A warrior born!!

It has been 7 days since the warrior dash. I finished the race, under an hour which was my goal. I would like to tell you that i ran full out and graced over the obstacles, but that would be a lie. Truth is i was way under prepared for the dash, and I almost quit several times, but I pushed through. I was also under prepared for how emotional the race was on me; I found my self in tears at the end and still haven't really figured out why.
So, Now the question is "whats next?". Well, I have an answer. I will continue to train having noticed that while i trained for distance, i didn't train for speed, so I will be implementing some sprinting into my training. A new weight regimen is on the docket, and i will be working on muscular hypertrophy as the goal. Finally i will try to be prepared for a 5k next year with my wife, and there is always a warrior dash in Georgia in may..........

32 days

You know I'da thunk I'd be more prepared by now, but here we are, a month away from running the dash. I have really stepped up my training this month trying desperately to get my miles in and turned my weight training into more of a metabolic exercise regimen. I have studied the map of the course, and come to the conclusion that anything under an hour will be good for me. Now, I have to get ready for a vacation in which for the first time in my life, i plan to exercise during WTF?
that's all!

seeing results and a case of the walks

ok, i have been slowly trudging with little of note. but today was a great day. my shoulder which has plagued me all summer has finally calmed down thanks to intensive rehab with Indian clubs, rubber bands, and a little thing i call Gilligan. Now Gilligan is a piece of bamboo approximately 6.5 feet long. to this i attach weights held by a bungee. Now I press this, curl it, done benches and bent over rows. 2 things, it Always makes me giggle like a school girl, and it's chaotic movement has gone a long way to helping rebuild the stabilizer muscles in my shoulder girdle. Now i have search the internet and you can find one of these for sale for Oh, 250.00 but take my advice, go out and hunt and kill your own Gilligan, you'll thank me. Oh yeah a side benefit is the bamboo is thicker than my regular weight bar, so my forearms have really tightened up, and a stronger grip means a stronger person all around.

Now, my jogging has not been where i wanted it to be, but I like to blame a couple of things.1 it is way hot here in the south, and for some reason i get out the door at 5pm, so i'm already tired, and its cookie tin weather outside.
2, i want to be one of those runners that look cool, you know the one that makes jogging look effortless, and literally leaps down the road at defiance of gravity.
Well, that ain't me. I have found however, that when i check my ego at the door, I seem to run a little slower, but cover alot more ground. I still take the walk break once a while but they are fewer, and so what? they give my knees a break, let me soak up the endorphins, and i catch my breath. Yep i like a walk break, and if i need it in the race by God I'm takin it.
Thats about it. Next Month I plan on starting hill training and obstacles Yum!!

the dog days are here

I can't remember the last time it rained here in good ole NC. but i know the last time i sweated. pretty much when i huffed outside this morning. It is hot I mean Devil's Dangle hot. Yet, I still have to run. I think the secret is to take it nice and easy, drink a ton of water, and take a cool shower when i get in. Otherwise I have been trying to keep my workouts up to schedule, the shoulder is better, but still very stiff. I did however order some Indian clubs to help rebuild and strengthen the shoulder girdle. If you want some I would suggest you look here: http://www.oldtimestrongman.com/indian_clubs.html its a neat site full of old and forgotten workout lore. Other than that I keep chugging along, I think the serious training is coming up in August and September, but this groundwork is making it easier and easier to imagine me running this race.
that's bout it, go eat a salad and stay cool!

What dreams may come, and I got SLAPed

Cigarettes are an insidious lot. I spent more years than I care to speak of at the altar of the devil's sticks. After the birth of a first child, and the inevitable coming of a second, I finally spoke to my doctor and got the assistance I needed to quit. However, for at least a year after quitting, I had dreams of smoking. I would sneak off in my dream and fire them babies up with abandon. What's this got to do with getting healthy you may ask? Simple, the other night I dreamed of jogging. In my dream I ran with the effortlessness and grace of a gazelle, swallowing miles upon miles under my winged feet.
Now I consider this a turning point in my training. If you saw me on the street and said "how's the running" I would spit at you "I hate it." But, can you really say you hate something that you dream about, and find enjoyment in the dream? I think not. Truth be told, I am finding a little enjoyment in the running, and certainly enjoy feeling good about myself when its done. My 1.5 mile jog has now gone from 40 minutes to approximately 23 minutes, and I foresee soon moving up to the mighty 2 mile run.

