Getting ready for the month of fitness

I have returned from my business trip to Canada where I managed not to gain too much weight, maybe a pound, maybe. I am also happy that I was able to get a few days of exercise in while I was there, which really helped keep me from feeling fat and lazy, even though I was working 14 hour days with Tim.

I have been thinking of how I am going to fit in 2.5 to 3 hour workouts 5 to 6 days per week with everything else that is going on at work and my life. I am going to have to be extremely committed and I will be challenged to meet my goal. I am not intimidated by this, I am actually looking forward to the challenge.

Month of fitness challenge

I was at the gym the other day sitting in the dry sauna and an Ironman Triathlete and I got to talking. He informed me he was in his "month of fitness". Of course I inquired what the hell is a month of fitness? After we talked about this for a bit, I realized this is something I would love to do with my friends and family.

What is a month of fitness you ask?
A month of fitness is something you do only once a year. You set aside one month, where you give up everything you enjoy for your health and your fitness. You give up all of your vices, such as drinking, junk food, soda, smoking or whatever other vice(s) you may have.

Yes, this idea came from an Ironman, so they know how to suffer for long periods. During his month of fitness he runs 65 to 80 miles a week, rides a couple hundred miles a week and swims 4 to 5 days a week. No, I am not asking everyone, or anyone for that matter, to do what this guy is doing. Well... Not exactly.

The point of this challenge is to get your body healthy, possibly even get over some bad habits, increase your fitness and hopefully some of the good habits stick.

Here are some ideas/guidelines. Give up the refined foods. No white flour, if you must have bread, it has to be whole wheat or whole grain. You get bonus points for no bread. Give up soda, diet and regular, fast food, french fries, fried foods, all of it. Maybe you have a pretty healthy diet, but you just have one bad thing, like stopping at McDonald's for breakfast. Cross those bad habits out for a month!

From a fitness perspective, commit to an exercise goal that will challenge you! Maybe that is walking to the end of the block and back three times a day, maybe that is an hour of walking a day or crazy like that Ironman who is running 80 miles a week, then cycling and swimming! It has to be challenging. This could be anything, it could be weights in the gym, swimming, cycling or even just playing ball with your kids.

Part of this challenge means you have to give up more than the foods and do some exercise. This may mean you will have to cancel on some dates you have, maybe not go out with friends that Friday night so you can squeeze in another hour or two of fitness. This is for one month, your family and friends will be understanding and supportive as this is a goal for you and your health.

For those of us who are building up to a big summer with Half-Ironman's, Endurance Duathlon's, Marathon's and other events, this is a great time to build up some good base miles, trim down and possibly integrate new training for a winter month. Also, could you imagine coming in to the spring with such a great fitness level!

Now, I am not a big fan of New Year's resolutions. I truly think they are horrible because people often set unrealistic goals, fail and go back to where they were or worse. If you want to do something, pick a date and DO IT!!! However, I think January is the perfect month. It is after the holiday's which everyone gains a few pounds during but it is not during the holidays. Come on, who can do Thanksgiving or Christmas without eating some of your favorite home made foods. I'm not cruel...

The rules are easy. Find a friend or family member who you will be accountable to for the month of January. It is ideal if you find someone who will be doing it with you. This person doesn't even need to be at the same fitness level as you. Here are some ideas.

Set your goal of exercising for X hours a week. Sorry, not goal, this is not a goal, this is a COMMITMENT to you and your family. Your friend may be committed to a different goal, but you both will be held accountable for the commitment. Of course you can do betting as to who will achieve what goals, or personal rewards. You hit your commitment for the entire month, maybe you can buy that new pair of shoes you have been looking at!

Another option, say you are going to run, bike and/or swim X distance each week for the month. Or who runs the most miles, wins a prize bought by the loser.

Ultimately this is for you and you will be the winner. Commit to a goal and accomplish it. Eat right and be super fit for a month. Just one month!

Push yourself and you will be surprised.

If you are in, leave a comment with your commitment. Get a friend to join you and get them to post as well.

My commitment:
I am committing to 15 hours per week of fitness. This is a time based commitment for me as I do not know what is going to happen with the stress fracture in my foot yet. I may end up doing a lot of swimming, cycling and weights, we will see. I am honestly gonna try and stretch out 20 hours if work doesn't get too hectic.

That was my fitness goal.

My food commitment is that I will stop drinking soda for the month. That is a huge one for me. In addition I will stay as far away from refined starches, such as white breads and pasta's. I will not touch fried foods and I will try and increase my protein intake drastically.

Anyone willing to join me? What are you going to commit to?

