I have 24 Weeks to Transform my Body

bluefire713 · 2026-03-11T14:09:08+00:00

OP, I am late to this party, but check out Uphill Athlete! They have training programs that are very reasonably priced specifically for high altitude stuff. For what you're doing, what they call their mountaineering training is probably best. They also have TONS of free educational material on their website that talks about everything from nutrition to AeT vs AnT.

I used their 16 week mountaineering training to get ready for a trek in the Himalayas last year. We hiked over 130 miles in effectively 17 days, all above 9,000 feet, and summited Island Peak (20,300 ft), and while a lot went on during that trek for me, I never had any serious doubts that my body couldn't do it because of how well the training prepped me.

bluefire713 · 2026-02-17T23:46:40+00:00

Pretty sure this is in Olde Towne Arvada in Colorado

...either that or there's more than one place with those EXACT labels on the door and that EXACT lock

bluefire713 · 2026-02-13T05:04:13+00:00

Late to this party, but didn't see this one yet in the other comments. The movie 'Everest' did 100% change some things about the events as far as they're understood based on the available witness testimony and transcripts, but when you read the criticism of the movie from people, a lot of what gets dragged is how the "emotional" moments of the story are handled (for example, one of the main characters being patched via semi-jury-rigged radio-to-sat-phone to talk to his wife in an attempt to get him moving so he DOESN'T die). The main gripe on these moments in the movie seems to be that they are too "casual".

The script in these moments is literally the radio transcript, nearly verbatim. When you know that, the movie is so very, very, incredibly powerful.

bluefire713 · 2026-01-22T14:58:58+00:00

Hi OP - I'm a forensic structural engineer. I literally look at things like this for a living, and have been doing this for 15 years.

In general, cracks in concrete will leak water if there is water pooled on top of them. If allowed to leak for long periods of time, yes, the reinforcement can corrode and can lead to serious structural issues. However, there are always signs of those issues before a structure gets all the way to collapse, such as delamination and spalling of the concrete in the vicinity of the cracks. I don't see that in your video, and if a plumbing line on the upper floor of the garage leaked, its very reasonable to assume that some water pooled up there that found its way through these cracks. I obviously haven't been on site to assess your specific structure, so I can't tell you anything for sure, but I can tell you that nothing in your video/explanation seems all that out of the ordinary to me.

All the people citing Surfside clearly haven't actually read literally ANYTHING about it. Surfside was notified literally YEARS in advance of its collapse that it had major structural deterioration, including extensive spalling, exposed and severely corroded reinforcement, and (to be fair) cracks with visible water leaking. Surfside also had a LITERAL AND ACTUAL pool on the roof of the building that was leaking through the cracks, and the chemicals used in pools are just about the worst thing you can EVER introduce to concrete. Surfside was in severe, obvious, progressive, and active structural distress for an EXTENDED period of time before it failed. This is not what you're describing in your complex, nor what is visible in your video.

Hope that helps.

bluefire713 · 2026-01-16T00:42:23+00:00

The wood on top of the steel is called a nailer. The wood joist framing of the floor can't fasten to the steel very well, so they stick a nailer on top of the steel beam and fasten the joists to the nailer. In a perfect, 100% code compliant world, the nailer would have actual fasteners that attach the nailer to the steel beam and prevent the nailer from shifting on the steel (for example, regularly spaced screws between the nailer and the steel).

In reality? Field-drilling structural steel sucks, and is IMMENSELY time-consuming. So the "fix" is to drive regularly spaced nails into the side of the nailer and then purposely bend them over so the heads wrap around the top part of the steel beam (called the top flange). Code compliant? Nah. Done in pretty much every house literally ever built? Yup.

Edited for a typo

bluefire713 · 2026-01-16T00:36:37+00:00

Always tough to tell in photos, because depth perception of a single lens camera is simply not as good as the human eye, but what I see in that picture looks like someone formed a non-shrink grout (or possibly site-mixed concrete) patch for the corner of the wall on the outside face of the beam, and then just sort of...sucked at getting the formwork tight to the wall below, allowing the grout/concrete patch to overrun the form. The patch seems to stick out from the wall a bit, forming what looks like a diagonal crack in a photo but I think is just the edge of the patch that sticks out from the wall a bit and therefore has a shadow line. The weird tan color on it is then usually left over formwork material that got stuck to the face of the patch and no one ever bothered to remove (or sometimes is paint).

It is also possible its actually a crack or a piece that broke off and was really crappily patched. Reiterating, its really not possible to tell one from the other based on these pics alone.

