I’m back from an emergency trip stateside. Weather, travel, the International Date Line and lack of internet access combined to destroy my workout and posting routine. But that’s life, especially when you’re supporting your loved ones.
Back at it tomorrow. See you there. Er, here.
I’m traveling in support of an unexpected personal situation. My workout routine is completely derailed but I’m worried overmuch because of the reason and the nature of the travel.
However, a deal is a deal and a failure is a failure. I am off the tracks with my Beeminder pushup goal because I chose to eat dinner last night instead of doing my workout (although I might have been off track anyway, the international date line is tricky and I haven’t figured out how to fairly account for its affect).
Anyway, we’re about to hit the road. I got up this morning and knocked out Week 4, Day 1 of the Hundred Pushups app program. 120 total pushups in five sets with sixty second rest intervals.
Felt good to sweat. Remember: especially during times of personal stress and emotional challenge, keep taking care of yourself. When you’re stressed, it’s more important to maintain your routine as much as possible and take good care of yourself. Other people won’t understand, but that’s not as importnatn as you think.
Cheers.
Today was my second Hundred Pushups workout. I forgot to grab a screen cap of the workout but if I recall correctly it was something like this:
For a total of 100 pushups. Each set had a 90-second rest interval. So far the program is pretty easy. We’ll have to see how it ramps up.
Next was a run. I decided to mix it up today for two reasons: 1) variety in training is good and 2) I was in a hurry and didn’t want to spend 40-minutes out on the road. Good enough right?
Luckily it was a hard effort run day. It’s a lot easier to adjust your time factor and still get the workout you want on a hard day than on an easy day. On an easy day, less time means less distance. No way around it. But with a hard day you can be creative. I wasn’t that creative since I just did a 2x1600m interval with a warm up, cool down and 200m recovery interval in between, but at least it was something different but still relevant to my goal.
Obviously, my second 1600m wasn’t as strong as the first. Part of that was fitness, part was poor strategy. I think I should have gone a little easier during my recovery period in order to maximize my effort during the hard legs. I really like this workout for the longer sustained effort it requires. I think that 1600m intervals are great for training my mind to the difficulty of a 2-mile run effort.
[Note: I realize that posting the maps is fairly pointless at this point since I run the EXACT SAME ROUTE every time but I’m just getting in the habit because my hope is to start mixing up my run locations so I have a neat collection of maps and even getting some elevation changes in there so I can justifiably post the elevation profiles of my runs too.]
I fell off the wagon over the holidays. Part of it was traveling, but another part of it was wrapping up my run training routine that I had been using without a cold, hard plan of what I was going to do next. Eventually I got going again but even after I started working out again I wasn’t doing any kind of strength training or pushup/situp improvement until the final week of the month.
Lessons learned:
Goals for February:
As I mentioned in my last non-workout post, I’ve relaunched 375CPFT in conjunction with using Beeminder.
I haven’t quite figured out my overarching strategy to get to my objective, but as they say, when in doubt attack. So to get started I’m working on my pushups. I am committing to using the Hundred Pushups app all the way through the program with the goal of being able to do 100 consecutive pushups. Once I can do 100 consecutive pushups I’ll make sure I can do them within 2-minutes and then I’m off to the races.
Now, the Hundred Pushups program is supposed to be six weeks long, but during my diagnostic test (63 pushups, untimed) I placed into the third week of the program. I’m still learning the ins and outs of the app but it also appears that you can repeat a particular day’s workout (or even a whole week) if it was too hard or if you weren’t able to complete it to standards. I don’t know how this will go. Frankly, if I’m up to 100 pushups in just four weeks I’ll be the most amazed person out there. So I’m going to give myself six weeks, which leaves the room to repeat some of the weeks.
So here’s the deal: I have set up a Beeminder goal (linked in the sidebar if I did it right) where the standard is to execute three pushup workouts per week for the next six weeks. The way Beeminder works is that if at any point during the course of that period I miss enough workouts to fall off the completion pace, they’ll charge me ten bucks to reset it and keep going. To make things more interesting (i.e. painful i.e. motivating), I’ll give an equal amount to the current Beeminder pledge to anyone who catches me out of tolerance Beeminder and is the first person to post it the comments.
But wait, there’s more! Because the only people who read this blog are my friends and family (okay, just my girlfriend and my mom) and because my friends and family are wonderful generous people, whoever catches me out of tolerance and wins the pledge, will also get to designate the charity of their choice and I’ll pledge an equal amount to them.
So, follow along as I do pushups, feel free to give me some tips or suggestions and keep your eyes peeled, because if I sham out you and a good cause could get paid.
Now, I haven’t thought this thing all the way through, so if you find any flaws in my system let me know and I’ll revise/update the terms and conditions to make it more effective.
As promised, I tried something new for my cycling workout today. I tried this:
This is a cycling training DVD that I have had for years. And yesterday when I went to use it I had to take it out of the shrink wrap. So yeah. I’m not 100% sure but I believe I got this for free with my CycleOps trainer. Not sure though.
