The Weak In Rock

Ok, so this week wasn’t great, fitness-wise.  I didn’t get to the gym as often as I’d planned to or do all the workouts in my program.  I did manage to get in 2 runs though, which is good, for a total of 5 miles.  Somewhere along the line though I pulled a muscle in my back, most likely through doing a lifting routine wrong.  I was in agony for about 2 and a half days with this really sharp pain in the middle of the left side of my back, right below my shoulder blade.

The pain didn’t abate until last night when Karen (I owe you a couple for that, sweetie) gave me a gentle backrub.  This was also how we figured out that I’d pulled a muscle because she could feel the obvious swelling where the pull was.  It’s not all better yet, but it doesn’t hurt anymore.  It just feels a bit tight.

In spite of these minor failures I still dropped some weight.  As of this morning I’m at 155.5 lbs.  I haven’t been below 155 lbs. in at least 10 years, so this feels like quite an acheivement.  The other thing that feels like an acheivement is my running progress.  I switched up my running program from what was a pure endurance regimen to give a shot at the Couch to 5K program from Coolrunning.com.   Since I’ve been running for a couple of months regularly I stepped it up a notch to meet my fitness level, which is somewhat higher than the audience they’ve designed the program for.

This week’s running plan was to warm up with a brisk walk for 5 minutes.  For me a brisk walk is at a 4 miles per hour pace.  From there I’d run for 60 second intervals with 90 seconds of brisk walking between.  Since I’d already been running for a bit I set my running pace at double my walking pace, or 8 miles per hour.   I finished up with 5 minutes of cooldown - half at my 4 mph pace and the other half at a casual walking pace of 3 mph.  Altogether this results in just over 2.5 miles distance covered and 30 minutes of a fairly intense workout.  This week I’ll shift up to 90 second running intervals - provided I don’t pull or strain anything else.

Technorati Tags: fitness, running

If you want to know how the new President is doing in relation to his campaign promises then bookmark this site:http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/

So far, pretty good.  5 promises kept with 14 in the works, 1 compromise deal made and 1 stalled.  Many other have said it, but it seems like it’s worth saying it again - It’s nice to have a real President again.

That’s not to say I’m going to like everything Obama does - I, for one, think more tax cuts are stupid idea when reduced tax revenue is a given during a recession and the other things that I do want to see the Government do, like healthcare reform, are going to cost a lot of money -  but I do have more confidence that this Administration actually understands the nature of the job they’re there to do.

Technorati Tags: Obama

Ok, so with the momentous inauguration of Barack Obama as the new President just hours away how do I observe it?  By being a smartassed wiseacre, of course.

Naturally, Deadspin beat me to it.  Here’s their list of the Top 10 Ways Sports Can Improve Over The Next Four Years:

1. All youth basketball players must be taught to play man-to-man defense. Zone defense to be banned at any level below college, and coaches must be trained in the fine, lost art of footwork, blocking out, man-ball vision and taking the charge. This will make America strong once again.

2. Dick Vitale, Billy Packer and Joe Buck to be set adrift in the Pacific in a dinghy with only a sextant and a jug of rum.

3. Excessive NFL celebrations not only allowed, but encouraged. And scored by the officials.

4. Soccer gets only a certain number of chances to catch on with Americans, like with Baseball Hall of Fame eligibility. One more shot in 2010, and if it doesn’t take, that’s it.

5. Curb on stadium financing; no more funding elaborate playgrounds for the rich with public money.

6. Creation of a Supreme Court for Athletics. Kige Ramsey is the first Chief Justice.

7. Brett Favre must vacillate on retirement for at least six more seasons. This will keep many newspapers in business and save thousands of jobs.

8. U.S. to withdraw all military from Middle East; invade nations only to stop bullfighting.

9. Wii Olympics to replace regular Olympics.

10. Al Davis to be handcuffed to Richard Simmons for one year for our amusement.

I especially like the last one.  I’d give that old coot about three minutes before even being in close proximity to Richard Simmons would cause him to keel over, thus ending all once and future Raider fans’ long nightmare.

I’m also very much in favor of #3.  I find it beyond absurd that showboating in the end zone is frowned upon as much as it is.  When T.O. called his mom from the end zone I thought it was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen any sports figure do.

