The Challenges of Quarantine

Firstly, thank you to @anomadsoul for creating this challenge and @blocktrades & @ocdb for curating and @c0ff33a for creatively supporting this little initiative.

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I had intended to submit an application for the American Ninja Warrior television show last year, but managed to acquire a super weird elbow injury that took most of last year to get properly diagnosed. Late last year I finally found out it was an overuse injury called Climber's Elbow and it was caused by all the training I had been doing.

It's one of those injuries that doesn't resolve itself with rest... you have to do a series of time-consuming exercises to stretch and strengthen the tendons.

I've been spending the first few months of this year going through the rehabilitation protocols... and it was going well, until 6 or 8 weeks ago when my pandemic-anxiety hit in full force. I live in the but all our family is still in Australia. I work with a huge number of fly-in and fly-out consultants who come in from both interstate and international locations. I work with a lot of people in China who let us know about the pandemic back in mid-January, and so I've pretty much be super nervous ever since.

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Ninja Warrior competitions are hard... I mean, obviously, by design... but also everyone keeps getting better and better, so then the competitions get harder and harder... so if you fall behind it feels impossible to ever catch back up...

... but here I am, in a quarantine world, where I have access to my own obstacles and plenty of space to run, and a huge amount of my competition does not.

My pandemic anxiety has shifted to hardcore Rocky-montage training and I feel a lot better overall. I'm still extremely worried about my family, and my employment, but there's not a lot I can do about that, but I can train the house down.

I have to be careful, because my Climber's Elbow is still very much there... so I have to continue the rehab, the careful training but I should end up much stronger overall. Looking at the positives, without a daily commute and all the messing about between training clothes and work clothes, I have myself an absolutely excellent opportunity to really set myself up well to compete next year.

With a huge amount of work, I can be this guy:

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instead of this guy:

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Same athleticism, different application.

I can't control whether I am on the TV show or not, but I can control submitting an application and how good that video application is.

I don't know how long my state will mandate quarantine, but I can set up daily routines and goals in the meantime.

My goals

I've got a set up in my shed that I can't currently use. As soon as I jump on, I fall straight off. My grip strength is virtually non-existent and any attempts to swing or grip onto any of this causes pain in my elbow and or headaches.

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My goal is to come out of quarantine doing this entire upper body course.

Breaking it on down

By the end of April, I'm aiming to be able to traverse this course but without using the grips (the dangling things). Essentially it's like treating the course as monkey bars (which sounds easier than it is).

By the end of May, I'm aiming to be strong enough to get through at least 3 of the 5 different grip types.

By the end of June, I'm aiming to be able to start with two laches and then finish the 5 grip obstacles. (Laches are leaping from bar to bar using only your hands).

The weekly process

I believe the path to ninja shed course domination is:

• Every night, spending an hour on stretching and rehab for Climber's Elbow and my neck issues
• 3 times a week do this strength building routine:
  - 3 sets of 6 push ups
  - 3 sets of 6 tricep dips
  - 3 sets of 6 pull ups
• Every night swinging or hanging on this course to work on my grip strength and conditioning

I want to come out of quarantine being able to train at a ninja gym or parkour gym (if they still exist after this economic recession/depression) and for that I'll need some hardy grip strength.

I also intend to run at least 50km per month all the way until December... and I'll be keeping track of this using the @exhaust blockchain app. Using the @exhaust posts I'm intending to record my progress with this little ninja shed mission.

This is the last time I successfully ran a ninja course... it was two and a half years ago:

I'm excited to use #quarantinelife to get back to this level of fitness and strength.

Thanks so much for reading!

Catch me on Twitter.