10News - 80-year-old becomes oldest man to reach top of Mt Everest - 10News.com - US/World News

10News - 80-year-old becomes oldest man to reach top of Mt Everest - 10News.com - US/World News.      You are too old? Really? Someone told you that? That person is HELL wrong.

A word about food...

This always happens when I have not written for a long time.  I write one post, and then the flood gates open.

The short version of this post is: Listen to your mother and eat your vegetables.

I have demanded a heap of work from my body lately, and I have stayed (knock wood) healthy, with the exception of a couple of little hiccups (a cold and a minor bout of tendonitis in my feet).  I am of the post-40 crew, which according to some, means I am on the down turn.  A couple of years ago I thought, well, the hell with that!  And I started down this path... I was doubly inspired last year during the olympic trials watching Janet Evans and Dara Torres, two doyennes of the swimming world, out there scrapping it with women half their age.  Neither of them made the olympics, but when you examine their times in real world terms (not the millionth of a second terms), they rocked at those olympic trials.

So here are my menu items:

water water water water water water

Breakfast Choices:
Brown Rice with eggs, wilted greens, and Sriacha
Oatmeal with butter or almond butter, honey and cinnamon (yes, sometimes butter)
Smoothie made from Perfect Foods green formula, with almond butter and one banana

Lunch/Dinner Choices:
Any big salad with some kind of protein (small fist size) and rice (small fist size)
Greens greens greens!!!! Kale and spinach.
Tabouli salad with protein
These greens are very high in calcium

Recovery:
This is controversial, but either organic chocolate milk or chocolate protein shake and a small bag of cashews.  I was totally off dairy for a long time, but I was concerned about my calcium intake.  I started drinking chocolate milk only after an intense workout.  It's extremely satisfying and keeps me going for a solid four hours.  I don't experience a sudden energy drop and I don't get hungry.  I also love a small of cashews for recovery.  Yes, the evil nut, loaded with fat.  Salted too.  I want to stress the chocolate milk/cashew combo is only after speedwork at the track, or an intense endurance workout.

Snacks:
A handful of mixed nuts
Plain popcorn
1/2 of a Clif Builder's Bar (usually while at work)
Banana
Apple

I tried strict Paleo for a bit, but the intense workouts left me lethargic.  I added carbohydrates for my morning meal and light carbs during the day.

Dag





 

Training...

Hello.  I have not written for a long time.

Reason being, I have not trained Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for what I consider a long time, roughly, 6 months-ish.

I have been preparing for the swat tryouts again, since I did not make the grade last year.  I have cut everything that is not related to the following: sprinting 440M, push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups, and an obstacle course.  I miss BJJ terribly, but I could simply not risk injury.  As you all know, when training BJJ with any modicum of frequency, you always carry a twinge or twang somewhere in your body.  Some muscle that fusses for a few days, a stiff joint.  Jammed fingers.

I also train in Intrepid Arnis Eskrima, and was supposed to compete in a sparring competition in April.  Along with my BJJ sabbatical, I had to tell my Eskrima Guru that the risk of a broken finger was too great, and I would have to bow out from sparring.  I felt so bad telling him this, as I am one of four of his students in his small school, and the only woman.

These were all sound decisions however, as I have been completely focused on the task at hand, which is becoming faster and stronger.  It is taking my entire being.  Real improvement in strength and speed takes time and diligence and patience and a bloody stubborn attitude.  These two animals do not like to work together.  You improve one, then you improve the other, then you go back and improve the other, and so on...It's not like, "oh hey! I can drag the 200 pound dummy farther today! And I can run faster too!"  Quite the opposite.  It's a constant building of a symbiotic relationship between them.

I have always been a pretty strong person, but the obstacle course demands, unadulterated, NC-17, strength. It demands that you essentially hurl yourself over hill and dale, drag yourself on the ground, over walls, through windows....your get the picture.  At the last practice, I realized this o-course was like a 4 minute round of speed deadlifting of my own body weight.

