April 30, 2005
10 responses to Week 18: Deads before dawn
Under the Bar is 21 years, 4 months and 25 days old with 462 posts, 329 photos, 108 video clips (363 M worth) and a bunch of comments.
Kris: Hi Bobby, Thanks for the feedback and sorry for the slow reply. I just came back from a few weeks at...
Bobby: wow nice work. I really enjoyed seeing how you built it from start to finish. i am thinking of making...
Anna: This is a disgraceful photo! This is indeed a chimpanzee and it is being full exploited fyi. Shameful. ...
The making of an outdoor power rack and heavy-duty bench
Alex: Hi Kris, Rack update - I was wandering around my father-in-law's yard and...
Tobias H: Just scanning thru and alltough these are brake drums, I doubt they are for cars because of their size. I...
©Kristoffer Lindqvist, 2003-2024
E-mail: kris@tsampa.org
May 31st, 2005 at 10:29 pm
This entry is part of the backblogging effort to get Under the Bar back up to speed. It was written on 31 May. Three weeks of workouts still in queue.
June 1st, 2005 at 12:37 am
holy crap…that’s damn early, I can barely concentrate on walking at that time let alone deadlifting.
June 1st, 2005 at 6:54 am
Finns have the guts to do it!
June 1st, 2005 at 10:27 am
There’s a word for that in finnish: Sisu.
It basically means everything of the following: not letting go, not giving up, sticking to it, being brave/gutsy, having the willpower to do something no-one in their right mind would be able to (like beating a little tiny country like Russia in the winter war). Those are mostly it. A quite encompassing word, isn’t it?
June 1st, 2005 at 7:19 pm
Ah, another cultural twist. Sub-maximal deadlifting in the wee hours is nothing compared to the squat session I once did in February at Toffe’s Gym when I worked up to heavy squats in the light of a hurricane lantern in a severly sub-zero winter forest. Of course, I only had a vinyl barbell set back then and my full-squat max was around 60kg, but sisu all the same.
I did a bit of surfing around on sisu on the web and noted that Wikipedia had an entry:
For a more mystical take see Poski’s Sisu page.
End of culture lesson. Note to self: must wield sisu more efficiently in training or face grave embarrassement and the risk of the ultimate punishment: having to wear clothes in the sauna and not getting to roll around in the snow afterwards. No beer either. Yikes.
June 1st, 2005 at 9:38 pm
Speaking of Sisu brand names, we should not forget the venerable Sisu pastil. Brings back warm memories of my grandfather who always used to carry some in his pocket.
June 2nd, 2005 at 12:27 am
you crazy finns…what do you have your own language now???
That’s a very cool word btw.
June 2nd, 2005 at 7:28 pm
Yeah, man, and it’s brand new too!
We’re so excited about our very own language (finally!), it ain’t even funny.
June 2nd, 2005 at 8:17 pm
Yeah, just hear how cool this conclusion from a paper on the origin of the Finnish language sounds:
That said, the truth is that all three of us (assuming Robert is the Robert I have e-mailed with) are Swedish speaking Finns and proud of it. We are more or less bilingual though and, since we do not feel any close affinity with Swedes but regard ourselves as Finns, most assuredly do have our full share of sisu.
In this ongoing ad hoc series on Finnish culture, this brings us to another interesting concept in Swedish called Ankdammen (The Duck Pond). Since those who speak Swedish as their mother tongue only amount to about seven percent of the population in our beloved capital Helsinki, we all tend to know each other, if not personally at least through a friend’s friend. It is indeed uncanny how true this is. Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux and arguably one of the more famous Swedish-speaking Finns, made this concept known to the hacking world in his book Rebel Code (true to the point, I’ve never met him but I’ve come to know his sister professionally).
June 3rd, 2005 at 12:04 am
;) I kid because I love!