Safe As Milk

This is 2 or 3 years now that I’ve gotten back into watching a decent number of baseball games. I’m still really enjoying it, though I wish the Mets had been better. The obvious Big Story of the 2019 season will be Big Meat Pete Alonso setting the rookie HR record with 53(!). Here is a quick recap of that:

Jacob deGrom lived up to the hype and big contract with another Cy Young-caliber season. I really do enjoy watching him pitch. In fact, he’s the only Met I enjoy watching pitch. The other starters always seem to have a bad inning or two every game and the bullpen, with the exception of Seth Lugo, was extra-extra bad this season. Historically bad. Ugh.

My dad and I had had another running text conversation about the Mets again this season. There are lots of high-five-emojis after good wins a plenty of “I can’t believe I stayed up to watch this” notes after bullpen meltdowns.

I’m looking forward to the 2020 season. I think my dad and I will try to get up there for some games. Maybe even a couple over a weekend home stand. It’ll be fun.

Top of the table with plenty of positive momentum.

I’m in with the Believers.

I also enjoy the music from Titanic as an overlay.

This NYT profile on Gary, Keith, and Ron is a fun read on the Mets’ television broadcast team. The Mets’ win/loss record has been bad but I like watching baseball and these guys have helped soften the blow(s).

It figures that they tank it hard in the season I spring for the MLB package to watch them. And, like it says in the article, the Mets have been just good enough down the stretch that I’ll sign up again for next season.

European soccer has a lot of tournaments, but the big one is the Champions League. Liverpool played in the final last year and it was very exciting. The new Champions League season started this week and this stoppage-time goal from Bobby Firminho was a tremendous capper to a great match.

Here’s a 90%-of-contest-weight axle clean and press. That 2-step move to get the axle to my shoulders is called a continental clean. It’s uncomfortable. The contest event is a 225 lb. axle that I have to press for the maximum number of reps in a minute. I’m not the strongest presser so I’m shooting for 3 reps on contest day. I’m a lot better than I was thanks to all of the Olympic lifting I’ve done in the last year. I’ll get another session of heavy work before the contest.

So much of strongman looks like brute strength (and it def. helps to be strong) but damn if there isn’t a ton of technique involved.

Working on my continental clean. 203 lbs. is about 90% of contest weight with two weeks left to train. I’ll get there.

A post shared by Michael Flynn (@falfa) on Aug 21, 2018 at 7:18pm PDT

Based on this video, I need to work on a couple of things:

I’ve got a strongman contest coming up on Spetember 8th and I’ve reached the part of the story where we get into training the specific events. The first bit of the video is with theDeadsled, a new-ish implement that plays the role of the trap bar in this contest. We have to rep as many lifts at 440 lbs. as we can in one minute. I’ll be very happy with 5 reps. That quick double was at 430 lbs. I’ll get heavier as we get closer to contest day. You can see that my left hand grip broke down right at the start of the video. I had to take an extra couple of seconds to reset and get my hand a little further under the handle.

The second half of the video is a 50-foot carry of a keg followed by a 50-foot, hand-under-hand pull of a loaded sled. The keg and the sled were both just 160 lbs. On contest day, the keg to carry will be 200 lbs. I’m training light to get re-acclimated with the movement. The rope pull is to teach the hand-under-hand movement which will get used in the truck pull event at the contest. Here’s a video to show what we’re looking for. While most of the power is coming from your legs, you can get a little extra help from the pulling the rope. The underhand pulling keeps the movement efficient and in the correct direction. I’m especially excited about truck pull practice on 9/1. Gonna be awesome.