So, I took the dive and bought a bike, an ’82 Honda GoldWing Interstate. The previous owner put two months of solid work into it and got it put back together and running at 85% or more. It still needs some work on the engine, though. It misfires occasionally and needs a good tune up.

I’m planning to start from the electrical side of things first. The spark plugs are new, but I plan to check the gaps anyways. I bought a spark gap tester to check if there’s enough juice coming to the plugs from the coil. After that, I’ll check the coil over. I bought a valve compression tester to check for leaky valves since the exhaust is smoky on one side of the engine. Valve clearences need to be checked. Finally, the carbs have been rebuilt, but have never been synchronized, so I’m borrowing a set of 4-cylinder carb-sync gauges from a coworker to do this. If I have any time left over, before my parent come to town on Wednesday, I’ll start getting more familiar with the bike by running through the scheduled maintenance procedures.

Wish me luck.

So… A lot has happened in the past four months. I injured myself in early May trying to do a max power clean and I took three months off while I recovered. Once I felt like my back was healed, I started up again, but was quickly side-railed again when my long-term relationship ended suddenly. This resulted in another month of no working out from a combination of depression and a lack of equipment.

I received my new barbell a week ago and I have been lifting, and plan on continuing to lift, very aggressively – About 25 lbs/week increases on my squat, 10 lbs on my deadlift, and 7 lbs on both my bench-press and shoulder-press. When things start to feel pretty hard, I’ll halve my increases.

After doing the same 1 rep max calculations as the last post, I find myself back where I was in April, with an estimated CrossFit Total of about 615. This is quite discouraging since I feel like I’ve wasted six months doing nothing. I need to be aggressive, but smart, in order to avoid injury since my default mode is to go all in.

I gained a lot of fat last time I did strength training. In the month of March, I gained 9 lbs, and my waist measurement went down. Sweet! In April, however, it all settled on my ass, thighs, and mid-line, gaining 10 lbs of mostly fat. After I injured myself, I cut back on calories, ate more low-carb, and tried to lean out a bit. I lost 15 lbs, but my body-fat calculator says that it was about half fat and half muscle. This isn’t what I wanted to see.

Now that I’m lifting again, I had to decide on a nutrition plan. I’m not going to be drinking a gallon of whole milk a day like I was before, which means my strength gains will probably not come as quickly. I’m trying to eat mostly paleo but adding IF. If I can lean out to about 8% body fat, then I may do a high-calorie (5000 cal/day) type of thing again.

So, that’s my summary. I’ll have to post something more personal, about starting my life over on my own sometime, but that type of writing is hard, and it makes me sad. I’m more comfortable with analytical analysis at this time, and I’m fine with that.

Cheers!