B.A.M.F Athletics

This one’s coming at you from the road.*

I say road. I mean chair. By chair I mean uncomfortable bastard row of seats in Gatwick airport, tapping away on the excellent WordPress App for iPhone. What am I doing here? I’m waiting until tomorrow morning before they let me check in for my flight to Copenhagen for the upcoming CrossFit Football certification at the weekend. I’m honoured to say I’ll be coaching at it, along with John Welbourn. Who’d have thunk it.

So, to the matter in hand – the B.A.M.F 30. Something that started with an impromptu community request from Gary and ended quietly and without much furore. That’s what happens when everyone tools up for something and realises they have jobs and lives and unexpected obligations and duties that keep them from sitting in a forum talking shite with other shite-talkers. This is a Good Thing. Forum dwellers need to be executed. Go and do
Something.

From the looks of it, we embarked on this adventure together and supported eachother as we took fire in the landing craft. Once we hit the beach, we were on our own, and in the hail of caffeine bullets and gluten bombs we survived. Easily. What a bunch of B.A.M.Fs.

Time (and comments and tweets) will tell if we found benefit in the mission itself, but I can certainly tell you how things went for me.

My circumstances are such that my main complaints come from a recurring skin issue that I found impossible to nail down. Skin at the elbows and around the eyes getting inflamed, making one look like a self-conscious (and unusually jacked) junkie. Couple that with a financial situation that makes life shockingly tight. Throw in my paranoia about how weak I am, and the fact I am going to be at a CrossFit Football cert coaching a bunch of power athletes, and you have a fairly heady mix of goals / self-assigned responsibilities.

I was using my Power Athlete Caveat, so I could attempt to add 10kg to my bench press before Saturday. Granted my new tattoo will preclude me from proving my success at the cert. You can’t really do this by skimping on food, so essentially this was a massgain experiment. The Power Athlete Caveat allowed dairy (goat’s milk) – as whole and as raw as possible, a-la Welbourn. My aim was to consume as much food as I could afford, the mainstay of which was ruminants and sweet potato, eggs and salmon, while adhering to the avoidance of B.A.M.F 30 ‘avoids’ like fruit and n-6 heavy shite like bacon and nuts.

Financially, it was difficult. Why? Quantity. Right now, two meals a day is my stretch, but I had to up that to three, which damn near buried me early on. Only luck and guile allowed me to make it to the end of the month. The day before payday I literally had £0.00 in my account. GOOD WORK. Paleo is cheaper than regular eating if you know how to play it. Though workmates may accuse one of eating ingredients rather than food.

Did it the B.A.M.F 30 Power Athlete Caveat work? I’l say. A week ago I managed 5 reps of 95% of my 1RM making my theoretical 1 Rep Max 12kg greater than previous. Epic. I got heavier, a little fatter (to be expected), put 5kg on my squat 1RM and equalled my deadlift 1RM, having not deadlifted SINCE JANUARY.

What did I learn about my skin condition? Well, I am allergic to dairy for sure. Post workout, it doesn’t flare up as badly, but if I have dairy at any time other than directly after a workout I am in trouble. I have henceforth resigned myself to never going back to dairy – unless in the future I can find a source of raw milk and experiment with it. Do I care? Not really. It makes it easier to be a nutritional convention miscreant when you can point at an allergy. Mark you, once you cut something you’re allergic to from your diet, if it creeps back in, may the Paleo Hobo Gods of Lifting Heavy Shit protect you, because your immune system won’t. I have promised I’ll someday book time off work and eat a huge pizza, just once, to document the effects of what it does to a clean eating, strong and healthy individual. It (and I) will not be pretty.

I look forward to hearing from those of you that stayed the course how you feel, what you noticed and what you think. I am pretty sure some have exiled the ridiculous hold caffeine held over them.

So what’s next for you? Reintroduce? Reject? Something else?

After this weekend I have another definite mission. I’m going to try a clean massgain, using a Paleo-ified version of the inimitable Dan John’s Mass Made Simple protocol, followed by a strength overhead / power program. FUN TIMES.

I can’t wait for tomorrow, and all the days after that. I hope you all feel the same way. You’ve proved you can survive. Now prove you can thrive.

Stay Badassed.

*this resulting in a lack of link-love and my usual obsession with unnecessary italics and emboldened text. Also, I am authorising typos. Okay?