I wanted to increase the intensity of my mornings and I did just that. It's funny how The Fatigue Wall fades away in the context of resistance training. Again, I did cardio in the 4-5AM time slot and then went into resistance for the next—I dunno, 45 minutes, I guess, and finished with more cardio. It was a chest day—pretty simple on paper. Presses and Flies: incline to flat to decline, 4×12. Nevertheless, it was intense and I reached muscle failure on 7th rep on the 4th set with flat press and the 11th rep on the 4th set of the decline press. It was a quality session. I'll put another hour of cardio in later today.

I'm unsure as to how to approach tomorrow morning. I may adopt (to some extent) what I did during The First Expedition, for here in The Second Expedition, I was just using it for an upper body rest with cardio replacement. While it'll still largely focus on just that, I may just slide a 20-minute ab session into the mix.

I'm feeling great, though my muscles feel taxed as I type on this—right where I want them. I look back over my life and think of how many 4AM's I've wasted. I can't imagine where I would be if I had started this regimen in the summer of '96. What I'm doing now is more than just minutes tallied on repetition or picking up heavy things. It changes my mood and breaks down barriers. It is reasonable to doubt that my Fall of 2000 would of ever happened—even just my grades and not everything else, that F in the Finance class in the Summer and the 2 F's, 2 D's, and a B that Fall, would never have happened. Sure, I redeemed myself the following Spring, but as much as we can learn from our failures, I would have been happy to have skipped that series of lessons.

However, all of that is part of my narrative. Sure, we wish we could go back and optimize things...I wish I never sold my Netflix stock—heck if we're going back, let me pick up some Apple stock in the '90s when it was trading for $0.58 compared to its $191 today. If I had put just $1000 in it in 1997 (what expenses did I have back then?) that would be $329,000 today! But, by the same token, I lost about $3000 in Facebook options a few years back...I didn't know the future back then anymore than I do today...but if I could "go back and do it all over again..."