The attitiude I’m trying to avoid
I saw this on the Twitter public timeline.
“…in office at 8 so i can’t fit a long workout in before. i want to start training for a half marathon, but time is a factor”
My first reaction was to scoff. The last two days I’ve run before work, and I’ve been at my desk by 6:45am both days. My second reaction was, “I can’t adopt that sort of attitude, it’s too easy”, so here’s to hoping I manage to keep up my early morning ways.
First 2 post “Body for Life” workouts done
More details to come, but I did my first strength training workout since I wrapped up “Body for Life” and it felt really good to change things up. It was a total body workout, which I was dreading, but it turned out to be refreshing to change up the routine. I finished with plenty of energy, which is a very good thing.
I did my first out door run this morning, at the very early hour of 4:50am. It was a little creepy being outside at that hour, but it was so peaceful. I felt better after I came across another guy out running, it made me feel better about m own sanity. He was running with headphones, which would make me feel very unsafe in the middle of the day, so there’s noway I’d be running to the tunes at 5am.
Details of the run to come, but I’ll say it was a little over 2 miles, it took me a little over 17 minutes and was pretty hilly. I’m not so happy about the pace, but I’ll deal. I’m sure the hills and the fact that I haven’t run outside in so long contributed to missing my 8 minute per mile pace I was hoping for.
Fin
Finished up “Body for Life” yesterday. Final tally, is 27.5lbs lost, which is a terrific start, but it’s just that, a start. I didn’t feel like working out Thursday, which was supposed to be an upper body workout, so I ended up just getting my bench max. It was 235lbs, which isn’t bad, but I really thought it would be higher. It’s a good baseline. I’m guessing it may have dropped a little in the course of dropping nearly 30lbs, but I’ll take being able to do 45lbs over body weight.
For those of you that caught the line above about the skipped workout, rest easy, I made it up yesterday by doing both upper body and lower body in the same day. Boy, that was a killer, but it felt good to get it in.
Next up, half marathon training. I have my running program mapped out, but I need to figure out my strength training regimen. All I know right now, is it’ll be two days a week and be a full body workout. Good times.
Last week of “Body For Life”
I’m coming to the end of my “Body for Life” journey, and while I’m happy about the 25lbs I’ve lost, I can’t help but feel like maybe I lost some intensity half way through, which has probably curtailed some of the gains I would have seen if I’d been able to stay as focused as I started out.
Is that a personal short coming? That probably has a little to do with it. However, I think maybe 12 weeks is too long to stay on one workout plan. When I felt myself losing some of the intensity, I probably should have changed things up. Also, I probably made a mistake by screwing around and adding the extra two days of HITT. In the last week or two I’ve started seeing my strength gains slide backwards a bit. Nothing too dramatic, but it’s still happening, and I have not skipped a workout. I fear maybe I’ve fallen victim to over training.
I have one week left and I plan to recapture that intensity and discipline I had in the first three weeks of the program to see if I can’t finish this thing off with a 28lb total weight loss. Overall, I’d call the program a success, though, it’s probably premature to do so. I guess it’s more important to see if I’m still being good a year from now.
Though my mom thinks I’m at a great point (yes, she’s pretty much obligated to say that) I still have a good 20lbs or so to cut, so this is by no means the end of the road, just the end of the first phase.
Up next, I’m thinking the inner runner in me is going to win out and I’ll train for a 15K and a half marathon in November, though the obligations of the job and the family me derail that plan as I get further into it, we’ll just have to see. If I decide I don’t want to dedicate the time to training for those events, I plan on trying out some Turbulence Training, or maybe the Navy Seal workout.
History repeating itself?
I have almost zero cravings for those things that got me to my sad state in the first place. I haven’t had a french fry through this entire journey and my beer consumption has been virtually nada. During the first couple of weeks, one of which I was on vacation, I slipped up and had a couple here and there, but in the past few weeks not a one, nor a real desire to have any. It was a conscious decision to break the habit, but now that it’s broken it’s not taking a lot of effort or willpower to keep it that way.
Of course, that’s always been the problem with me. When I’m working out and pushing myself I don’t want to eat the bad stuff because I know it’ll only make it more difficult to push and get better. The unfortunate flip side is that when I’m not working out, it’s always easy to slip back into those old habits. That’s how I went from finishing in the top 5% of the Atlanta Marathon in 1999 to having a hard time finishing in the middle of the pack during a 5K in 2007.
10 years ago I went through a similar cycle. I’d been away at college for two years, having left my athletic career in high school I had plenty of time to pick up some bad habits. Having never really followed a healthy living regimen besides all the time on the playing field and in the weight room growing up (translation, playing hard but eating like shit) it was easy for me to pack on the poundage, and boy did I, topping the scales at a hefty 225lbs.