The workout streak is still on fire and I was even able to squeeze a 4 round in. This weeks format was exercise Monday, Tuesday rest Wednesday and work out again Thursday, Friday.
MDW is for sure in my top holidays of the year. I have a lot of good quality memories around this powerful Monday and long weekend. Traditionally my family has grilled on Sundays. Though I didn’t get to spend this Sunday with my family I was able to spend it with some close friends and their 3-month-old baby. To celebrate We picked put some Prime Ribeyes from Marianos. Quick side note Marianos has some great meat if you have one near and are into grilling they are a must to check out.
My body definitely feels the 4 workouts I completed this week, but I was able to do it and my body did not fall apart lol. Hopefully, I will be able to keep this up and build some stamina and get my cardio back up the level of my younger years. I can say that all this Olympic lifting has helped my CNS fatigue I encounter playing 18 holes of golf. If I can stay sharper deeper into the round maybe I will avoid those dreaded blow out holes that usually happen around the 11th or 14th hole.
On the fitness front, I’m happy to report that I logged 3 workouts this week and would have had a fourth if it wasn’t so nice out on Friday. It was so nice that my brother texted me right after lunchtime to see if I wanted to golf. That was very fast yes and we booked a tee time at my “home” course Harborside International. It was low 70s all day and sunny all day so we were eager to get out and hit some balls.
The traffic was dreadful and made us late for our 2:50 tee time. Luckily the course was pretty open so we were able to jump on the 3:40 tee time which was putting us pretty close to finishing right at sunset so we had to be on our horses to get all 18 holes in before the sunset.
I’m beginning to hit my driver a little bit better, but my drives are not at the level as my old driver. As it turns out I was actually planning to go get some serous swings in at the driving range before I got the ca to play 18. So at least i’m trying to get some practice in lol.
I will need to start getting some drills in for my golf swing while I’m at home watching tv. I like to do them on the commercial breaks to cater to my short attention span.
The weather does seem to be turning but this rain will not quit especially in e the weekends. Whatever i’ll just keep trying to get on the course when my schedule allows it.
Last week there was a solid Saturday Afternoon that was low 50s and sunny. Was able to snatch a 2:10 tee time at Cantigny Played a solid round with a couple of buddies and one of their friends for an almost chilly kick off round of the season.
I shot under 100 for and hit that ball pretty well off tee. As usual, my short game got the better of me especially 50 yards and under. I can’t wait to focus on that in practice this year. It should shave at least 6 strokes off my game easy.
Other big news was that for the first time out of the hotel, I am sleeping in a King size bed. What a game changer to have all that room. I had been having trouble falling asleep once in bed for a while now. I tried a lot of things like blue light glasses and not looking at my phone after 9:00 PM. Since I started sleeping on it I’ve fallen asleep super fast and stayed asleep which is always a good thing.
Looking forward to next week I’m going to keep logging my food and hit the gym 3 times this week. Working on portion control might be easier than a stricter diet.
This was my second year for this annual ski trip with a large group of friends from college. I flew into Salt Lake City on Monday and came back to Chicago on early evening Saturday night. It was an action packed trip and was sad to have to come home but was very glad to get home back to my shower and my bed.
Trip Break Down:
Monday was a travel day that turned into quite a ride, to say the least. I’ve traveled quite a bit for work in my career so I have my timeline just right of how to get to the airport. An easy estimate would be over 550 flights, with most of those originating out of O’Hare airport. What I’ve never encountered on my way to the airport was a Level 2 Hazmat situation that locked me in the Loop of Chicago for over 20 minutes. I was stuck in my Uber and was not allowed to leave due the traffic situations and the emergency vehicles blocking the intersections. I was for real stuck in my Uber with now way out except to ride it out.
After what seems like for ever I was able to exit the Uber and make my way down to the Blue line all the way to O’Hare. I made it there with 20 minutes before boarding but, it was to late to check my bag 🙁 I conceded and check my bag for the next in 4 hours. I was on standby with 14 open seats I was pretty confident that I would make the next flight to SLC. I slipped through security with no problem(Thanks TSA Pre-check) and began to walk down the gate to go grab some breakfast since i had all this time to kill.
That’s when I saw my original flight start to board. This was a sad sight and I really debated just jumping on this flight and having one of my buddies grab my bag that was on of the later flights.
In a quick bout of depression, I came up with a great idea! The American Airlines Lounge was a clutch idea. For not a small fee ($59) you have an open bar, what I continental plus breakfast and lunch and all the brownies and cookies you can eat. Trust me the brownies are awesome and I probably have put down a whole tray of them on many a layover. #cuethestomachache
Miller Lite in the American Club at O’Hare Airport
After more than a few beers and 3 or 4 handfuls of brownies, it was time for me to move to the gate to board. Flight time was a lot longer than expected, we were in the air for over 3.5 hours and my butt fell asleep hard. With the delay of getting into SLC, I had to find my own ride to my friend’s house who thankfully loved a quick Uber ride from the airport. With a fast pit stop, we packed our gear up in the truck and headed to the mountains for what was sure to be a wild week.
