R2 Day 31 - Back & Biceps

New workout today. I like this workout a lot. It's quick and intense, and it really works your arms. My numbers were the same as the last time I did it in week 12 of the first round, except for the pull ups, which fell away a little at the end. I've never felt like I am on top of the pull ups, they are so damn hard. I tried to fix my bar, but I couldn't. No great drama though.
I just went down the shop with Will and bought a can of coffee - my only indulgence for the day. It's weird because as soon as I decided to cut down on the crap (really not to eat any at all, but I've decided I would like one treat a day, whether it be a can of coffee or a Kitkat, the kitchen seems to be piled high with doughnuts and mini croissants and ice-cream etc. Last week I would have gone nuts and ate a heap of them, but this week, nup.
Tiger will be in Melbourne in a couple of days. There's an interview with 60 minutes tonight, which I will definitely download. I should have scheduled my trip to coincide with him playing at Kingston Heath. I would have loved to have seen him play. I saw him at Royal Melbourne when he came down for the President's Cup ages ago.
I still can't believe what he has done. When I was learning golf, the best two players were Greg Norman, who you knew deep down was an asshole, and Faldo, who was my favourite. Golf exposes people. Flaws in their character, work they haven't done, presumptions they've made. Norman was exposed again and again. Those 'unlucky' things that happened to him, he brought about. Larry Mize's chip in in 87 was amazing, but like he said years later, it was Norman's shitty second shot that took the pressure off him and let him chip the ball thinking that he might be able to make a bogey and still be in the play off. If Norman put his second to fifteen feet, then Mize would have approached the chip knowing that he had to get up and down to stay in it - a completely different mindset. In 86 when Tway holed a bunker shot to beat Norman, Norman had shot a 40 on that back nine. He was already beaten. The other times Norman's technique let him down, and even though it cost him dozens of tournaments and millions of dollars, he refused to tackle the problem. Faldo, on the other hand, did the work, hit the shots, and for a few years was the most dominant player in golf since Nicklaus. He won 6 majors. Norman won 2. I thought Faldo was the best golfer I would ever see.
Tiger has won 14. The thing I love about Tiger is that all he wants to do is win. He's not Ali, or Shaq, he's not about changing the world or being in Disney movies, he's about winning golf tournaments, and he does what he has to do to win them. When he first came on the scene the media tried to paint him as some kind of saviour, a barrier-breaking racial hero, all that. They tried to portray his dad as some kind of crazy Korean tennis dad. Turns out that Tiger isn't really interested in race, and that his dad was a great guy who taught Tiger what he needed to know but was just as in awe of his son's talent as anybody. From a purely golf point of view, he's the greatest ever. I think only Nicklaus has a problem with that, and he's a proud old bugger. The shots he has hit over the years are just amazing. The pressure he is under week after week is intense, but the consistency of his form is untouchable in any sport.
Sometimes I wish he would be more... charismatic, so people who don't play golf take an interest in him like I might take an interest in Michael Jordan or Ichiro, even though I have no interest in their sports. It's probably why even though we have the greatest golfer in his prime playing, golf is in all sorts of trouble. Clubs are struggling, TV audiences are down. It's a shame. But fuck it. I'm a golfer, and Tiger is mine, and part of me is glad that he doesn't appeal to the shitkickers out there who don't know what it takes to do what he does. They've got their Koby Bryants and Lance Armstrongs and all those tennis faggots. You won't see Tiger taking steroids or involved in a nightclub shooting or smoking bongs. Sorry.
So good luck in Melbourne, Tiger. Hope you like Kingston Heath, it is a beautiful place. Hope you kick their ass and win.

R2 Day 30 - Plyo, ARX

Phew, big day. Day 30, actually. Nearly half way through already. Plyo then Ab Ripper X. This was easily my best Plyo so far in this second round. The intensity was very high, and I'm feeling it now like I haven't for a long time. Nice. ARX was ARX. I had a quick coffee before my workout, and that's it. No headaches, which is nice, and weird considering my caffeine intake is way down. I feel really good, really even-tempered.
I did a lot of looking after the baby today, and we went out for dinner. Ramen. Probably not the healthiest of foods, but damn I love ramen.

R2 Day 29 - Chest, Shoulders & Triceps

Phase 2 starts today. Chest, Shoulders & Triceps. This workout just hums along. It seems really quick, and it's hard to type now because my arms are kin of like jelly after all those pushups. Great stuff.
I have to say that straight up I had a can of coffee while walking to work. I think I'm going to restrict myself to one a day, and only when I'm working. So that's three or four cans a week, instead of three or four cans a day. A considerable drop. I didn't have any KitKats after lunch today, a radical departure from the norm, but I did have a cup of Ecco, an "instant cereal beverage naturally free of caffiene". It was okay.
Last night Nori cancelled again because he was still in a meeting in Nagoya, so I thought I'd do the same thing as last week and go to the same bar and see if the people I met there last week were there again this week. But when I got there, it was closed! How can a place be open one Wednesday night and not the next? Where's the consistency? So I had to go to a net cafe and kill an hour rather than go home and have my deception exposed. A bit of a bummer.
Today a co-worker gave me a Japanese rhinoceros beetle larva for Will. His daughter's beetle had babies, so they're giving them away. These things are huge in Japan, every young boy owns one and fights them with his friend's beetles, and they look pretty cool. I don't know how Will will go with it, because it looks like a big witchety grub at the moment and will for a while yet, until next summer. We'll see how we go.
Here's my Pre-stage 2 photo. I look pretty lean, and tired (I just woke up), and I don't know where all the weight is. I hope that even in only one month, the results will be clear.

