Via The Adventure Blog : Steve Colligan is getting ready to tackle more than 600 miles from Lhasa, Tibet to Kathmandu, Nepal - on a unicycle. Love it.

Over the past few weeks there have been some incredible entries to the Instructional Video Competition, including the random selection below.

Like to add yours? The competition is running for another two weeks - details here. It's a good one.

Betty Constable (1925-2008).

Squash pioneer Betty Constable.

Via The Adventure Blog : this definitely sounds like my kind of adventure. Dutch film company Deepeei are currently looking for two teams of bilingual (English and either Spanish or Portuguese) cyclists to take part in the Going South project. One team will be riding from Alaska to Central America; the other will be journeying from Central America to the southern tip of Argentina.

Sounds fantastic.

Dave Whitley explains how to quickly switch from one hand to the other whilst performing high-rep kettlebell snatches (such as in the SSST). Great video.

Line up the bread.

Despite the name, this'll churn out any sort of nut butter you like. Nuts in the top, jar below; perfect.

Video

General Alexander Retuinskih certainly knows how to move. Excellent.

Site

Scientific Wrestling.

To get a feel for things, perhaps the best place to start is with the blog. Love it.

If you'd like to recommend a site or event to us, send us an email.

Start considering. Virtual meets are ready for you.

Virtualmeet.net runs virtual meets - "geographically dispersed" raw, steroid-free meets that take place wherever the lifters and judges are, and play out online.

I'm the first female to successfully complete a virtual powerlifting meet, and the first one to come back for more. I just finished a deadlift meet, and Scott asked me to talk about my experience. I'm so excited about the project that I'm happy to talk about it to anyone who'll listen.

Virtualmeet.net is a grassroots project founded by Kristoffer Lindqvist in Finland and run with love by his volunteer team, warmly welcoming lifters at any level of skill or experience. Participants have been in Iceland, Austria, Finland, Puerto Rico, Canada, the U.S. (this particularly attracts Americans, for whatever reason) and more, and the list continues to grow.

Let me start with a couple of disclaimers. I'm not a powerlifter, and I've never done a live meet. I've attended them, and I brag on my world champion sister. My competition history up 'til now has been bodybuilding. Since my training evolved into strength training and Olympic-style weightlifting, the idea of dabbling with powerlifting as cross-training appealed to me. Doing a virtual meet isn't as intimidating as doing a live meet, and you just can't beat the convenience. New adventures help keep me fresh and nimble. Finally, the idea of a truly grassroots project run on passion and brains really nailed it.

Virtual Meet is just beginning to gain momentum. Next month is the pilot weightlifting meet. Eventually, VM strives to be a home of both powerlifting and weightlifting virtual meets, run parallel, throughout the year.

It's terrific fun and burgeoning with good sportsmanship spirit, but make no mistake: It's no joke. Judging is strict. At this writing, just 57 percent of attempts have passed. So although this doesn't count as a sanctioned meet, in many respects, this feels very real.

Tech Side

The technical architecture for the Virtual Meet web site blows me away. It seems as if Kristoffer Lindqvist (Yes, that Kris - founder of Under the Bar, the oldest powerlifting site on the web) has thought of everything. There are the conventional online community things you'd expect - discussion forums, profile pages - but everything has nifty little extras. Like the profile pages house widgets displaying your best lifts - one in pounds, one in kilos - that you can paste wherever you want, and they're automatically updated to reflect your current stats.

There are tons of tiny ingenius conveniences when it comes to viewing meets, too. View by meet, by flight, by lifter, by lift. Hover over a score and the judging specifics drop down. Tell at a glance what the attempts were for each lifter and which ones scratched.

The rules are detailed and assist you in delivering quality recordings of your lifts. I've benefited as a videographer just by following all the suggestions for framing, angle, timing. Uploading clips is done via FTP, so the judges get to them easily.

I've had a few glitches in the tech stuff - Gmail banishing meet emails to spam, the pesky business of adhering to a new FTP server's quirks - but overall, it's worked well, and Kris has always been there in a heartbeat to guide me through email, despite a major time difference (when does this guy SLEEP?).

Rory Hickman using a Foam Roller.

Well, for a long time eating and sleeping as much as possible served me well - I was gaining weight and getting stronger - so I saw no reason why I couldn't keep doing this for a long time. However, as the weights I was using continued to climb and after a 4 month long 'dirty' bulk I was much stronger and 35lbs heavier - great, but now my joints were starting to ache and I felt sore for much longer after workouts. I figured this was just due to the weight gain and that I'd adapt after a week or two of maintaining the same weight.

The two weeks passed - I was still sore, and my left hip was almost constantly aching. This was getting increasingly annoying and it got to the point where I needed to at least try something to help me recover. After lots of reading on the internet I began to notice that foam rollers were mentioned with a much greater frequency than I had noticed a couple of years ago, and it was rare to see an article or training log that didn't mention their use somewhere.

I first read about foam rolling in Eric Cressey and Mike Robertson's article "Feel Better for 10 Bucks" on T-Nation but, whilst very interesting, it really didn't seem relevant to me 4 years ago. I was 17 - how much "soft tissue adhesions and scar tissue" could I possibly have accumulated in that space of time that needed to be broken down? Maybe in a couple of decades it would be something to remember, but at the time I couldn't see the point. A few weeks ago, as I re-read the article and many others on the same subject, I could see that in theory it might be possible to address a number of issues.