This trip in an annual event with a mixed group of friends from college and some girlfriends. Our housing was two conjoined condos that were mirrored and most importantly had 2 separate hot tubs to help relax those muscles after the slopes along with a bunch of beer.
Our condos were a 6 min bus ride (free) from the base of Park City which is a huge mountain that has something like 370 runs. The two days that we skied here I was only able to hit about 27 of them. I will need to come back and get a few more days here to really have a complete scope the mountain, but I would definitely recommend it.
We split the 2 days a Park City with active rest day of Snowmobiling at Thousand Peaks. This was insane experience, I highly recommend the three hour tour with a private group if you have enough people with you. I took the chance to rent the upgraded to the faster snowmobile. The 300cc sled was blazing fast and well worth the price, it had no problem charging up the hills/mountains.
Snowmobiled to to the top of the world!
The $20 dollars for insurance was an easy purchase, gave the confidence to be able go full throttle and get a little reckless on the sled. Turns out it’s a lot easier to roll one these things than you think especially when your 250 feet up a mountain and your trying to turn back down hill.
Skiing on Thursday got intense, a small group of us got together and skied our asses off for the whole day. At the end of the day, my slopes app totaled just over 18,500 feet over 16 runs. The legs were burning on the way home. I ran into some trouble after trying to slide down a double black diamond run. I was feeling pretty confident after hitting a bunch of black diamonds threw out the day. The giant moguls on almost vertical terrain way above my skill level. I had to bail on the run 1/2 way through, it just got too hard trying to surge the moguls so I took a cat track to get back to one of the bigger “easier” runs. This where one bad decision turned into a very bad situation, turns out that cat track was not really a cat track. It was an access road to my dismay, so I had to cross country ski in 6 inches of snow for about 40 min to get back civilization.
When I finally popped out of the woods it was magically next a small chair lift. I was greeted by an awestruck lift operator that said: “Where did you just come from?” I responded with “don’t ask” as I plopped on the 2 seaters and caught my breath on the slow ride back to the top of the mountain.
Thursday night was a blast and it snowed quite a bit which got us even more pumped for Powder Mountain the next day. Powder Mountain is a 90 min drive from Park City so we ha dot gets up a little early to try and make the first chair. The ride to the mountain took what felt like forever as all we could see was the deep freshly fallen snow.
As a local Mountain, they only offer 1500 lift tickets a day and at the time of when we got there was still 1100 tickets left. Except for the first lift the runs were empty. IT really felt like our group was the only ones on the mountain. The legs were sore to start the last day of our ski trip, it was only a Green run but my legs felt zapped. It took the next two runs to get my legs firing on all cylinders.
The highlight of the day was the recent deposit of 8 inches of fresh powder the night before our day at Powder Mountain. That much pow pow with on a local mountain with only 500 people in attendance gave us fresh runs all day.
For something like $25 dollars, you can purchase a one way Cat Trek ride to some backcountry lines. Half of our group participated in the Cat lift, it was a packed ride up to the top of the mountain with all the other skiers and snowboarders not in our group.
It was a funny sight having the group stumble out of the back of the Cat with our ski boots on. After we all got kitted up the guide gave the three different subgroups of abilities instructions of what routes to take and what to avoid. I paid extra special attention of what to avoid because there were some real threats in the Back Country. Hidden drop-offs and cliffs trees and rock formations that were really hidden by all the recent snowfall.
I placed myself in the intermediate subgroup and followed them down the little trail to our suggested run. We stopped at the top of the run to plan our attack with began to get daunting. Trees, bushes, rocks/boulders, and a “don’t go left there is a cliff” I was as ready as I was ever gonna be. The snow was so deep it was really hard to turn, took a few slow turns to get the jump turn that everybody talks about. In about 25 seconds it was time to negotiate some trees mixed in with rock formation. As I made it past those obstacles with way to much speed I tired another jump turn which turned into a few head over heels tumbles. Falling in that deep of snow was surrea.l. You fall down but you just sink into the powder. Everything was cushioned so there’s was zero impact with any hard surface. The closest thing I could compare it do if you fell into a ball pit with nerf bullets that were coasted in baby hair lol.
that nice powder did make it hard to get back up on my skis though which I would say is the only downside of being a crap skier on a whole mountain full of powder. That is a great motivation to learn and develop my technique before my next trip.
All in all, this is one of my favorite weeks of the year. The group of people combined with the house the activities and the mountain make for a very exciting action packed week that takes me more than a week to recover from. So worth it though, Hoping to get in at least one smaller ski trips next year to take some lessons and see how wrong I’ve been skiing this whole time lol. Can’t wait till next season!
This Chicago Winter is really starting to drag on. Maybe I need to take a serious dose of Vitamin D to bring up my spirits and get a little pep back in my step.
I attempted to get my golf fix after watching what seemed to be 30 straight hours straight of golf this Saturday and Sunday with all the weather delays at the Gennnisss Open in California pushing rounds 2,3,4 into two days. This task proved to be harder than I thought it would for living in downtown Chicago. There is only 1 place in the loop to my knowledge and when I called at 2:20 pm they were booked full for the rest of the day. 🙁 This might be a special case since it is a 3-day weekend for President Day.
