Sci-fi TV up to the glory days of 70's campy shows (Buck Rodgers anyone?) and into some of the more modern shows/movies. They have Captain Kirk's original chair from the Enterprise, which in person, looks like it has seen better days. In fact almost all the Star Trek props were pretty low class, given that the TV resolution was so poor and with proper camera angles, it didn't really matter too much.

Later that day we went to the Geek Chic warehouse and I met Robert and his family that my buddy JC is a partner with. Didn't get to see any complete tables, but I did get a chance to spy The Alexandria Codex which is a nice piece of wood working. They, as a whole, are doing very well and are working feverishly to get caught up on back orders. Robert was a nice guy with a lot of contacts in the gaming world.

Friday night we had dinner at JC's families house then played a few games of Pandemic with his kids. Good games, but I was getting tired so we broke at about 930. Here are the highlights of Sunday to today...
0300 Pacific Time - Get Up
0400 Pacific Time - Drop off Rental
0600 Pacific Time - Get on Plane
1230 Central Time - Get home
0450 Central Time - Get up at home
0615 Central Time - Start the Filthy Fifty*
0625 Central Time - Regret starting the Filthy Fifty
0652 Central Time - Finish Filthy Fifty
0730 Central Time - Get to work and check 50+ emails
1200 Central Time - Head to Airport
1330 Central Time - Get on Plane
1900 Eastern Time - Get to Maryland
2000 Eastern Time - Eat a crab cake at G&M
2100 Eastern Time - Return to G&M to get jacket left behind GRR!
2130 Eastern Time - Arrive at Hotel and check in and watch Broncos loose... Stupid Broncos
0030 Eastern Time - Crash
0700 Eastern Time - Get up and do 5K on treadmill (36:36 is a good time for me!)
0830 Eastern Time - Update Blog!

I don't think I have any other business travel for a week or so.

*Last thing. The Filthy Fifty. My god. The cool aid drinking Crossfit guys are just insane. Our Monday work out was 50 of the following: Box Jumps, Jump Pull-Ups, Kettle Bell Swings, Push Press w/ bar, Knees to elbows, Wall Ball (throw 12# ball 10' on wall and catch in squat), burpees (don't ask!), double unders (jump rope with two passes for each jump.) I was beat. Still sore.

Well... I've got to hit the shower. More later!

jp
Like a band of gypsies we go down the highway

100 pounds gone... Forever!

Greetings,

I’ve been in a stall the past two weeks and I have been hovering around 220 pounds every morning at the gym during that time. Stalls are common in the process, they can last 1 to 4 weeks, and they are just part of the process, so I wasn’t worried about this being the end, but it was very frustrating knowing I was sooooo close to my first goal.

Achievement Unlocked!

This morning, after a grueling workout, I stepped on the scale and was pleasantly surprised to see 217.4… Just over 100 pounds from my high of 318. Hallelujah and pass the protein shake!

The process has been a great benefit to me, helping me adjust to what I should be eating. I haven’t been perfect, nobody ever is, but I’ve been pretty good by and large and I am very happy with the results.

So… New goal? 200 pounds. 20 more to go!

I also started a new workouts this week. Crossfit. It is like a cult in the gym. The work outs are very tough and I am not even coming close to the proscribed workout of the day. Today’s routine (our group is 24 hours off from the official cycle) was:

21 - 95# Sumo dead lifts

250 Meter on the rowing machine

15 - Pull-ups

Wash and repeat for 20 mins… The goal is to do as many as you can in that cycle in the allotted time.

Since I’m just starting out and I just don’t have the upper body strength yet so I did the following:

15 – 20# dumbbell Sumo dead lifts

250M row

9 – Assisted Pull Ups

In the 20 minutes I finished three full cycles and started the sumo deadlifts again, but didn’t finish.

My legs are killing me (a good thing), but I just feel like I could rock all day.

On the gaming front I hope to get at least one game of FoW with my Italians tonight at league night and then Saturday we have the continuing mis-adventures of the “I can’t believe we didn’t get TPK” gang.

J

jp

Hey, Hey, Hey, Good-bye