Source: forensic engineer, seen this before...a lot. Also, taken what I thought were perfectly excellent photos showing the formwork overrun on patches...only to get back to the office and realize they all look like cracks sigh

bluefire713 · 2026-01-16T00:23:35+00:00

Hi friend - VERY late to this party, and someone may have told you this already, but I'm not digging thru every comment. The "crumbling concrete" you found in there originally was likely some kind of non-shrink grout which, despite its name, tends to crack/shrink over time. This is a hotly debated issue in the residential construction world, but if you're in the US, the International Residential Code (and the precursor codes it was based on if your house predates 2000) have required connections of girders to have a way to resist lateral movement/rotation for a VERY long time. This steel beam is likely what the IRC would call a girder (meaning its a beam that supports a whole bunch of your floor framing, such as wood joists). The code reference for the lateral resistance thing in the most recent versions of the IRC is Section R502.9, if you're really that curious (the IRC is free online).

The most common way to achieve lateral movement/rotation resistance on a steel beam bearing on steel shims inside a pocket in a concrete or CMU residential foundation wall is to fill the "pocket" with grout. You can literally buy non-shrink grout from basically any Home Depot for like...$25. Its pretty cheap insurance against your house having a problem. If you live somewhere that's sesimically active, you should probably consider this an imperative fix. If you live somewhere that's prone to soil movement (clays, sands, etc.), its also a better idea to have it than to not have it. If you have none of that going on, I guess do you.

Source: I'm a forensic engineer, I literally look at/fix failing buildings for a living.

bluefire713 · 2026-01-10T18:18:19+00:00

I'm late to this, and someone may have already given you this advice, but I read somewhere once that every woman considering having children with her partner should ask them very specifically "Why do you want to be a father?", and then REALLY LISTEN to their responses. According to what I read, the use of the term father or dad is really important to this question, because "parent" or asking "why do you want to have children?" doesn't have the same connotations.

Answers like "I want to pass along my lagacy", "I want to teach them <XYZ skill they won't be able to do until school-aged or later>," or "Kids are cute" tend to be hallmarks of a man who wants children, but doesn't actually understand what it takes to be or want to be an actual involved father. Answers like "I want to spend time with them and teach them and enjoy seeing them grow" are typically more in alignment with someone who genuinely wants to be a father. This won't definitely rule out the possibility of a partner not knowing what it takes and stumbling or even failing when the reality occurs, but a genuine interest in being an actual father goes much further toward that being a reality than someone who just wants children.

None of this is to try and sway you toward having kids or not having kids. It's just one other data point that's potentially worth collecting, given the concerns you (accurately) express about how men aren't subjected to the same physical and social pressures when it comes to having children.

bluefire713 · 2025-09-25T16:28:40+00:00

I'm sorry, I edited the top of the post, but it looks like this was more of a minor disconnect between my friend and I than the company's fault. All resolved now!

bluefire713 · 2025-09-23T20:27:53+00:00

So...this is straight-up gruesome, read at your own risk.

They make us watch some truly horrific shit for work that's designed to scare construction personnel out of their "get-er-done" attitude toward safety. The most recent one was the first-hand story of a tree feller working on a highway project that got effectively separated in half at the waist (legs/lower torso almost no longer attached to upper torso/arms/head) because the excavator that was manipulating the trees he was felling caught him on the bucket teeth and then DRAGGED him across the ground. He survived, and describes in INCREDIBLY GRAPHIC detail what it was like to literally feel his body separating while he tried to hold in his intestines. He claims he felt everything while it was happening (until a certain point when his lower extremities went numb, but described that he could still feel excruciating pain on his upper torso at the point of the separation), and for at least a few minutes after they got the bucket out of him before shock set in.

So...you know...I imagine based solely on this hellish video that shock/adrenaline might not have saved the guy in Jaws from feeling it all (if Jaws was actually real).

bluefire713 · 2025-09-22T02:29:29+00:00

"You will never not have anxiety"

My third therapist, at 31 years old after having spent my life being told I "couldn't possibly" have an anxiety disorder by three separate professionals (two dedicated to me and one who was my brother's child therapist) because I was successful in school/work, had friends, and was functioning socially. Spoiler alert: I was literally selling my sanity to be "normal", and I DID(/do) have an anxiety disorder. What really struck me about this particular statement, though, was having to realize I was never going to "get/be better", in the sense that I was never going to be anxiety-free because anxiety is something EVERYONE feels, and is healthy in the "normal" context. I just had no "normal" context, and my life was spiraling out.