I will try and go to this location during this next week to see if this is something I would get into, it is kind of expensive at $50 an hour, but hey they do valet your car for 4 hours for only 10 dollars. I will break that experience down in a dedicated blog later this week.
On the fitness side of this week, I went out way to hard in a workout on Tuesday that had a wild amount of pull-ups that basically blew my lats out. This was a scary feeling as I can’t remember a time when my lats were ever sore. That put me out of commission for a few days, but I did go to a Yoga class to help stretch things out. Having not been sure if I had really hurt myself or just needed a few days to let them recuperate and took advantage of my buildings Gym and did some light lifting and some short cardio.
I should be finishing up my Current audiobook titled Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss and Thal Raz. This has been a fun listen so far, I wish I could dedicate more time to actively listen to this book. It really is worth a read/listen.
The bitter cold really put a damper on this week activities as I was basically couped up in the condo for most of the week. Negative 50 degrees was really cold, I tried to stand out on the porch for a couple minutes and it was brutal. That type of cold was very piercing. It seemed to almost delete the body heat I had. The experience was a little scary, to be honest. I hope I’m never stuck out in those temps in my life.
The actual Superbowl game was little lackluster but the food and beer made it great. There had to be at least 8 different cheese foods out on the table. The top dish was the Mac&Cheese, I took some leftover for lunch on Monday.
A fun one in the books for this past week, Thursday night was the 4th round of the Steak and Cigar night. Even though it was very cold walking to the steak house and the cigar lounge it was a lot of fun to be walking around downtown with the dudes.
Sundays dinner also turned into a steak night again with Costco butcher shop had some of the prettiest ribeyes I’d ever seen at Costco. The steaks were located in the Prime meat selection, this has been in an area I always take a peek at while Persuing the free sample in the weekends. In the past I had not pulled the trigger and bought them was that they come in a pack of 4, and I never was willing to freeze this type of quality meat. To be fair I also thought about just eating three steaks in one night to justify purchasing this top quality cut of meat, but that seemed excessive lol.
I also bought the bullet and signed up for an Audible account. I was hesitant to subscribe to this service due to the $14.95 a month. You do get a 1 book credit month and something like 30% of other books outside of the 1 credit a month. So far so good. Hoping to hit more than 15 books this year. The first book I’m Listening to is “The Outsiders” by William N. Thorndike
For two weeks in a row, Sunday has been the best. I took advantage of the extremely cold weather and was able to get a table and the breakfast spot called Batter and Berries. I had tried to get a table at his place 3 times before and was always met with a 90 minute wait times and would always have to find another place to have brunch.
Since the weather was cold I was able to get a table as soon as I walked in. This was a relief since I was really amped to try this place for quite some time and it did not disappoint! I eat the same breakfast on the weekdays so I like to get French Toast on the weekends for brunch and breakfast. I ordered the Super Flight of French Toast which had 5 flavors to sample. Those flavors included Strawberry, Blueberry, Lemon, Carmel, and my favorite Peach Cobbler. I will break down my whole experience in a restaurant review later this week.
Going to shoot for 4 workouts next week and stack it with more days of health-conscious meals.
Lost my parlay bet on the Colts Game-took the Under at 54 points and +175 for the Colts to win
Should have worked out more
This week was pretty low key, lots of couch time with some serious Netflix shows. Birdbox was actually not a bad flick, did not like the ending to be fair. The “monster” was a little annoying I wish they explained the origin story to give a bit more context to the story.
With all that Netflix time I missed 2 work out days. I wasn’t sore, hurt or injured so the only excuse was that I was too lazy. I will address this issue next week with at least 4 workouts and yoga on Wednesday to give me 5 total for the week.
As the weekdays were low key the weekend was off the charts. A bunch of my college friends met up for a Soprano’s tracksuit bar crawl that turned into a wild good time. 5 Bars in one-afternoon definitely put me under the table lol. The nice part was it was time to go home at 10 pm which gave me a full nights rest for Sunday at the Boat Show.
The Boat Show was a lot of walking but way worth it. Always fun to see the Million plus yachts, those things are huge! They were all bigger than my condo, maybe I should get rid of the condo and just live out on the Lake might be hard in the winter though. One day I guess, definitely some motivation fuel to get after in 2019 and make some real cash.
Practice yoga twice a month (only hot yoga will count towards work out count)
Attempt to meal prep with also some baking mixed in
Start to learn how to code in the Python language
30 Days consecutively sober
Most of my resolutions are fitness based- So 2019 will be my year of fitness! All of the above should be easily doable as long as I stay committed and don’t go off track for a month or two as I have done so in the past. To help keep myself on track I will include my progress to the weekly summary blogs. So there will be a ton of more blog content to post to this page generally on a weekly basis to review the week in totality.
I have never really put to much stock in New Year New me, but I am giving it the old college try and feeling very positive about the possible outcomes of my goals.
