Well, not exactly. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've been experiencing some elbow issues. These issues arose as a result of climbing five days on at HP40, where all the constant squeezing left my poor elbows screaming for mercy. Unfortunately, upon return from HP40 I was scheduled to begin the power phase of my training, in which I had included campusing.

Frankly, this scared me a little. Campusing is precisely how my first round of bad elbow problems began. However, that was then, and I had no idea what I was really doing on the campus board. I'm smarter now, right?

Ummm... maybe.

I know; I wrote the schedule, so I could easily change it. I could rehab the elbows and skip campusing and all would be well. Not a chance. I did what any self-respecting trainer would do, and I ignored my own advice to experimentally take one for the team.

Of course, I would never recommend this to a client or a friend. Probably not even to an enemy. It wasn't a good idea and I knew it, but I felt compelled to know exactly how much the elbow workouts I detailed in my previous post actually worked while still training at a high level. And so it was that I drug out my old friends dumbbell and "Therabar", placed them in a prominent position in the living room, and I headed to the gym to campus.

As of this week, I've finished with my 4 weeks of campusing, and I'm happy to report that in fact, through dilligent work on my elbows, they are healthier than when I started. They've gotten better gradually, to the point of almost no pain now. They are still stiff in the mornings, and they take a while to really warm up, but by all measures they are in good shape. Not only that, but my campusing improved markedly over the 4 weeks. Of the three main exercises that comprise the meat of my campus workout (which I'll detail soon), I experienced a big gain in all three. In the final 2 weeks, as the elbow pain was really subsiding, the strides were bigger than I had expected, which was a nice bonus.