This was a good week, fitness goals-wise.  As of this weekend I am down below 157 lbs. for the first time in many, many years.  I kept mostly on track with my workouts, running a total of about 10 miles over the course of the week and not missing a single session of circuit training.  I also got myself a new pull-up bar, although the odd doorjambs in our house made trying to find a doorway to use it in something of a challenge.

Hurray for me.

Seriously, this is good progress.  Now I just have to figure out a way to fit in time for swimming and bike riding in my program so that I can be ready for the sprint tri in June.

Ok, along the lines of what I posted earlier, this is a food rant.

Food is a subject that generally seems to make us Americans loony.  We’re not sensible about food in any way.  We generally eat too much of it (which is why airlines have to have rules about what to do with a passenger won’t fit in a seat on one of their planes - you wouldn’t have to have such a rule if encountering such a person was a rare occurance; it’s also why stadium seats at sports arenas have had to be enlarged in the past 10 years), and what we do eat wouldn’t have been recognized as food by our grandparents when they were young.

Think about that for a moment.  Here’s a great quote from The Art of Manliness:

Don’t eat anything that comes in a box, tube, or bag. If your great-grandfather wouldn’t have recognized it as food, then it’s not fit for consumption. Stay away from packaged foods, filled with all sorts of preservatives and additives that allow them to sit on a shelf and stay good for a year. Not only are these additives not good for you, companies formulate their foods to bypass your natural hunger/satiety signals and keep you munching past the point of natural fullness.

We Americans tend to regard food in one of two utterly unhealthy and slightly demented ways: it’s either medicine to be measured and dosed precisely or something we consumer purely for pleasure and indulgence.  Both attitudes are utterly wrong.  The rest of the blog post at the Art of Manliness gets to the heart of the matter and is worth a read.   And it sums up nicely:

1. Don’t eat anything your grandpa wouldn’t have recognized as food.
2. Eat protein and plenty of it.
3. Eat in a relaxed and unhurried way
4. Eat sensible amounts

Not so tough.  Personally, I’ve been working to keep the packaged foods out of my diet.  One side benefit is that whole, fresh foods cost less.  They also go bad, so that guilts you into eating them instead of other things that you ought to limit your intake of.

The hardest part is the portion control bit.  One trip to a restaurant will throw you for a loop here because restaurants serve us food on plates the size of Texas these days, generally serving portions that are two to three times the amount you should be consuming.   Some folks automatically will halve their restaurant portion and take the rest home.  Not a bad tactic but I can’t seem to make myself do it yet.  Even at home though it’s tempting to go for seconds or load your plate up with food.

Good food makes us feel good.  My curse is that I’m a fairly decent cook.  I generally really, really enjoy the food I cook.  My mashed potatoes are to die for, so it’s hard not to scoop extra onto my plate.  The one tactic that does seem to work is to tell myself that I’m saving this yummy stuff for later, thus making the joy of yummy food continue beyond the meal for which it was prepared.

The other challenge is re-orienting your tastebuds.  We’re programmed to love salty, sweet and fatty foods.  The big food manufacturers manipulate us using this knowledge by loading their packaged snacks and goodies with salt, fat and sugar.  But if you start to avoid this stuff and stick to eating whole and fresh foods you’ll find that the saltiness and the sweetness of packaged stuff is too salty and overly sweet after a while.  And the types of fats they use won’t sit with you as well as natural fats do.

Pardon the pun, I couldn’t resist.

I’ve decided to make some changes round these parts.  I’m dropping my long-standing rule (observed often in the breach) against overly personal posting.  Now don’t fret folks.  I won’t be engaging in miserable navel-gazing anymore often than I have previously.  What I will be doing is keeping a journal here of my attempts at reclaiming my physical fitness.

Two years ago I signed up to ride a century with Team in Training (worthy folks, by the way - the organization that runs TNT, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, does a ton of good work on the part of people living with blood cancers).  I did it to satisfy three goals I had at the time.  The first was to ride a century, something I’d wanted to do before I turned 40, but couldn’t quite manage because of competing priorities.  The second was to do something meaningful in a community sense, which I acheived by raising close to $4,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.  The third was to try to take my portly, out-of-shape self and transform it into something resembling an endurance athlete.

So, I accomplished goal #1.  I rode my bicycle around Lake Tahoe (complete with a dogleg out and back to Trukee to add the extra 30 miles necessary to make that trip into a full 100 miles).  I accomplished goal #2 as mentioned above.  Goal #3, not so much.