Yes, it has been too long

I need to start updating the blog more often. A quick run down since my last blog post.

I completed the Eugene Marathon, but I was nowhere near as fast as I had hoped/expected. But, I now have a new respect for the distance, that is for sure. I plan on doing another marathon in 2010, maybe Portland or Seattle. We will see.

I have transitioned fully over to barefoot/minimalist running. I know it seems odd, and maybe I am an odd duck. But I have done quite a bit of reading and research and ultimately what it boils down to is there is not a single piece of legitimate research out there that shows running shoes reduce injuries. To the contrary, there is research suggesting modern shoes cause injuries because our feet lose contact (feeling) with what the ground is doing. In addition, modern running shoes promote heel striking, which causes more impact on all of the joints from your ankles all the way up! As an experiment of one I have found that I do have more issues with my IT bands and knees when I run in shoes.

With that revelation about not using shoes any more, I now have a stress fracture in my second metatarsal. YAY! It was a freak accident, which sucked. I was running on a downhill at night in the rain. And when it is raining at night I have a hard time seeing the contours of the road and some objects. As I was running down this hill I landed on a large rock, maybe an inch in diameter, with a fairly pointed side facing up. This hit right where my second toe meets my foot. This caused some immediate pain that I at first thought had cut my foot and/or broke something. Thankfully I was wearing my Vibram Five Fingers which kept it from cutting me. It was painful to continue running but I kind of shrugged it off and finished my run, which was just over a mile.

I continued running for another week and a half. Every time I ran, my foot would feel better, and if I was off of my foot, it would start hurting as soon as I put any weight on it. After a week and a half of the pain not going away, I decided it was time to go see a podiatrist. The podiatrist informed me that I do have a stress fracture in my second metatarsal. So, I am off of running for 3 to 8 weeks as I am in a walking cast.

Although I am not happy that I am now off of running, just as I was getting to the point where I could do runs at a sub 8:00/mile pace, I am looking at this as an opportunity.

I was originally thinking of doing an endurance duathlon this summer, but I have decided maybe this is the perfect opportunity to look at doing a triathlon. So, I have switched over to weight training, swimming and cycling. The weight training is a good thing to do during the winter months anyway. But now I am going to integrate swimming, which I had not originally planned to do this winter. This opens up the possibility of doing a triathlon, which I had previously not considered. We will see how my swimming workouts go, but I may sign up for a Triathlon instead. We will see...

Okay, so, there is an update. Hopefully many more to come.

Getting ready for the Eugene Marathon - which is this weekend

Just a quick note.

My hotel for this weekend sent me a confirmation that I have my rooms for two nights.

I also have received an email from the folks at Eugene Marathon with my bid number, which is 149. Wonder how I got such a low number? They say there will be over 6,000 people running the marathon this year, how cool!

According to the race organizer, you will be able to log on to www.eugenemarathon.com and be able to keep track of my progress through the race.

What has been going on with my fitness

A week from tonight I will be in Eugene hoping to get a good nights rest for the Eugene Marathon. I am very nervous about this, but I am also confident that I will finish it.

I am still losing weight steadily, but I am definitely trying to curb any weight loss, or at least keep it to a minimum. But, I am also struggling not to gain weight. See, I am used to eating 2,500 to 4,000 calories a day, depending on my workouts. However, before a marathon you taper your workouts, which is basically under training so your body is well rested for Marathon day. But, this means my calorie requirements are closer to 2,000 to 2,700 calories a day. So, I am having to be careful to watch my calories.

I am down to 221 pounds, but I have been trying not to lose much or any weight lately. I am asking a lot of my body by asking it to do a marathon and I am not wanting to ask it to lose weight aggressively, and run 26.2 miles. It is not a good idea at all.

Overall, I am feeling good, my body is feeling right, my legs are feeling fresh. However, I am already looking past the marathon, and I have a definite plan for this summer. It is too late to do anything big on the bike, like a double century, and I am not sure I want to do Seattle to Portland again anyway. I am going to work on being faster on the bike and on the run. I have a pretty good pace on the bike. Over the long haul I can average pretty good speeds, but I can't sprint on the bike to save my life. I just don't have that "top end". The same goes for my running, but I am a slow runner all the way around.

For the summer, I am planning on running two to three times a week, and riding three or more times per week. I am planning to run a half marathon at least two to three times a month, training runs, not showing up at races. The other days I am going to work on intervals and and overall increase of my pace and running economy. Two of my co-workers, David and Tim, are going to be doing track workouts every Wednesday at Dunniway Track and I am going to join them.