And then there is speed.  Lord oh lord, do I ever have to be diligent with speed.  I have spent so. many. hours. at. the track.  Documenting documenting documenting.  The track has been a source of joy on some days, when I set a new PR; and a source of misery, doubt, and frustration, when my times have been out the window.

In the running department, I was blessed with the ability to go as far and long as I want, but not very fast.  I have aways had to claw my way through the clock to improve my speed.  And I have done it to, am still doing it.  If I make the academy, I'll have to go from being a 9-9:30 minute miler, to a 7:30 minute miler.  This is a tall order, and I decided, well, then I will become that person.  I will be a woman who can run a 7:30 pace and do it well.

My tryout is on June 7.  Until then, the work and focus continues.     

Dag

Dear Keith Owen-

In answer to your question:

Yes.


Sincerely,

Dagney Taggert

Black and White. Warning: Not a warm post.

I have trouble with gray area sometimes.  A lot of the time.  My job has taught me about gray area, but many incidents are, at the end of the day, black and white.

In short, people in positions of deep trust, whether teacher-student, colleague-colleague, supervisor-employee, name your own relationship dynamic; people who violate that trust in a gross, terribly damaging manner, in a physically and mentally damaging manner, ....they need to rot in hell.  

Hello Latvia and Israel

Warning, this post has nothing to do with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Eskrima, training, or anything  else.  THOUGH it has everything to do with blatant narcissism. 

Okay, not gonna lie, I was shamelessly glancing at my stats the other day and I noticed Israel and Latvia popped up on my "Audience" list in fairly decent numbers.  I googled Latvia and Israel BJJ, and found a couple of FB pages for BJJ in those countries and "Liked" them.  Well, today, my "Audience" hits from Latvia were more than the United States. 

So, hello Latvian Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioners!  Thanks for reading!

Dag

PS- I am currently doing research for a post on the power of the big toe in our overall performance.  This is not a joke.  Hopefully I will get it posted this weekend.

Hello again...

Well, I guess three, okay four months is long enough to keep thinking, "I should update my blog..."   The reason for the absence?  The combination of busy schedule, a tad bit of laziness, a new work schedule.  The usual suspects.

A quick update:  I am on a new squad!  (For those not in the know, I am a police officer in San Diego).  My new gig is on the Gaslamp Quarter Bike Team.  We work weekend nights in the thick of all the partying and pandemonium the Gaslamp Quarter begats, which makes for my shift being 10 hours of running comedy.  I was interested in the team months ago, and the sergeant approached about joining them, but I turned it down because swat tryouts were two months away (at the time) and I did not want to mess with my workout schedule.  

I knew joining the bike team would require new uniforms (expensive), attendance of a bike class (time), and the usual breaking in period with a new team.  This time however, I thought, I have more time to deal with a squad change.  My new squad mates are fantastic.  Specialized teams have the potential to be fraught with peril and misery due to egos and snarky attitudes, but this crew is (happily!) smooth sailing.  

I have been training BJJ about once a week, which is so lame!  I need to get back to at least twice a week.  I regret missing the Master/Senior Pans,  but during what would have been the meat of training, I was steeped in work priorities and I did not want to go in half trained.  I had designs on the Mundial No-Gi, but again, I have not trained BJJ as much as I would like (for a competition prep anyway), and I don't want to represent my school as a half-trained athlete.

Though speaking of training,  it's going well!  I started training with Karoline Koehler again (more on that later) to prepare for swat tryouts next year, and all the heavy duty anaerobic track work is translating to more freedom and more speed on the mat.  I have always had to make a conscious effort to keep my speed up to speed, and now it seems, the extra cardio work has pushed me to the next level.  

A fellow BJJ classmate once told me that when we start training, we are blind.  (I think I may have written about this before). The moves are new and unfamiliar, and the missed opportunities are frequent as we simply do not see them.  Over time, the path is revealed.  Our vision sharpens.  The missed opportunities become moments we seize with ferocity and joy.  A newly achieved submission becomes a new ray light for a fleeting moment, like a flickering florescent as we set to work polishing the move over hours and hours and hours.