Now, I have for some time had a pain in my left shoulder. being the macho com-macho man meat I am, I have soldered thru to over a 200lb standing military press. then one day i couldn't raise my arm laterally in line with the shoulder except under extreme pain. I made an impassioned plea to my friend who is a physical therapist, who after several questions told me I been SLAPed! A SLAP stands for Superior Labrum from Anterior to Posterior, and generally is a pain in the tookus. what this boils down to is 1. stretching, and therapeutic movement to repair the shoulder. 2. a big hocking shot of cortisone into the joint. 3. surgery.
I opted for the least invasive of the three. this means my lifting has been on hiatus for 2 weeks while i have been running and doing what i call sissy stretching, which is NOT sissified at least for the first couple of days. I now can happily say most movement has returned to the shoulder, and next week I will resume lifting although it will be a modified 5X5 system, with shrugs instead of presses, and some serious attention to my shoulder in benching. if it hurts, push ups and light flies will be the order of the day.
Anyways, things are progressing, and that's the key slow steady progress is what built behemoths of men, and it just might turn me into a warrior.

the runner's high

Being a man who abused himself quite regularly thru college, I found the promise of a runner's high very inviting. The concept of a sudden release of endorphins into my blood stream made me giddy enough to contemplate putting some Phish on the ole mp3 player when it happened. Sadly, it happened today while listening to my couch to 5 k podcast, which i highly recommend if you are trying the couch to 5k program. It plays some generic electronica while you run, but most important, it tells you when to start, when to walk, and when to rest. Being a lazy man who needs to be taught to run i find it invaluable, especially because it's free! get it here http://www.ullreys.com/robert/Podcasts/
Now back to this glorious high: yeah i felt good, i felt good about myself for schlepping along in what i call my zombie run mode ( shuffling, spit flying out the corner of my mouth, occasional groans) I felt good I have stuck with it when i really haven't seen the weight loss i so desire ( i do however think my body composition is changing) and i didn't seem to mind the pain in my calves. Now i was hopping to break out into a spontaneous free flow spin of yester year chasing trails of light from my finger tips, but this wasn't to bad either.

Now for the actual training. I am running about 1.5 miles 3 times a week, but i have cut 10 minutes off of this since i started. I am pressing and squatting over 225lbs for full reps, my push ups have gone up as have my pull ups. Soon i will begin to pepper into my workout sprints and what the boxers call "roadwork" thats when the real puke should fly.
Until then see ya in the ice bath!

And we're baaack!

Sorry I disappeared there, i had somethings taking precedence (bum shoulder. bum knee. kids), but i am back and now for an update:
My training has switched over to its second phase, I am now lifting weights Monday and Friday, while running Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Now this may seem like a recipe for over training, but bear with me a moment. Marines, soccer players, and various other fit individuals run every day. I was finding that my jogging was slow to progress while my weight training took off. but I did notice that the progress was quicker when i ran 2 days together, hence this plan. I am now military pressing 200lbs as of last week, but my jogging is barely a mile, and whats worse is my beautiful wife has taken up jogging as well, and is moving ahead of me. Now lets take into account that i carry roughly one and a half times her weight while having tree stumps for legs while she has nice long legs, still. So i will keep you abreast of this change and let you know in the coming weeks how it fairs. till then i got some legs to look at!

