In Die Una

 The first day started off well at 6AM, in the misty cold rain.The first march was 4 miles with a 10kg rucksack, this was done in an hour at a reasonable pace, with the majority of the march up hill. The second march of the day was done with a 10kg pack and body armour ( weighted vest weighing 8kg). The march with the added weight of the vest significantly increased the difficulty.So far to date I have covered 10 miles today. My upper back was quite sore but this will just be breaking in the rucksack and getting used to weighted marches 

The weather did lay off which didn't make the labouring any harder, but didn't make it any easier ! Having done lots of manual labour in the past I did not have a problem with this. What was involved was moving logs to a new area as well as driving wooden piles into the ground to form the preparation for small walled area.  

For training the weather cleared up and it was overcast which was a pleasant change. I wore a weighted vest throughout. I am intending on doing quite a lot of forearm work as from experience renacting with swords, forearms come into play a lot. I will also be trying to do a lot shoulder work to make up for the lack of hours of manual labour. I started off with a quick circuit of 10 forearm pronated curls, 10 pushups and 10 squats all with a weighted vest, I did this 10 times so in total, 100 curls, 100 pushups, 100 squats.   After that I finished with 100 burpees, again all with a weighted vest. I am trying to avoid standard weight training as much as possible. So my workouts will roughly be on this style of training - max effort, aerobic training, not focusing on hypertrophy as I don't imagine this was a Legionary's direct focus. 

The hardest part so far has been eating the quantity of food. In the past I have had no issue eating 3000 calories, but eating 3000 calories of mainly grain/ bread and whole foods is proving challenging. In particular the loaf of bread has been hard to get through. I was quite surprised with the amount of protein I have consumed - 115g even though the only real protein I have had has been from 350g of beef. The rest has been from grain. Total calories I have burnt today however is 3229 (This is written at 8:45pm)  according to my fitbit. 

Mentally it has been fine, it's wasn't great going for an evening march but it was just one of the things I had to grit my teeth and get on with it. I'm looking forward to the coming days and weeks, especially the training and labouring side of things.

Roma Invicta! 


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