„Boguszowska 30/15” is the first event that I’ve signed up for this year. It’s on April 18 and, if everything goes well, this might be the hiking debut of my 5 year old daughter Julia. I picked the shorter route this time but a week later there’s another event nearby (Maraton Pieszy Wojcieszów 25/40km) that I’m planning to take part in as well, most likely with my son. He’s done 25km in one day already so it shouldn’t be a problem.
Although it’s still 3 months away, I am already ticking off days in my calendar.
As you know the primary goal of this ?project? was to prepare for the big hike in September. However, in the process I discovered that I like powerlifting and I got a bit… carried away. It’s time to get serious, though, because there’s now a bit more than 8 months to go and I need to be able to walk 70km. I hate running in the winter so treadmill is the only option for me. So last week I went to my local gym in Strzelin to do a ‚trial jog’ , a silly 1.5km; then today I did 3km quite easily so it’s not bad considering that I still weigh close to 150kg. The plan is to jog twice a week on top of all the powerlifting stuff that I’m doing now, increasing the distance 1km per week: initially 3km on Wednesday, 4km on Saturday, and then i’m going to make the Saturday run longer and longer until I get to 16-18km. This should help me lose weight, on the other hand I expect some negative impact on powerlifting. I thought long and hard about this and I decided that losing weight is my top priority now. Other news is that I’m making some serious progress with my squats. While on a business trip in Beckum I went to a local gym, did my bench+squat training and finished with a nice squat of 1x155kg to show the locals who’s the boss 😉 Jokes aside, 155kg is not that much but it definitely shows the potential because i’ve only started doing squats quite recently after a superlong break. I’ve added a few kg to my best benchpress, too, but because there is a serious imbalance between my left and right arm I need to work on this before I attempt 135kg. If the ‚rehab’ exercises work, i’ll try 135 around end of January.
I had a wee accident in my garage gym the other day because I panicked when I failed the 3rd rep in the 9th set of 106kg bench rather spectacularly. I dropped the bar quite awkwardly, rolled it through my stomach leaving a huge bloody mark. I don’t recommend this to anyone.
Of course i was back in the gym next day but my belly looks like it was done by a mad surrealist painter.
Good news is that I benched 10x101kg so my magic calculator shows I can already beat my max of 133kg. I’ll try that on Monday.
I’ve finally done it! Yet another milestone reached. After watching some youtube channels where they said that apart from volume work (smolov jr training) it’s good to do single rep sessions, i’ve added some 85-95% one-rep sets and it’s paying off. In fact it’s going so well that I might still add 1-2 kg before end of 2025. Other than that it’s just SSDD. I’m doing crunches, Smolov jr bench training, a once-per-week session with my coach at a local gym plus an occasional bike training when I find the time. But today i’m a bit sore so I guess it’s time for a day off.
The video is from a few days later when I did 131kg because I forgot to record the attempt at 130. Oh well.
P.S. a few days ago I also did 10x100kg, which was the first goal that i set for myself when I started lifting weights back in 2023.
I’ve had a bit more time recently (no business trips) so there’s an upward trend.
I’m still doing benchpress 3-4 times a week. At the moment i’m doing the week with 6x6x91, 7x5x96, 8x4x101 and 10x3x106. The only difference is that on each day I added sets of 3x>110 and a single rep above 120kg. I find that this small extra bit really keeps my motivation up.
I do 1 heavy powerlifting training per week. Yesterday I started with this set: 10x56DL 10x32SQ 10×76 BP Then i did 7 more sets, adding 2-3kg here or there so that the final set looked like this: 10x87DL 10x46SQ 10x90BP
I was extremely pleased with this training, although it took more than 2 hours to finish, but I was a bit afraid how I’d feel the following day but today I feel great.
Lastly, I’ve connected my stationary bike again and I try to do a few kilometers whenever I have the time + 40 crunches every morning. I badly need to lose weight so I’ll be adding to this as well.
All this is taking me about 8 hours a week and I think I can push it to 10-12 with some more time management and by adding 10-15 minutes to each training. Summing up, I’m quite happy with my progress this month.
The goal for next month is to start losing weight slowly, 2kg every month. I just weighed myself and it was 150kg exactly. 2kg per month is less 500kcal every day, so 30minutes on the bike + no food after 4p.m I guess.
I’m on fire! I’m training a bit differently now and it’s paying off. Every time I do my bp training I add a set or two with 3reps x >110kg and a single rep above 120kg. In theory the nervous system should get accustomed to higher weights and it’s working so far. I started a few weeks ago with 3x110kg and 1x115kg and i’m up to 3x114kg and 1x124kg. I made an attempt at 126kg as well last week; it was a struggle but I did it! Today, emboldened by my good streak I tried first 125kg and it was so easy that I waited a few minutes and attempted 127kg and did that one, too!!! With the new training my progress is amazing! I’m doing all this very carefully, introducing 1day pauses if there’s shoulder pain or any other discomfort. I’m really trying not be afraid of those big weights so I only add 1kg per week to the max rep and even this scares the bejesus out of me. That said, i’m 42 so I this is not the time to be afraid anymore. It’s now or fucking never. There’s that exhilarating feeling, too, after completing a particularly scary set. Like i’m a bad motherfucker. I have 7 weeks until end of the year and I feel that 130kg is within my reach now in 2025.
