Today was brutal. I couldn’t run at all. I did walk 50 minutes at 4.0 mph, but it felt like somewhat like cheating. Hopefully next week won’t be as rough. Even the push-ups were rough today. I barely finished that first set of 40. The sets of 30 were still pretty easy.
Time at mile 1.0: 15:05
Time at mile 3.0: 45:05
Push-ups: 40, 30, 30
Weekly Totals:
17.5 miles
500 push-ups
Today was significantly more difficult to run than the past few days. I barely made it through the first mile, and even that wasn’t fast. I walked at 4.0 mph until I crossed 4.0 miles, but felt pretty crappy the whole way.
The time has come for me to get some new shoes. My right foot has started falling asleep during my longer runs. The shoes I have are at least 10 years old now, which is just crazy. It’s not that I’m too cheap to spend the money on some new shoes, I’m just too lazy to go waste time trying on all the different creations that have come out in the past 10 years. If I ever do make it to a shoe store, I’m going to buy 3 or 4 pair so I don’t have to go back for a long time.
So I was content thinking my shoes were the big reason I had such a hard time today, until I logged my progress and realized I had skipped a very important step this morning. I normally drink a Red Bull about 10 minutes before I start my run and I completely forgot to do that this morning. I think that played into the poor performance more than I’d like to admit. I’ll make sure to drink one before running tomorrow.
Time at mile 1.0: 9:12
Time at mile 4.0: 54:12
Push-ups were easy again today, so I mixed it up a little and moved my hands closer together on the final set. That certainly changes which muscles are doing the work. I’ll have to play with that some more in the next few weeks.
Push-ups: 40, 30, 30
I pushed a lot harder through my first mile today, but only managed to go a very small amount faster. I guess that’s the way it goes. I crossed the 1.0 mark at 8:41. I was happy with that outcome, but I was expecting to be faster than that. There’s always tomorrow. After that I got into a nice rhythm of 2 minutes each at 4.0 and 6.5 mph. After crossing 3.0 I walked for another 20 minutes, so my final distance was over 4.0 miles, but I’ll just count it as 4.0.
Time at mile 1.0: 8:41
Time at mile 3.0: 31:34
Total distance: 4.0 miles
Push-ups were easier today than yesterday. I may need to increase my goal sooner than later.
Push-ups: 40, 30, 30.
Day two of this round. I sent a fairly inflammatory email right before leaving for lunch today. I was pretty upset and tried to turn that into a good run. It sort of worked. I ran my first mile under 9:00, but my phone was ringing off the hook, so I paused my running to see what all the fuss was about. It was about the email I sent, so I turned the ringer off and got back on the treadmill. I had a hard time getting back up to speed, but eventually started alternating 2 minutes at 4 mph, 2 minutes at 6.5 mph. I crossed the 3.0 mile mark around 32 minutes, which is much better than yesterday. At that point I decided I wasn’t ready to go back to work yet, so I walked another 10 or 12 minutes at 4.0 mph. I forgot to look at the final distance, so I’m going to be conservative and just count it at 3.5 miles, but I think it was probably closer to 3.8.
The push-ups were more of a challenge today, but not much more. 40, 30, 30.
It seems I’m always starting over, and this week is no different. My goal for this week is to “run” 15 miles over 5 or 6 days. My secondary goal is to do 500 push-ups over the same time period. Technically, I’m on track after today. I ran for about 5 minutes, then walked the rest of the way to my 3 miles. I crossed the virtual finish line at 36 minutes, which makes for an average speed of 5.0 miles per hour. That’s far from good, but at least I did a full 3 miles. I think it may be tough to do 3 miles every single day. The push-ups, on the other hand, are going to be a piece of cake. I probably should have set a higher goal there. I planned on doing sets of 40, 30, 20, and 10, but it was easy enough to just do 40, 30, 30, and be done. Maybe I’ll bump it up next week, depending on how things go.
Today I wasn’t able to get away with just hitting the treadmill. No. Today Sam and Tom came to the gym and we met up with some of Sam’s friends from a previous job. One of them brought “the sled”. The sled is a 60-pound metal structure with three feet, each on a small skid pad. We added a 45 pound disc to each of the two back legs, bringing the total weight of the sled to 150 pounds. Then we pushed it back and forth in the parking lot. One direction we pushed from a high position behind the two legs on the back, and then we switched and pushed from a low position just above the single leg on the front. Each direction was about 35 yards. It was pretty tough. We did each direction 10 times. Most the time you got a break between pushing each direction, but sometimes nobody at that end of the parking lot was ready to go, so you just had to jump back on and push it back.
