As research for Composite, I’ve been reading like a madman of late: physical therapy textbooks, Eastern Bloc Olympic weightlifting research, NFL team training manuals, behavioral medicine medical journal articles, etc.  And, from it all, I’ve been generating reams of notes, studded with an almost endless list of ideas to test out.  Because, as I’ve learned the hard way over the years in the fitness space, there’s often a gap between what works on paper, and what’s actually successful (or even implementable) in the real world.  No matter how much intellectual sense a training concept makes, you still won’t know if it’s an excellent or terrible idea until you actually try it out.

Fortunately, I have two crews of brave and enthusiastic Composite alpha-release guinea pigs, on whom I’ve been able to test things out, with great results. And even before new ideas make it to those two groups, they first get filtered by testing on Jess.  As she’s still obligated to like me even if the workouts I give her suck, and as she’s most definitely not afraid to express her strong opinions to me (on Composite or anything else), she’s ideally suited to the job.  But even before Jess, the first wave of trials happen in my own workouts, using myself as patient zero.  I’d like to think I’m sort of like Salk or Curie, albeit with lower odds of a Nobel prize, but possibly with better abs.

Surprisingly, most of the ideas I’ve been testing out have turned out better than expected.  But every so often, one goes quite wrong indeed.  Which is how I ended up on crutches today, with a sprained left knee.  (Lesson learned: depth jump sprint reaction drills = no.)  Frankly, it’s a pretty minor sprain, so I can make do without the crutches.  But based on the amount of walking in my schedule this week, and the ‘pimp walk’ I was unintentionally doing when crutch-less, it seemed taking weight off the joint for a couple of days might be wise.  Still, I don’t imagine I’ll be on crutches for more than another day or two, and by the end of next week I’m hoping to be back to full health.  And, therefore, back to self-testing further crazy Composite ideas.

Generally speaking, I tell people “no pain, no gain’” is a terrible piece of fitness advice.  But, I guess, at least for my specific purpose here, it seems to be the cost of doing business.  As the inimitable Twain once put it, “you can learn certain things holding a cat by its tail that you can’t learn any other way.”