On Saturday we decided to go hiking again. I didn’t want to break any records this time because I felt that our previous hike was a bit too long (26km). I picked a nice route through Samotnia and Śnieżka, because my son had never been there before.
We started at the Wang church around 11a.m. There are still a lot of stalls around the place so we spent some time window shopping.
The beginning is always difficult in our case so it was soon time for a snack.
… and mushrooms.
As we were approaching Samotnia, where we had planned our lunch, it was getting a bit chilly but by then we had already warmed up.
Around 1p.m we arrived at Samotnia. It was beautiful.
Unfortunately the place was packed inside so we decided to have lunch at Strzecha Akademicka instead.
Coke and good food always puts us in a good mood.
By the time we got to Dom Śląski, the landscape had changed a bit… it was starting to get windy and a bit cold, too.
Despite heavy wind and slippery conditions we decided to climb Śnieżka anyway. It was a good decision and around 3:30p.m we were at the top.
The views were beautiful 🙂
As we were getting back to Dom Śląski, we decided to take a brief stop to take some photos. We were under the clouds now so we could actually see the valley.
We were back at Karpacz around 7p.m but not before finding some mushrooms. It was good we took our headlights 🙂
It was awesome 🙂
On the technical side we did 16km in 8 hours, so it was a solid pace considering the conditions, extra time for lunch, snacks, coffee, photos and mushrooms. Also, I wanted to spend some time at the peak to find out how Olek will react to walking in the dark. He had a bad fall while we were going downhill from Dom Śląski (red path was super slippery) and for a moment there I thought that might be the end of our trip but he recovered very quickly. Still, we decided to pick a different path (black one) because it was less steep and I didn’t want to risk another accident.
There have been no updates recently because I needed a month to get over my failure to complete the Long Walk on Sep 20. It was generally a horrible experience: it was hot (>30 degrees) which sounds amazing but it wasn’t, actually. I managed to walk about 43km and I threw in the towel. Hiking in this temperature is not enjoyable, my pulse was 150 (on average for the whole hike!) and after 13 hours I didn’t see much point in walking any farther, especially seeing as my stomach refused to cooperate.
I must say I was disappointed but, as usual, there’s a silver lining in every cloud. I think I learnt something from this experience: First, do I really want to go hiking even in extreme weather conditions? Second, did I really think I was prepared for a 70km hike if I’d only done a few 30km marches this year? The answer to both questions is sadly a „no”. Next year I will be better prepared BUT I’m not going to even start if the temperature is above 30 degrees. I hate such weather and there’s no changing this.
So, after this hiking debacle, I decided to make some further changes to my training. I bought another bar for my garage so that I can do some benchpressing, squats and deadlifting all in a single training. I keep my weekly schedule of 4 benchpress trainings but I’ve now added 2 trainings where I do a bit of everything. Round 1 looks like this: 10×52 DL 10×72 BP 10×25 SQ
Then I add 1-2kg for round 2, and so on until round 7. The goal is to eventually start all 3 activities with 70kg and add 2kg each round, but I need 2-3 months to get there. Finally, I’m still doing my general stamina training whenever I have time with crunches and pullovers etc. Overall I can see some improvement but the weight still refuses to drop below 147kg which means I need to add some cycling. I just have no idea where to find the time for all this. The new goal would be to lose around 30kg and I have 47 weeks to do this because next year I’m (obviously 😀 ) also taking part in the Long Walk.
Inspired by Hafthor Bjornsson’s new record of 510kg, I thought that I can probably do a third of that, and went for 150kg today. It was easy so I risked another attempt at 160kg and I did it, too. During the weekend I’ll try 170kg.
There’s still 9 days left so I might go hiking once again on Saturday or Sunday depending on the weather and next week i’ll just go for long walks. It’s going to be a real struggle because of my weight but I’m reasonably sure I can do 70km as long as I do it smart. The important thing is to maintain an even pace of 3.4km/h, to remember about regular 10 min breaks every 10km to put Sudocrem on my feet, and I need to put in about 500kcal every hour or so + drink 0.5-0.7l of vitamin water/isotonic. After the first 5-6 hours I’ll start taking 1x400mg ibuprofen every 6 hours (hour 6, hour 12, hour 18). It’s gonna be fine but I’ll be really sore after all this.
My name is Tomek De Wille. Welcome to my blog. 