For those that really wanted to hurt themselves, there was also an army duffel bag filled with sand bags that you could lift to your chest and carry back and forth when it wasn’t your turn on the sled. I wanted to see what it was all about, so I ran the duffel a few times. I didn’t do more than about 3 rounds with the duffel. It was much harder than pushing the sled, because you have to carry all the weight of the bag. I don’t know how much the sand weighed, but it was plenty. With the sled you don’t have to carry any of the weight; you don’t even have to carry all of your own weight. There was nothing as brutal as finishing a round with the duffel and hearing that it was your turn with the sled without any rest. I think that’s what convinced me to stop carrying the duffel.
I said I wouldn’t do any rounds with the duffel next week, but I think we all I know I will.
First let me say that we rode our trainers Monday for about 45 minutes. Then Charmaine got me to agree to do a short ride Tuesday with a local group that calls themselves the boat-dock bandits.
We started the ride at the furthest north west parking lot at UVU. The ride would take us out along the shores of Utah Lake and up to the American Fork boat dock. The group gets its name from upsetting the old man that works the boat dock entrance gate (and always wants to charge the riders or prevent them from turning around inside the parking area).
The short ride turned out to be 22 miles in some pretty serious wind. At one point we couldn’t see more than about 10 feet in front of us because of the dust storm we were riding through. Luckily, the ride was extremely flat and the wind was at our backs the whole way back (we were going more than 30 mph with the wind’s help).
Unfortunately for us, we got back to the car without enough time to go home and get changed for swimming. We did our best, but still arrived a few minutes late.
As it turned out, that huge wind storm we were riding through was enough to close the pool. It’s technically an outdoor pool, even though it has a bubble over it. In severe wind storms, they close the pool to prevent anyone from drowning in the unlikely event that the wind causes the bubble to collapse. So, instead of swimming, or reviewing our videos from last week, we got to do dryland training! By the end, I had to struggle just to stand up so I could drive home. It was fairly embarrassing.
True to its name, the Icebreaker Triathlon was cold. I was ill prepared for how cold it was to come out of the pool, soaking wet, and get on my bike and ride fast in the wind. It wasn’t actually windy, but it was still cold. I had a really hard time breathing the cold air and at one point I noticed my arms and legs had turned completely red. But it sure was fun.
I am definitely rusty when it comes to knowing what to do for these things. I started things off by trying to check-in without my ID. Luckily, Charmaine had reminded me to bring it, so I only had to make an extra trip to the car. Then I went to start warming up in the pool and realized I was the only one without a timing chip. Woops. So I went back to the check-in station and picked up my timing chip… and noticed that I was the only one without body marking, so I fixed that as well.
Warming Up
Zig-Zag Overtake
I think my swim-to-bike transition may have been longer than my actual swim. I should probably work on my transitions someday. The cold definitely added to my slowness, plus I was really breathing hard after swimming hard then running from the pool out to the transition area. I took several minutes putting on my helmet, gloves, socks, and shoes.
Fat Man Riding
Running Home
A lot of the people I meet at the pool seem to be there for a specific purpose: training for a triathlon. They usually tell me that I should do a triathlon. According to them, I would be good. What they don’t know is that I may swim like an animal, but I can’t run worth crap, and I don’t have a road bike. Despite all that, I’ve decided that I am going to do a triathlon next year… not because I think I’ll do well, but because I think it will be fun.
I’m relatively sure that my running skills are my weakest link in getting ready for a triathlon, so I’ve started running on a treadmill once a week. Well, I’ve just barely started, so we’ll see how long I hold out. The first day I ran 2.0 miles at 6.5 miles per hour. That’s right, I was only “running” for about 20 minutes before I was dead. Interestingly enough, it was only my muscles that were dead. Cardiovascularly (is that a word?), I was fine. I couldn’t walk for the next 4 days and was still quite sore on days 5 and 6. But the next week came and I ran 3.2 miles in 31 minutes. I was pretty happy with that result. And the best part was that I only felt sore for about a day. After that I skipped a week, then ran 2 miles the week after that. I tried to run at 8.0 miles per hour for the first mile, but I only made it to about 0.75 mile marker before I had to walk. Since then I’ve skipped another week.
But today is Wednesday again, and that’s the day I’m supposed to run. So I’ll be heading out to run in about 15 minutes. I just wanted to get that in there in case I forget to post about it after lunch.
Here we go again now. Last week my strength was pathetic. I started off a lot better this week, but quickly ran out of steam. I really like the 20-12-8 pyramid we’re doing. I think it’s moving me in the right direction.
Travis said he had to be back by 1:30, but it turned out that he needed to be back by 1:00. Luckily we ended up getting back at 1:09.
Weight: 258.4
Flat Bench:
185/20 205/12 225/8
Incline Bench:
135/20 185/12 205/8
All the adjustable benches were in use when we finished Incline Bench; they were still in use after our Bar Dip routines, so we wound up skipping Incline Bench today.
Bar Dip:
3 (pathetic)
Treadmill:
10 minutes – 0.95 miles