Point being,  and I know this sounds like a simpleton way to describe it, but I am having so much fun in class.  Maybe it's the busy schedule and having to really to carve out training time, maybe it's the improved cardio shape, or maybe I am just having one of those great and rare "improvement" moments.    The rays of light have been knocking me upside the head and I leave class feeling invigorated and excited.  The moves are becoming smoother, dare I say easier sometimes.  

I have two female training partners that provide a consistent level of challenges.  Rachael is a fellow brown belt, and is like a hummingbird.  Fabio has said that pound for pound, she is one of the strongest people in our school.  Rachael's petite size, razor sharp technique, and Tasmanian Devil speed force me to keep my positions clean.  And then there is mega-tall, mega-limbed blue belt Jessica.  I am dreading the day she figures out and starts handing out triangles like free ice cream.  And spider guard.  And De La Riva.  Jessica is on the path to be a wrecking machine.

And regarding Karoline Koehler.  I don't think I ever wrote about her, and she deserves a mention here.   Back in....end of March or April-ish, I think, I was at the track working on my 440, which was devastatingly slow.  Up to that point, I noticed that on my track days, a young lady was being coached in sprinting technique by a tall blond woman.  I was so frustrated with my 440 time, and I thought, you know I should go over there and introduce myself to that coach and ask how much she charges for a session.  

So I did.

I waited until her training session was finished, and I marched up to her and said, "Hello, are you a track coach?"  She replied, "Yes, but I am also an athlete too."  Her session training rate was (unexpectedly!) well within my budget so I told her my whole story, that I was a police officer training for swat tryouts and in need of some help on speed for the 440m.   I told her where I was, which was 1:45 and 1:50, and that I needed to get under 85 seconds.  Much to my surprise, she casually said, "Oh yeah, I think we could do that."  Huh?  I thought, no way.  Then she delivered the biggest shocker,  "I can meet with you one time this week, and then we will have to correspond by e-mail because on Wednesday I am flying home to prepare for the Olympic Trials."  

Oh yeah, I wrote that.  The Olympic Trials.  For Team Germany.  All through the swat preparation, I felt like I was being led by these breadcrumbs...each time I had a conversation with a colleague about swat, it inevitably led to some new addition to my training that drove my progress forward.  Well, meeting Karoline was like having a loaf of bread shoved down my throat.  A world class athlete.  I had just met and established the roots of  a working relationship with a world class athlete.  

I met with Karoline once.  She ran me through an endurance workout, and a 200m time trial.  She also showed me a series of track drills that became the cornerstone of ALL of my workouts.  This woman was a surgeon, and immediately went to work on my form.   That day I learned the comfy, heel-strike, upright posture running form I used was a detriment to sprinting and it thus became a thing of the past.  I learned how to run on my toes.  I learned how to lean forward.  I learned how to swing my arms and use arm movement to translate into leg movement.  

Long story short, Karoline got me there.  We corresponded via e-mail and I did her work-outs with extremely hard line religious conviction and she got me there.  Well, I got me there too, but she gave me the seeds.  Side note: Karoline did not make the Olympic Team due to a groin injury (she competes in Long Jump, and the 200m)...;(.   She is currently preparing for the World Championships next year.

Karoline is back in town and I am working with her again.  My workouts with Karoline are nothing short of demanding.  The other day she put me through an endurance workout and half way in I thought, holy mackerel I am going to vomit!  I didn't, thank goodness.  I really had to do a little digging around in the old soul box to finish.  This was a wonderful feeling, because I knew that improvement had occurred within that thin space of misery.  I embraced it. I finished strong.

All in all, I am in a good place right now.  Work is fun.  My husband is amazing.  My family is healthy.  

Train well!

Glad to be here again, 

Dag