Now you’d think that training to ride your bike 100 miles absolutely would have to have an impact on your physical fitness, and it did.  I started out my training as someone who was wiped out after riding 25 or 30 miles and who completely fell apart on any significant climbs.  I finished my training as someone who was able to finish a 100 mile ride, complete with two epic climbs and lots of climbs that would have kicked my ass four months previously.  So, obviously, I was fitter than I’d been when I started.  But what I didn’t understand then that I do now is that fitness and body composition really don’t have a hell of a lot to do with each other.

Let me explain - just because a guy is sporting six-pack abs, a low body fat percentage and lots of muscle definition does not mean that said guy is strong or fit.  Likewise, just because someone is carrying around a lot of body fat and shows little muscle definition does not mean that person is weak or unfit.  My training for the century made me fit.  I had the endurance necessary to turn my pedals over repeatedly enough times to take me and my bicycle on a challenging 100 mile ride.  But I was still overweight.

One of the reasons for this was that I’d focused all of my training on cycling and endurance.  I got my cardiovascular system in great shape (and don’t get me wrong, that’s a good thing, and something I was very much in need of).  But if I tried to run or swim a mile I’d poop out long before I finished.  And I was no more able to lift heavy objects than I had been before I started.  I’ve subsequently learned that lots of endurance training actually robs you of muscle tone unless it is accompanied by strength training to build muscle mass.  This is why touring cyclists and competitive marathon runners have that familiar long and lean look to them (and at that level these folks are doing loads of strength training just to retain what muscle mass they can).

So, here’s the brass tacks - when I started my TNT training in 2007 I weighed 175 lbs.  Over the course of the training I droped 5 lbs, all of it muscle.  Last year I had planned to do a few more centuries and see how many cycling miles I could get under my belt in a year, but due to a neck injury I was told to stay off of my bike by my doctor until he could be reasonably certain that any potential fall wouldn’t make my cervical problems worse.  By the time I got the all clear I’d lost the motivation to ride.  Because I didn’t want to backtrack fitness-wise though I started weight training with some swimmng thrown in and took myself from 170 lbs. to 165.

Along the way I found a program that works for me and decided I needed to give myself a goal.  I plan this summer to participate in at least one Sprint Triathlon (swim = .5 miles; cycle = 13 miles; run = 3 miles).  If the first goes well (it’s part of a three-event series), I’ll do the other two and perhaps tackle an Olympic distance event (swim = 1 mile; cycle = 25 miles; run = 6 miles) in the fall.

Today I am at 158 lbs. with my body fat percentage down below 20% for the first time in dog knows how long.  I do vigorous cardio three times a week (typically running because that’s my weakest link, although I’m now successfully running at a 10 minute mile pace for 2 full miles of my 30 minute runs), with circuit training (typically weight training with dumbells where there is no break between excercises and minimal rest between the three sets I do) also three times a week.  Last week I threw in a long bike ride (actually too long, since I hadn’t done any riding in 8 months) and I think I’ll try to keep doing that, although not overdoing it like I did last week because it seemed to give me a bump that carried through the rest of the week.  I will also start adding in time in the pool again because I’ll need that to be ready for my first Tri-For-Fun in mid-June.

So, what’s the point in detailing all this.  Shame.  If I wuss out on any of this I want to be shamed by my friends and readers.  With the Team In Training event they keep you going by requiring you to fund-raise for them.  You must raise a minimum amount in order to participate in the event.  Halfway through the training if you have not raised your minimum you must authorize them to charge your credit card for that amount.  For the Lake Tahoe century the minimum was $2,500.  No small chunk of change.  I had no problem raising the money, so I never feared I’d be out of pocket for the event, but once you’ve gotten people to hand over their money to support you, you do feel obligated to go through with it.  And as it was, by the time I was halfway through the training I knew I’d be able to do the full ride.

This is different.  I’m not raising money for anyone.  I’m just doing this for me.  So wussing out would only affect me.  That’s why I’m going to keep a journal of my efforts here.  I’ll be logging my workouts, posting my weight, bitching about my aches and pains and probably rambling on occassionally about food (because part of this whole deal is an attempt to change some very bad habits I’d acquired over the years).

I’ll bet your year started better than Scott Adams’ did:

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/dog_pillow/