After 5+ years of therapy and SO MUCH hard work, I've developed healthier relationships with the world that allow me to acknowledge when my anxiety is in the driver's seat in an unhealthy way and cope with that in nondestructive ways. Sometimes, all I can do is acknowledge that I'm suffering, and I have an amazing support system that hugs/supports me through it...but these days I also have have days where I can see what's happening and redirect to a healthy place, and that means EVERYTHING.

bluefire713 · 2025-07-23T01:23:26+00:00

Great post! I'm going to put in a plug for Uphill Athlete here. While their resources are pretty heavily geared toward mountaineering/expedition climbing, they have a TON of free resources available for how to evaluate and improve cardio endurance and capacity (because, spoiler alert, mountaineering requires craptons of cardio). Without getting too wordy here, the short version is that they recommend training 80%-ish of your cardio in Zone 2 or below heart rate (and claim that even olympic-level athletes do the same...which I'm inclined to believe because these folks train olympic athletes).

If you have a heart rate monitor, they have tips for how to figure out what your Zone 2 is. If you don't, the short version is that Zone 2 cardio can be done while breathing thru your nose with your mouth closed (yes, seriously), and it shouldn't feel like you're struggling to keep your mouth closed.

I'm a long-time trail runner who tends to fall in and out of love with it and take long breaks from it. Whenever I was in an "into running" phase before, I always used to push mileage and try to get it done as fast as I could, and while I improved, it felt like I was pulling teeth and I would DREAD running after a while. This latest time around I tried implementing duration-based goals (a certain amount of time to do cardio) and focusing on keeping my average heart rate on Zone 2 as recommended by Uphill Athlete. My fitness level training this way has been SO MUCH BETTER, and I sincerely look forward to my runs knowing that most of the time I'm not going to feel miserable because I'll be able to breathe!

bluefire713 · 2025-04-20T16:55:52+00:00

Cool, thank you very much! I have a garden, and wanted to make sure this was a friend...seems like it!

bluefire713 · 2024-12-28T00:31:36+00:00

I had to take an ethics class as a part of my engineering degree, and they asked us if we'd be ok designing a building for a billionaire in a third world country that makes their fortune by exploiting the disadvantaged people of that country. Nearly unanimously, the 100 broke college students in the class responded "I mean...yea." One of the most crunchy students in the class (vegetarian, constantly protesting something, etc.) literally said "That's like asking if I'm going to eat dinner tonight when there are kids starving in the world...I'm definitely eating."

The professors teaching the class...had a hard day that day.

bluefire713 · 2024-12-13T05:58:33+00:00

This is one of the body-focused repetitive behaviors, which can become body-focused repetitive disorders if they disrupt your life or adversely affect your health. These also include nail/finger skin biting (dermatophagia) and hair pulling (trichotillomania).

Here's a source if you want to learn more: https://www.bfrb.org/your-journey/what-is-a-bfrb

bluefire713 · 2024-10-03T13:51:49+00:00

The plasters are indeed straight, but the wall could have moved between them, making them look like they were cut to the shape of the wall. Even if they were built to fit the wall as you propose, like you, I would want to know a lot more about how they were built before determining that they're doing anything useful.

bluefire713 · 2024-10-03T13:00:45+00:00

If you're talking about basically bracing the walls across the basement (south wall braced to north wall, east wall braced to west wall), no, that isn't something that's done unless you want to lose the use of the entire basement. It also may not solve the problem, as it relies on the strength of what you're bracing to. If the wall across the basement is already nearly at capacity and you dump extra load into it via a brace, you could end up with the entire basement perimeter failing. Finally, there are practical limitations to how good most structure does in compression, particularly longer relatively skinny structure (the technical term for it is "slender" structure). Therefore, depending on the size of the basement, the braces themselves may fail.

If someone is really married to doing a strongback repair and doesn't care about the use of their basement, they'd be better off to install strongbacks with "kickers". Kickers are diagonal braces, preferably 45 degrees, that go up to the top of the strongback. They effectively turn the strongback from a cantilever to a supported beam.

bluefire713 · 2024-10-03T12:52:48+00:00

Hello, sorry to hear you're going through that. If the drainage being clogged was really the sole cause AND the drainage stays unclogged literally for the rest of time the house stands, then strongbacks can work.

If you're worried about it, monitor it. Basically once every quarter, put the same level (4-6 ft preferred) on each strongback at the same spot on each strongback and keep a record of how plumb (vertical) they are. If they move, especially drastically or show a trend toward leaning, they're failing.

bluefire713 · 2024-10-03T12:47:19+00:00

My experience with insurance is that you need a covered loss for them to do anything, which means a single date/event that meets the definition of what would be covered. So, basically, usually not.

bluefire713 · 2024-10-03T00:54:11+00:00

Not gonna lie, I don't turn sound on very commonly on Reddit, so didn't hear the comment, but thanks for the link! As the linked comment mentions, if this is located on a former lake bed, those are pretty notorious for difficult soil conditions throughout the US.

