Aaron's Status

7:22 pm

After a series of challenging anxiety episodes through the holidays, I made it my mission to get a rather complete health check-in to set my mind at ease. I talked to my doctor and got the order for a lipid panel and a couple other blood tests (can’t remember the names, but they were cool).

When I mentioned feeling lightheaded during a strenuous climbing session he also ordered an EKG (or ECG, same thing). Anyway, everything is normal. I mean except my cholesterol, which has been high for years, but even that is surprisingly stable after all the shit I’ve eaten.

Feels good to get a clean bill of health and be back on the straight and narrow.

This was the first full week back at work and shit is cranking. The team is storming and norming, I’m trying my hardest to avoid doing management things while at the same time feeling compelled to do management things. I hope that my arms-length soapboxing about development philosophy is useful to someone.

I wrote about my pretty strong climbing day last Sunday. I mean, it was fine, but I felt like I tried hard. We went back Tuesday and I was so beat. I couldn’t even do the first move of the V5 we had worked on on Sunday. I got all the way to the end of a V4 and couldn’t stay on the last hold. I took a few tries at a V4-ish comp problem and didn’t send that one, either.

I had felt iffy about my back for that session, but got through it, it was fine. On the following days things have felt about the same, like not great, but not bad either. Starting yesterday (Thursday), I woke up with the worst pain down my left side. It isn’t muscle soreness, it feels like maybe I pulled something inside, under the lat.

It’s a bit better today. I took some Advil in the morning but nothing since then, and right now it feels annoying but not terrible. Here’s to hoping that I make another leap to wellness tomorrow.

At the same time, my back today has felt fantastic. Like as good as it’s felt in a long time. I even hit a moment at work where I was feeling just burned out and decided to do a deck workout, which I haven’t done in ages. Banged it out in like 15 minutes.

Oh yeah and yesterday I also did my grip training pyramid, for which I mounted a couple of horizontal strips of wood on the inside of the door under where the hangboard is. The pyramid is going pretty well, I can easily do three of them with rest between.

On the third one I played with using the 20mm crimps instead of the top of the board and that made it like 200% harder. The goal might be to get to where I can do the whole pyramid on the crimps, but we’ll see about that. I may use the regular pyramid as a warm-up and then do some actual dead hangs. I need my grip to get a bit stronger so I can finish some of these crimpy climbs.

My back today is making me feel more optimistic about Sunday. I’d like to close the book on the two V4s and take a proper stab at the V5 and/or the blue 5.11 that I feel like I’m so close on.

I’m also playing too much Stardew Valley. Which is what I’m going to go do right now.