# weeks down, or the last Frito I'll ever eat..

So, i have been ill with one thing or another for 3 weeks now ( i blame small booger eaters who love to stick their dirty dirty hands in my mouth), in that time I have lifted about 3 times and ran about 2. I am of the vein that overexertion is no good when you are hackin coughing and can't swallow. So, how do you make sure you don't undo the tenuous progress you have striven for? Well don't eat Fritos! I dove into a bag of these salty, fried delights one day to accidentally flip over and read the calorie count and other horrors. the bag was only 160 calories, a big strappin man as myself can absorb that no problem, but, whats this? 90 of those calories was fat!!! I suddenly saw myself gnawing on pork craklins and getting the same results.
Now, Running and exercising 5 times a week does alot of biological things to you. Eventually, your mood improves, your energy goes up, your libido hops on the happy train, and your clothes start to fit a little better. Now you will never get skinny by exercising, not in your mid to late 30s such as i am. I cried for 2 days when i figured this out. You got to watch what you are putting in the gullet, and anything 50% fat ain't gonna do it. Now I hear you cavemen supporters out there winding up, lemme tell you something, if we were all so lucky as to be eaten by a sabre toothed tiger at the ripe old age of 22, while constantly moving, and foraging for food, we would all leave great looking corpses with fantastic teeth. Unfortunately, I decided to be born in an era where food falls from the sky, i can talk to my friends across the universe from my pc, and if i didn't really want to, I wouldn't have to wipe my own heiney. Ladies and gents the future is truly now! Now i am not totally dissing the caveman lifestyle proponents, i'm just saying that maybe our protein choices should be a little more thought out than gnawing on organs and strips of fat.
With this in mind, this enlightened 21st century man has began to read what he eats, and boy is it a horror story . Another victim to the food label? regular ole hotdogs, man i loved them too. Anywho, I suggest that you go and get your fave snack and sit down and look at what goes into your body. Poop in poop out my data card punching dad used to say, so make sure you are not putting in poop.

a wasted week?

Due to a death in the family, a lot of travel, and sickness that spread throughout the household, i found only one workout this week. A wasted week? maybe, maybe not. Now here's something to think about, we have a finite number of workout days, no matter who you are, what you do sooner or later these days will be over. Now before you go scrambling to grab the nearest sweating to the oldies tape, remember, we as humans need stimulus and time to absorb what we've done. I think it is a good thing to break from your workout routine once a while and let our bodies( especially the bodies over 35) time to recoup. now does that mean throw down some ho-hos and lie prone for one week? no, but take yourself off the routine treadmill. go for a walk, take a swim, play with your children, and enjoy a french fry once a while. I for one am glad for this time off, and it makes me look even more forward to tomorrow's weight training session. Now the jogging? that's a different story.

ode to a callus

Anyone who's ever done anything slightly exercise worthy knows one thing, Sooner or later, your gonna either get a blister or a callus. Now blisters are yucky, I gotta pop them and they annoy me to no end, but calluses are cool. They show that you have been progressively training, and the body is building itself up to handle the workload. This is where i have found my training. I am slowly slowly seeing improvement in every aspect. My running is getting better everytime I go out, my weights go up every time i lift. Last nite my wife noticed that my knees don't quite make the snaps crackles and pops they used to, and i have found that i come back from the run feeling winded but good, and while i still don't look forward to getting out there (think its mostly the weather, if you're on the east coast, you know it ain't been jogging season), i get out there and every time push that little bit harder. Tonite I go for a run, and I'm bringing my Drill instructor. I am hoping to beat her up the hill today.
that's about it, for me, except that i have started to eat a salad a day, and i think my wife would prefer i left off the raw broccoli for gaseous reasons.
Remember in your endeavours, we want to callus, not blister. Take it easy make little gains, and soon you'll be where we need to be.