For the bike, I am going to be doing hill repeats and intervals at least one day a week, and the weekends will be doing 50 to 75 mile training rides.

The end goal is I will get faster, but I will also be within reach of doing any standard distance race, bike or run, and be able to perform at a respectable (to me) level.

My goal around these would be to do a half marathon race at 1:50 or less and for a bike race, I would like to actually contend for a top ten finish. I can do bike races and I can do well wen it doesn't matter, but I have no finishing power, and that is what I am truly looking for.

Oh, and on top of that, I want to drop to below 200 pounds by end of the summer. Ultimately, I want to get down to 195 pounds. That will be 100 pounds lost, which I think would be a cool thing to say. Once I get there, I am going to try and love weights, or at least tolerate them. I want to get my upper body built up a bit so I don't have a wire thin upper body and massive legs. I am not looking to get huge, just to have a well rounded body.

Why it is hard to be me - Sort of

Okay, first lets get one thing off the plate. Mom went back in for more cancer checks today and she now has an official-official clean bill of health!

So, I am starting to track my calories to make sure I am not eating too much or too little. Too much and I am going to gain weight, too little and I am not going to lose weight because I will put my body in to starvation mode. Another thing with too little or too much is your body does not perform at it's peak.

I have the weirdest problem, when I am working out, I have a really hard time getting in enough calories because I tend not to get too hungry most days. So, today I ate what felt like a ton! Here is what I ate.

Breakfast: 240 calories

• 2 protein breakfast bars

Mid-Morning snack: 461 calories

• 1 apples worth of dried apples, all natural (thank you Trader Joe's)
• 1/4 cup of high Omega Fat trail mix
• 2 ounces of turkey breast meat
• 9 cherry tomatoes
• 1 banana

Lunch: 432 calories

• 2.5 ounces of turkey breast meat
• 8 cherry tomatos
• 3 pieces of fiber rye wafer (no yeast, very low carb, high fiber)
• 1 bowl of healthy choice clam chowder.
  

Afternoon snack: 402 calories

• 1 ounce of honey spread over 3 pieces of fiber rye wafer
• 1 fuji apple
• 1 banana
• 1 strawberry fruit bar, all natural

Dinner: 965 calories, I was way behind on calories, had to force myself to eat big

• Foot long sub from subway (Turkey and Ham, no condiments)
• 16 ounces of Orange Juice (Usually would not have OJ, normally I would have something else, but I chose this as it was calories and no caffeine)

Okay, I know some of my friends and family would say everything on this list was disgusting! However, that is not the hard part. Not one thing crossed my lips today that did not taste good. Well, actually, the OJ was way too sweet for me.

For me, the hard part, I felt like I was constantly eating all day! It was too much damn food, but I was trying to actually hit my calorie goal.

I ate 2,540 calories, and I was still 225 calories short of my goal, which was 500 calories below my calories burned number. I burned 3,265 calories for the day after you include my daily calorie burn and the amount of calories I burned on my run today.

So, I am just bitching that I feel like I am almost force feeding myself and I have to eat a ton of food every day. Yes, I could easily get these calories in by adding a ton of carbs or fried foods in my diet, but I am not doing that.

So, it really isn't hard to be me, and I am happy I have my health, and I have the ability to be in this situation. However, today was really difficult to eat enough calories, and I am realizing I am drastically undereating again, so I gotta keep up on the calories. The other problem is now that I am tapering, it means I will not be working out nearly as much, so I have to be careful not to get used to consuming 2500 to 2800 calories a day and then drop my mileage, i.e. calorie burn, and end up gaining too much weight.

The call I didn't want to recieve - again

For a little background, I took mom to an oncology appt late last week to see if she had any signs of cancer. a week before this appointment she had a mamogram done so the Oncologist could review that as well.

The appointment went really well, great doctor, etc. The blood work does not show any signs of cancer, which is great. However, for some reason the damn mammogram has not come back and it has been six days. Mom and I thought, well, if they aren't rushing it back to the doctor, it must not be anything urgent. However, before we left the doctors assistant asked us if we had time to wait around for them to actually get the results back. She called over to the mammogram folks to get the tests faxed over ASAP. After we waited for a while, the assistant told us she has called multiple times but still no dice, but she would call Mom's cell as soon as they had the results.

Well, that ended up being this morning, 10 days later! At 8:30 this morning, they finally called mom with the results. It turns out there were some abnormalities in her breasts and they need to do further tests. DAMNIT!!!

They are getting her in tomorrow to have more tests done, but only a doctor can give her the official results and the technicians can not. We are not sure when she will get official word yet.

Getting this call again, sucked. However, can you imagine what Mom is going through?