R2 Day 28 - Rest

There's no way I'll be able to fit a workout in today. Too busy. What I'll do, seeing as though I owe a Yoga and an ARX, is do Yoga X on Sunday instead of the Fountain Of Youth Yoga I usually do, and forget about the ARX. There's plenty of ab exercises in Yoga X anyway. It begins again tomorrow, and I am ready to go. BTW I was apparently a little premature with the 365 Tomorrows story. Still not up yet. Also, I saw Zombieland last night. Really funny movie, maybe my pick of '09 with District 9.

R2 Day 27 - Yoga, ARX

Yoga and Ab Ripper X. No dramas. I'm starting phase 2 on Thursday, and I've decided to really commit to getting fit and strong, and that means raising the intensity of my workouts and not eating any more chips and chocolate, and not drinking any more coffee. Looking at myself in the mirror, I guess I look like an off-season AFL footballer at the moment. The muscle is there, but so is the fat. As I've said before, I'm not worried about my weight, but last night when I was doing Core Synergistcs I remembered how hard it was the first time I did it back in May, and how far I have come since then. Then I thought, wouldn't it be a shame if I was ever went back to that level of fitness after all this hard work, and if I did, I wondered if would I ever be able to do it all again. I don't know. The amount of work I did in the Summer was ridiculous. It was great, too, but every day I would be drenched in sweat and just wasted. But then I looked at it the other way. I've come this far, but I have never really committed to it except for the hour or so I do the workouts every day. I know I've said this heaps of times, but I've used working out as a justification to eat and drink (well, not drink, I rarely drink alcohol now, not here anyway, but certainly eat) pretty much the way I always have. I don't have the big heavy meals I used to, but I still have the chips, the chocolate, the cake, the ice-cream, the coffees, all that shit. Wouldn't it be a shame to come this far and not fully commit (for at least two months, anyway) and see where it takes me? I would love to have a photo of me aged 35 and just ripped and in the best shape of my life that I can look at in the years to come, and my boys can look at when they get older, and just think "Fucking hell, 35?" Know what I mean? When I hear people say that you can work out all you want, but diet is the most important thing, I think, nah, that can't be true. But it must be, because I'm not losing any weight. I think I've done the work to put on muscle, now I'd like to work on losing a couple of kilos just to see how I would look and feel. I think I'll go to the sports room here at work now and weigh myself. There's no work to do and it's really boring... Holy shit! 83.3 kgs! That means since I finished the first round of P90X I've put on almost 2 kgs! Probably the trip to Australia that did it. Ok. I won't weight myself again until after the last workout of the Recovery week after Phase 2 which will be on the 2nd of December, and my goal weight will be 80 kgs. That's pretty realistic, and I would fully expect to be in the 70's somewhere. Even if I do get down to 80, that's still five kgs heavier than when I started P90 back in September last year. I'll take a photo on Thursday before the workout, and a photo after the workout on the 2nd of December.
You know, I've been thinking about this for a couple of days now, like "On Thursday I'll really put my head down and work hard for two months and go after the results... which means I'd better buy a pack of chips tonight because I won't have the chance to do so in a couple of days." That's how I thought when I was a smoker, only now I'm applying it to chips. *sigh* Have your precious chips on the night of the 2nd of December, asshole. An early Christmas present.
So that's the challenge. Question is; do I have the minerals? Do I have the sack to do this? The little voice that is getting me to eat the chips and chocolate and that is sabotaging my efforts would say, gee, I dunno, mate. Sounds pretty tough. But the last year has been all about proving that little voice wrong when it says I can't do something because it's hard, or because it takes too long. I've been giving that little voice too much room to move lately. Too much space. I know I can never fully destroy the little voice. But I can tame it, and I can ignore it.
Only one thing left to say: BRING IT!

R2 Day 26 - Core Synergistics

I think Core Synergistics is the hardest workout in the P90X system. The middle 20 minutes is just torture. I don't like how Tony messes around with the Superman/Banana boat exercise either, changing them around so quickly. I ignore him during this exercise. That one minute iso run just kills me. I'm looking forward to getting back into the weights on Thursday. I've got two Yogas and two Ab Ripper Xs before then, one scheduled and one that I owe from last Thursday, so I should be raring to go. I want to make Phase 2 the most intense phase I have ever done. I want to increase the numbers, lose some weight, and get really lean.
So my first two weeks of scheduled Japanese study have gone reasonably well. I passed my bi-weekly test with flying colours. I might be a chance, you know. Regardless, December '10 will be my goal for reaching Level 1. Or actually, N1, which it will be called from next year. They are changing the system. In fact, I have been invited to sit a practice test two weeks before the real test which they are holding to establish the new levels and just generally see how the new system goes. Should be good practice.

R2 Day 25 - X Stretch

I had X Stretch today, which was awesome. The quickest hour of my life maybe. I really needed it, because I've been feeling really tight around the neck and shoulders.
It has been raining all day. I took Will to the pool this morning, which he loves. He gets his floaties on and just floats around. He can't swim yet, but it looks like his dog paddle is coming along okay. He started talking to a couple of little girls, and their father chatted with us too, and talking to Will he said "Where are your goggles? Get daddy to buy you some goggles." I had to laugh, because this is the second time someone's mentioned that we don't wear goggles.
The way these people get others to conform, it's kind of frightening. I hate wearing goggles. I'm not swimming, I'm just messing around in the water. Besides, they never fit right, and they leave rings around your eyes and you look like a freak for the rest of the day. You and your goggle buddies can kiss my ass. I'm not part of your system.