Anyway, I’ve never used a training video before although obviously I know they exist, and I even have a good friend who used to have a special set up in his garage to ride in the winter and watch videos (training and otherwise). I wasn’t sure what to expect, and honestly I wanted to do something different but I didn’t want a flat out, 100% interval intensity workout since I had a hard run scheduled the next day.
Anyway, turns out the video has a several different viewing segments that you can select and mix and match as desired to create the length you want.
I didn’t even actually do the main workout segment (“The Race”, like I said, I was saving my legs for my next run) but I did enjoy the parts I did. It was fun to have a structured program to follow, I enjoyed moving up and down the levels of intensity and moving between the different video segments really broke up the duration and made riding on the trainer much more tolerable. I’m definitely going to look for a good opportunity (scheduling wise) to get more into this DVD and do a good long workout of it that includes the main Race segment.
If you’ve read any of my other cycling posts you know that I normally dread the trainer. But it’s pretty easy to make it more tolerable. If you’re actually training for cycling or a cycling-inclusive event (like a tri) I think that training videos are definitely the way to go. They make long trainer sessions tolerable and give you a good motivational boost and a gauge for how hard you are training and how hard you need to be training. If you’re just spinning along for cardio training or you’re using the cycling as cross-training then the key is entertainment. Set yourself up in front of the TV or your computer and queue up a bunch of YouTube videos or Netflix shows and start churning those legs. I like to listen to audiobooks while I’m riding but that’s just me.
For the time being my focus is on running, so I probably won’t hit the cycling intensity too hard, but after I’ve reached my CPFT goal I’ll start to diversify my effort a little bit. I’ve already got my eye on some other cycling training materials including some online/downloadable/streaming videos with custom sound tracks matched to the intended pace/intensity that look completely badass.
[Note: no Garmin Connect capture today because my 310XT froze up on me. It went to the “Transfer Data” screen and got stuck. It was like that for hours. None of the buttons would work. So yeah, no data on this one. Just a manual place holder on my calendar.]
This post is the public announcement of the relaunch of my tiny little fitness blog. I’m really excited about it though because unlike its previous iteration I really enjoy the interface on this one and have enjoyed posting to it.
Even more than that though (nice alliteration there, huh?) I’m excited because since the holidays and the migration of the blog to WordPress, I have found a couple of tools that I’m going to use to increase my personal accountability (one of my main goals with this thing) and simultaneously increase my engagement with anyone out there on the Interwebs who stops by (which will just be fun). And maybe even give a little money to charity along the way.
The name of the blog is 375CPFT because that is the primary fitness goal I’m working towards right now. I say primary, because part of what I learned over the three months leading up to my holiday hiatus was that concentrating solely and intensively on just CPFT training wasn’t going to work. I got bored. And it’s worse: I HATED the pushup training. A lot. Which led to a lot of skipping. Turns out that in the absence of positive peer pressure I’m a bit of a welsher. Even on promises to myself. But I think I’ve got a solution for that. Keep reading to find out.
What I’ve decided to do is go back to a little more varied routine like the one I was doing prior to setting my CPFT-related goal. For now I’m going to do a varied cardio program of running, swimming and biking with a slightly run-heavy focus. I’m also going to incorporate some other strength training and fitness activities that I enjoy and that will improve my overall fitness, helping me towards my goal. I enjoy this type of training and it’s something that I can and will sustain for long periods. Eventually I’ll tune it more and more towards the running and the 2-mile speed training that I need to do . . . but not yet.
First, the pushups. The run is going to be the hardest part of the test for me to do physically. Frankly, I’m not even sure if I my body is even capable of it (but I’m going to find out). However, the PUSHUPS are the hardest part for me to make myself train for. So I’m going to make training my pushups and being able to do the 100 pushups needed for my goal my first objective.
“But,” I hear you saying, “didn’t you just say that you failed miserably at making yourself do pushups?”
Yes, yes I did.
The solution? Beeminder. What? Exactly. I won’t go into detail in this post but Beeminder is a goal commitment website that combines data gathering and reporting, financial commitments and penalties, and cool graphical displays. In a nutshell what happens is this: you create a goal and some parameters for it, you put it on Beeminder, and if you fail to achieve your stated parameters Beeminder charges you money. Stay on track, achieve your goal, and no penalty. So I’ve created a goal designed to make me follow my designated pushup training program.
It sounds a little crazy, but that’s how interested I am in making this happen. To broaden the appeal of this and to intensify the consequences if I fall off the wagon I’m going to leverage the Beeminder penalties into some giveways to readers here at 375CPFT and also to charity donations.
The link to my Beeminder goal is in the sidebar (I hope – let me know in the comments if it doesn’t work) and I’ll post the details about how you can help me stay on track and do some good for the world in another post soon.
Here we go . . .