October 21, 2009
So I noticed this morning that I definitely have distinct trapezius muscles behind my neck. This is extremely cool, and marks the second time I’ve noticed clearly improved muscle size or definition (the first being my triceps a month or so ago). Traps are a muscle group that I’ve never really had much luck developing, so clearly my shovelgloving is targeting them in addition to the chin-ups I’m doing. After Christmas, my plan is to really target my abdominals, lower back, and lats (provisionally, I’m thinking pull-ups and planks, though squats would probably work, too).
Anyway, I should also note that I ran outside on Thursday as opposed to the treadmill, so my stats are a little wonky in the sidebar. Probably not coincidentally, I forgot to do shovelglove that day, which drops me down to 99% compliance for Hot 100. I upped my chin-ups (8/6 -30lbs), dips (8/8 -30lbs), and bench presses (8/8 165lbs) on Monday but didn’t run. Today I’ll be heading over in the afternoon to do a 5K and another round of chins, dips, and benches. The short of it is that Hot 100 is still coming along nicely.
Oh, and bad news on the tooth front: I’m going to need a root canal. So that’s how I’ll be spending the morning before Halloween! 
Updated: I’ve updated my running and Hot 100 stats in the right sidebar after today’s gym visit. I did 5K at 7.5 mph and bettered my chins to 8/7.
October 14, 2009
Aside from an excellent album by New York band They Might be Giants, the title of this post is also an effective rubric to give an assorted update:
- Teeth: Despite very good adherence to my oral hygiene plan, I have intermittent, excruciating pain in one of my teeth (though it might be two–it’s tough to tell). I don’t know what this means, but I’m hoping I can get an appointment with my dentist soon. In the interests of full disclosure, I was pretty sure I had a cavity in this tooth before I started my plan, but had hoped that I could solve it without a filling. I don’t think that’s going to work
- Time: I don’t have enough of it right now. I’m falling behind on assignment marking, and it would’ve been easy to skip my run and workout this morning. In fact, at at least three points during my 5K run, I had to mentally wrestle with myself not to jump off and get to work. I need to avoid making stress an excuse!
- The Hot 100: speaking of which, below is how I did today on my Hot 100 goals. As you can see, I’m still on track despite missing a few sessions last week and obviously missing Monday’s session due to Thanksgiving/Columbus Day.
- Chin-ups: 8/7 at -35 lbs
- Dips: 8/8 at -35 lbs
- Bench presses: 8/8 at 160 lbs (88% of body weight)
- 5K Run: 7.4 mph
Hopefully I’ll have a positive update on Friday or Saturday in all these categories (especially the tooth thing–it’s incredibly painful!)
October 10, 2009
Well, this was not a terrific week. I broke my streak of compliance on the No-S diet at 40 straight days. Though this is a new personal best, it would be better to now be talking about being on my 45th consecutive day. I also only ran once this week, and even then I didn’t complete a full 5K. The reason: stress over work stuff. I’m like Wally in that classic Dilbert strip:
Asok: I got the stress everyone talks about. What should I do?
Wally: Try using it as an excuse for not exercising.
Asok: So…it’s a good thing?
Wally: It made me the man I am today.
On the positive side, I didn’t missed a day of shovelglove and have continued to improve my chin-ups, dips, and bench press (3 of my 4 Hot 100 goals). On Friday, I did the following:
- Chins: -40 8/8
- Dips: -40 8/8
- Bench: 155lbs (86% BW) 8/8
In particular, my bench is shaping up very nicely, even though I am now performing it after the dips.
Finally, I also need to report a gain in weight. I’m now up to 181.6 lbs. I’m not discouraged by this number. On a week where I ate three big handfuls of Doritos on Wednesday night and barely ran, I’m pretty happy with such a small gain. I know that if I get back on the horse, I’ll be fine.
October 3, 2009
The short version is that I had a great month!
- I didn’t miss a single shovelglove workout (and I moved up to a heavier sledgehammer this month)
- I didn’t have a single failure in my eating plan
- I ran all five days I planned to
- I made some gains on my chin-up, dip, and bench press
- I did a great job following my oral hygiene plan–not perfect, but awfully close.