the return of the pink bike

Ok i am slowly starting to see some slight improvement on my wind in the running department. Now this doesn't mean by any stretch i am running my entire time out, but i can run for several minutes at a time and was feeling confident. Now, if you knew me you would know that confidence is something that cannot be allowed, so I decided to knock myself down a peg or two with the dreaded pigtailed drill instructor on a pink bike.
If you have read the previous post about the first excursion with this pint sized warrior of the wasteland, you would know that things didn't go well, matter of fact my feelings were down right hurt. So with a long talk about how to encourage someone, and what was to be expected, we went out into the cold dark night. Things went great!! My daughter was not only very positive, but she kept me company, and actually caused me to shave several minutes off my run!! with this done i have now made a deal with the devil, and will allow her to ride with me once a week. I have also found i have been slipping off my original running plan somewhat, but i am trying to make improvements every time i leave the house. With this in mind i have found 2 tools i couldn't live without. a stopwatch, and a pedometer. the stopwatch is key to help me kkep up with how much time i am actually jogging, and how much i am walking. with this knowledge i can make sure i run more each time, and the pedometer will help me find out the distance i am actually traveling which i am not particularly worried about now, but will become more and more important as the journey progresses.
As for the weight training, i am still adding 5 lbs to each workout, I have been concentrating on form over weight, and i am starting to feel more confidence in those workouts as well, I wonder if my daughter would mind hanging out while i lift.....................

the weighting game

I was never what you would call "svelte" even in my most active, most brimming with testosterone, having hair on my head, time of my life, i was a big man. This is pretty hard considering i am 5'11 so squat is the word of the day. Now lets fast forward a few thousand bacon cheeseburgers and a brewery of beer, and i weigh approximately the same as a female lion, or a side of beef. Now, having lifted weights I just chalked it up to getting bigger, but it was all a lie. there are plenty of people who weigh less than I who are as strong as I, and there are a heck of alot of people who can run further than i, and i think i could as well with about a rucksack worth of fat off the body.
as of today, i have lost approximately 10 lbs doing little more than cutting out my beer during the week, and fried foods, but i would love to be down at least 50lbs by the time of the race. So I have to bring up the most dreaded of gym equipment, the scale. I weigh myself every 7 days, and i am hoping for a slight decrease in weight each week from the simple addition of working out 5 days a week from 3, ans well as the cardio of the running, but will this be enough? when i start to loose significant weight i will burn less calories because of simply not working as hard carrying the weight.( ain't that a stinker, being fat actually helps you lose weight) so i am toying with some sort of diet modification and man i do not want to go there. Either way I will keep you informed.
as for the training all went well, i did miss one day of running due to bad weather which means i am going to have to come up with an alternative for jogging on the dreary cold days. and i finally made it to "big plates" on the weight training, a whopping 50lbs added to the bar, kinda fun considering i was squatting and pressing around 300 lbs.

who is this old man peeing all over the toilet

OK week 2 is in the bag and i have made some startling revelations. One, I am horribly, horribly out of what is known as "conditioning". If the zombie horde is ever to come and according to my sources, they will; I shall be the fodder that will allow others to escape. I find that i can't really run any discernable distance without looking for a place to lie down. I think one of my problems is the actual mechanics of running, it seems that i don't know how to run. When i started this, I found that I ran on the balls of my feet, and was told that unless I am trying to sneak up on someone this is hogwash, and i should actually have a roll to the foot starting with heel to toe. This means that i have to teach myself to run and now find my new mantra "heel toe, heel toe" instead of "don't throw up, don't throw up" not that throwing up is a bad thing, but more on that later.
The second thing I have learned is that somewhere in the middle of the night i age 30-40 years so that an ancient man rises up out of the bed, hobbles to the toilet, and pees all over the seat because his knees are jockeying for position of which will hit the floor first. This strange occurence seems to clear itself up after a little bit, but the first couple of days my wife was surprised to meet her future husband now in the present, and i found that i can make old man noises on cue if there is anything needed below waist level. I have begun to add linoment to my regimen using biofreeze on my knees with some good results you can learn more about it here:http://www.biofreeze.com/
Other than that things are doing well, I have enjoyed the 5X5 workout system, and it does keep me motivated adding 5 lbs to every workout, but i have a feeling in the next couple of weeks, this is going to become arduous as well. The running is slow in the gains, but i am seeing a small improvement each time out, and while i don't know if I am going to make my goal of one mile in one month, i do feel that my wind and endurance is improving.
Check back with me next week when i shall address the most nightmarish of all things, the scale.