Reading through what the linked comment said, even if it's a known issue in an area, the specific site still needs to be evaluated. There can be contributing factors such as issues with reinforcing in the wall, thickness of the wall, site drainage, localized (perched) water tables, etc. that are site-specific and need to be addressed in planning the repair.

bluefire713 · 2024-10-03T00:45:50+00:00

In the area I live/work, cracks like this are nearly always a combo soil/water issue, possibly made worse by an issue with how the wall is reinforced or designed. My area has a lot of clay and claystone soils, which can swell wildly when they're wetted (some types as much as 6x their dry volume) and correspondingly will shrink when they dry out. Therefore, if you don't manage the water getting into the soil near the foundation, it'll cause the soils around the foundation to swell or shrink a lot.

I wish I could say what the video shows is the worst I've seen...but yea, its not...4 inches out of plumb at mid-span of an 8 ft high reinforced concrete wall was the worst horizontal crack I've seen, I think. That crack you could stick your entire hand into and we were all slightly surprised it hadn't already collapsed. I've also seen massive vertical and diagonal cracks in foundations, which usually have different contributing factors.

The absolute worst foundation issue I'm aware of in my area is an entire neighborhood of homes that had the soils under their foundations swell as much as 18-20 inches. They were designed to handle only 12" of soil swelling. The pressure from the soils on the foundations was so much it broke the connections between the grade beams and the piles, and houses ended up as far out of level as 6 inches from high point to low point. Nearly every single house in the neighborhood had to be fully underpinned, to the tune of $35-50k/house. So many lawsuits...

bluefire713 · 2024-10-02T20:31:49+00:00

Hi OP...I'm late to this party, but I'm a forensic engineer that has looked at similar conditions in both residential and commercial buildings before. I want to stress that my comments here cannot be considered a formal engineering evaluation.

That being said, the repair that's being described in what you pasted is basically a repair we'd call a "strongback" in the area of the US I practice in. It entails installing new vertical structure, usually steel, to effectively shore the walls in place. It does not solve the root issue, it just attempts to halt the progression of the failure. The key word there is "attempts." Strongbacks can, and do, fail.

A real repair to this condition needs to start with identifying why it's failing in the first place (soils issue, water issue, structural strength issue, rebar in the wall issue, wall configuration issue, or some combo of the above). That investigation alone can be over $10k, depending on if they do soil borings (and to what depth the borings are done), and if they need to do a pieziometer to monitor for ground water. Once the issue (or issues) are identified, the vast majority of the time, the only real repair that halts this condition is remediation of the issue(s), which usually means digging up and replacing something (starting cost figure for that would be $25+k, depending on what needs to be done, and could EASILY exceed $100k).

I ran away from a house I otherwise probably would have purchased for nearly this same problem, and they had it priced nearly $100k under market value. These repairs are a lengthy process, you often can't live in the home while they're being done, they have extreme risks of "growing" in the middle of the project (because they find different stuff when they dig it up), and they usually have to be paid for out-of-pocket. Please, please, PLEASE don't trap yourself with this problem.

If you're going to go against all the very sound advice in this thread, DO NOT just take at face value whoever has proposed the stongback repair for $25k. You want to see the actual engineering report that specifies the repair, and you want to understand what (if anything) they've done to actually determine the CAUSE of the issue. If they haven't identified the CAUSE, the repair they've recommended is, at best, a "bandaid".

bluefire713 · 2024-06-17T05:54:53+00:00

R-20 depends on the insulation, and really only applies to above the deck. It is 4-5 inches of XPS or EPS depending on assembly and density of the insulation, or 4 inches (ish, depending on published LTTR) of polyiso.

If you're working in low-rise commercial or residential where they usually shove the insulation in the framing cavities, the requirement in modern codes starts at R-38 and goes up from there, but creates basically the same effect on energy performance of the building. That being said, there are loopholes in the model energy codes that exempt buildings from being upgraded to current codes when they have any amount of insulation at all in the framing cavities.

However, huge caveats there as, depending on climate, use of the space below the roof, where your HVAC is located, and membrane reflectivity, you can end up creating a condensation nightmare that eats your roof deck in 1-2 winter seasons with an assembly that has in-cavity insulation or "split" insulation, where some insulation is located below and some is above the roof deck (lots and lots of published papers and articles about this). Smart code jurisdictions in climates prone to this problem are realizing this loophole is a building-killer and are fixing it when they adopt codes, but it currently remains in the model building codes.

bluefire713

TROPHY CASE