Cloudflare clearing, up and over the bar

So my first day of utilizing CloudFlare on the Bar-barians web site has shown some promising results.  It filtered out a massive 62% of the traffic hitting the site that was bot related.  It also identified some malicious traffic originating from China, Japan and the UK that was hitting the site which it also filtered out.  I haven’t heard updated CPU utilization numbers from IX but they have to be way down since that 62% of traffic never even touched their servers.

Although all these issues with keeping the BB site up and running has been frustrating, I sure have learned a lot how to reduce the impact of a WordPress site in a shared server environment.

Last night I headed out back to my bar park to do something I haven’t done in a long time, muscle ups.  My long road to accomplish a muscle up is well documented through out this blog.  In total I worked on getting my first one for at least two years, getting on top of the bar for the first time in September of 2011.

Once I got my first muscle up I worked the movement a lot, building up to a max of 7 reps after a few months.  I was really into it.  However then a weird thing happened, I stopped doing them.  Well not totally, but muscle ups took a back burner in my bar work.  Part of this was because of some injuries, aches and pains in my wrist and elbows that made a muscle up very painful to do.  Part of it was because I directed my calisthenic gaze in another direction.

So anyway for whatever reason I decided last night I wanted to do some muscle ups.  It had been quite a while since I did a bar muscle up so I wasn’t even sure of my ability to still get over the bar.  Luckily my muscle memory had not gone senile and I was able to knock out a few small sets.  In total I did 10 reps.

I had forgotten the auxiliary benefits of doing muscle ups, at least for me.  It makes you feel powerful.  There is something about pulling yourself up and over the bar that is hard to explain until you accomplish it yourself.

I felt really good after swinging down from my last rep,  good enough that muscle ups will be back on my regular calisthenics menu indefinitely.