on pink bikes, podiatrists, and why all fat men should fear compression shorts

OK first week is in the bag, and i have never been so bone tired. I stuck to the programs outlined in my previous entry, and i am glad that i decided to start the weight lifting at the bar instead of the weights i am used to. These weight training sessions became my stretching and bitching sessions ( special thanks to my lovely wife who got to put up with both).The old adage you must walk before you run is so true, and i spent the majority of my time walking instead of running. My main mission was just to make it out the door and stay out at a brisk pace for 30 minutes.

The very first night I took my beautiful daughter with her bike newly liberated of it's training wheels on my maiden jaunt. i would rather have a rabid drill instructor out of Paris island with a bad hair cut than my princess as a training coach. I heard things like: "suck it up!", "boy you're really bad at this", and "are you having a seizure?". Needless to say my next foray out I decided to go it alone, so i could gasp in peace.

Now on to the good foot doctor. I recommend that if you ever had problems with your feet find a competent podiatrist, and get them looked at. Now if you don't have insurance or can't find a doctor that didn't graduate from Tijuana, let me illuminate you. Take your favorite pair of shoes, flip on over and look how your tread is worn. if the tread is worn on the inside of the shoe you have what is known as overpronated feet. if the outside of your shoe is worn you underpronate.

now look at the arch of your foot. if you have one good for you, if you don't you are what is known as flatfooted, and you probably already know this. now my copay is $25.oo i saved you at least that so we will call it even at $5.00, pay up. There you just went to the foot doctors

Finally,

I have rather large legs, i like to think its from years of squats, but the fried chicken probably didn't hurt. after an exhaustive search and study with speaking to literally a real person, i have found a solution to the unbearable chaffing that is to come from the friction caused by thighs rubbing together enough to start a forest fire. A good pair of compression shorts help protect the tender spots, while adding support to the muscle in the upper legs. I bought and have enjoyed so far the underarmour shorts. you can find them here: www.Underarmour.com these have been a life saver, but word of warning, if you have ever had a relationship with a French fry, a cheese steak, or anything remotely tasty, do not put these things on and stand in front of a mirror. If by chance you do I suggest hard liquor and one day bed rest, burn all mirrors.

That's about it, I will next time discuss shoes, why they are cruel, and why you never trust a dvd on stretching.

The plan is set

OK,
my initial decision to run this insane race, i need to do a serious overhaul on my body. As I have said, i have lifted weights most of my adult life, and i don't see that changing. So I have decided on a 5 day workout regimen with Monday, Wedsday, and Friday going to weight training, and Tuesday and Thursday being my jogging days. My weight training I will be following the strong lifts 5X5 routine. this is a great basic routine, that should cover all major body parts. I am used to a 3 day routine albeit 2 body parts a day and not total body conditioning, so we shall see how this goes. anyways, if your interested here is the website:http://stronglifts.com/stronglifts-5x5-beginner-strength-training-program/.
For my jogging criteria, i will be using a modified"from couch to 5k running plan" Sounds right up my alley. here is the website for it as well http://www.coolrunning.com/engine/2/2_3/181.shtml.
as the year progresses, i will be flipping these two regimens so that i am lifting 2 times a week and running three. I will probably let the weight training go and do primarily body weight exercises the last month of training and will be actively searching for body weight workout plans that encorporate a bear walk for scrambling under barbed wire, as well as the always fun push ups, pull ups and the infamous "burpies"
Think thast about it for my plans of course there will be some dietary restrictions, and i need to see my podiatrist to find out what type of shoe i need, and whether or not all the broken toes and ankles over the years are gonna give me trouble. so stay tuned for that.