You may be saying, “Geez. Mariko’s brother is talking all random again. What the hell is this Fran thing? Wasn’t one of Mariko’s friend’s cats named Fran?” Fran is a Crossfit thing where they time you doing 21 then 15 then 9 sets of thrusters and pullups. The standard male weight for the thrusters is 95 pounds but I only did 75 pounds and, surprisingly, I wasn’t DFL. Well, surprising and not surprising. Not surprising because I was using 20 pounds less than the rest of the guys (and Mark the yoot beat me by three or four minutes!) Surprising because I’ve been away from the gym so long.

I have several limited measures of how well I’m doing at the gym. One of them is pullups. After going to this gym for four months, I could do ten pullups without thinking about it. Before or after a workout, I could do ten. I couldn’t do a whole lot more, but ten was easy. But now, after being gone four of the last five weeks, I’m struggling to do six pullups. Time to get back to it.

I was a little off my feed this week as well. I think it all started when I ate way too much last Thursday night. Megan and I went to a soul food restaurant, the Hard Knox Cafe, on Clement St. It was weird going to a soul food restaurant in a Chinese neighborhood; there were two young African-American men working out front, but everyone else working there was Asian. The food was great and Megan told me to calm down, my chicken wasn’t going anywhere. I think I was over-enthusiastically wolfing it down.

I got the macaroni and cheese (which had some garlic in it) and the red beans and rice as sides. Spectacular.

Megan had the fried chicken as well, but with greens and yams.

I was so full I thought I’d burst, but I still had to ask for sweet potato pie. I really overate. When I make it back to San Francisco, I’ll probably overeat again!