M2M Day 301: Alone and in pain

Max Deutsch
Aug 29, 2017 · 2 min read

This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For August, my goal is to complete one continuous set of 40 pull-ups.

This morning, I planned to head down to the gym and finally surpass 40 pull-ups.

However, I woke up this morning still feeling sore and tired — and also had some pain in my left shoulder, which I think is from benching slightly too much weight on Friday night.

I feel like one of those professional athletes who tears their ACL during an inconsequential pickup game in the off-season. In other words, I acted as if I were invincible, throwing my body around without enough care. Spoiler alert: I’m vincible.

Still, the pain was very benign (I didn’t notice it until I started my pull-ups), so I headed to the gym anyway for a few PR attempts.

On my first attempt, I started swinging aggressively from the very beginning. By the time I reached 30 pull-ups, I felt like I may be able to dig deep enough and get out the remaining eight, but I had already mentally decided, because of the swinging, that this wasn’t going to be The Take. So, I hopped off the bar at 32, saving my reserves for my next attempt.

I rested for 10 minutes, which seemed to be long enough, and then hopped back up on the bar.

10 minutes wasn’t long enough, and I had to work very hard to get out 35 decent pull-ups during my second attempt.

Unlike on Friday, I just didn’t have the same ease and energy in my sets. For both of my attempts today, my body felt a bit off and I had to pull hard starting from the very first pull-up.

Matt the trainer is coming on Wednesday, and I’ll try one last time with him then.

It seems to be easier to feed off of someone else’s energy anyway: Today, I had to tape my phone to a pillar in the middle of the gym to film myself.

Read the next post. Read the previous post.

Max Deutsch is a product manager at Intuit, the creator of Somebody.io and Rightspeed, and the guinea pig for Month to Master.

If you want to follow along with Max’s year-long accelerated learning project, make sure to follow this Medium account.

)

Max Deutsch

Written by

Founder at https://LearnMonthly.com. Blogging at http://MonthToMaster.com. Get in touch at http://max.xyz.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade