No entry for yesterday because I hit the ground running and didn’t stop until around 10p. I crashed in Chinatown and had an awful sleep, just 5 highly interrupted hours, and am now in the secret office thinking about what to do.

I can survive the day, but my body is broken down from training and I didn’t recover enough (because of lack of sleep). My legs are sore and my eyelids heavy. I got used to a pattern of training hard and recovering well through rest and nutrition. When that gets screwed up, it can cascade. There’s a difference between getting only 5 hours of sleep, and getting only 5 hours of sleep after an evening of heavy and serious physical training. Your sleep requirements change dramatically when your body needs to heal. If you body isn’t healed, your brain will adjust to try to encourage healing, which means feeling not just tired, but actually sleepy, until you recover.

I could sneak a nap in here, though that’ll be hard. I’m supposed to train at 1p. Will I go through with it?

Yes.

No compromising what needs to be done.

Between February 1st and now, I have only had one night in which I drank alcohol. It was at the Gojira/Devin Townsend show, and the only reason I drank was because the person I was with, a highly respected metal guitarist, started ordering for me. I’ve been out with him twice since and explained I wasn’t drinking because I was training and it was respected immediately, no problems. Going alcohol free has helped me achieve great strength gains, and I’ve also been feeling more balanced and zeroed-in overall. I have a couple friends who find this lifestyle harder to accept, and they pressure me. But I’ve just stopped hanging out with them. I have better things to do. For me, I don’t care if you drink or smoke pot or make questionable decisions all the time. I can still like you and hang out with you and have a good time. Just don’t expect me to be like you. If you need to be around people who reinforce your esteem by doing as you do, reflecting your own behaviors back at you, then it might be important to figure out what the implications of that are for yourself.

It’s hard for me to watch people tightening the bindings that so often are the cause their dissatisfactions, especially when they confuse “distraction” and “entertainment” with happiness and well-being. You have to build your awareness of what’s really happening with you and to you, and break out of that shit.

Onwards into the Day of Thor.