The other big news is that I hit another new low on the scale:
180.6 lbs
This represents about a seven pound loss this month, which is terrific! I think it’s no accident that my big improvement on the scale came in my best month for fitness and diet compliance. Also that it happened when I started running again. I’ll need to keep these two trends going if I want to see this kind of progress again!
I’ve also done a much better job of keeping my blog updated (it looks like I wrote 10 posts last month), and I’d like to continue this trend as well. I have a couple of posts that I’ve been chipping away at as well, and I’d like to get those finished up sooner rather than later.
October 2, 2009
Even though I’ve given a couple of updates on my running and chin/dip/bench goals for the last 100 days of the year, I think it’s time to write up a little post talking about where I am so far and why I chose them. First, the update for today:
- I ran 5K at a pace of 11.6 km/h (7.2 mph) for the third time this week.
- I also performed two sets of 8 bench presses of 140 lbs (77% of body weight),
- two sets of 8/6 dips at -45 lbs, and
- two sets of 8 chin-ups at -45 lbs.
I think doing the dips after the bench presses makes doing them much harder.
Here’s the long-term summary:
- If I add .1 mph per week, I’ll hit my running goal by the week of December 11th.
- If I add 5 lbs per week to my bench press, I’ll hit my bench press goal by the week of December 4th.
- If I subtract 5 lbs per week for my assisted chin-ups, I’ll hit my chin-up goal by the week of December 4th.
- If I subtract 5 lbs per week for my assisted dips, I’ll hit my dip goal by the week of December 4th.
In the running case, I’ve got one week of wiggle room if I’m not feeling I can bump up the speed at some point in the next three months. For the chin-ups, dips, and bench presses, I have two weeks of wiggle room, which I may well need for the dips.
In summary, so far, so good!
September 29, 2009
Another good run yesterday. On a whim, I decided to jump up .2 mph to 7.2 mph. It was pretty tough, though I wonder how much of that was having run for 10 minutes the night before to try to encourage my buddy Dave to start using his Nike+iPod.
I also bumped up the weight on my chins (-45lbs), dips (-45lbs), and bench press (130lbs). Though I wasn’t able to hit a full 8 reps on the second set for any of them, I hope I’ll be able to by the end of the week.
Yoga
One of the items on my list to incorporate into my life is yoga. I’m horribly inflexible and my assumption is that yoga will improve that. Indeed, there’s a great Iyengar yoga centre near my home. However, one of the revelations from Born to Run, a book I’ll be reviewing in a subsequent post, is that doing yoga almost guarantees a running injury. Of course, in the book, the comment is mostly a throwaway, but it does bear thinking about.
The balance to this question, of course, is general healthfulness–I know that yoga will improve my health, though likely not as significantly as running. I know that yoga generally reduces injury, though perhaps not in someone who plans to run 2-3 week for the forseeable future.
Are there any runners out there who do yoga? What has been your experience?
September 25, 2009
Another time crunch today. I started my treadmill run with less than 35 minutes before I my class. This was both a blessing and a curse: It was a bit of motivation to keep my pace up, but it also meant that once I was five minutes in, that voice that tells me to stop had a reason beyond being tired–not being late. I finished the run with about 6 minutes to spare which meant I ended up teaching my class this morning with sweat pouring off of my face for the first 10 minutes! Here are the details:
Time: 26:36 minutes
Distance: 5 km (3.11 miles)
Calories: 464 kcal
Average Speed: 11.3 km/h (7 mph).
As usual (if you can actually say that when I’ve only done this once before), I also performed dips, chin-ups, and bench presses. Here are the results for those:
Dip: -50lbs 8/8
Chin-up: -50lbs 8/8
Bench: 120lbs 8/8
I added 1-2 reps on the second set for all movements and I think I’m ready to move up in all areas, which is good because I’ll need to in order to stay on course for my Hot 100 goals. I’ve updated my stats in the right column as well.
September 22, 2009
So often-commenter South Beach Steve is running a contest that encourages you to set some goals for the last 100 days of 2009. While I have talked before about making habits rather than goals, I’d like to jump on this particular bandwagon, due in no small part for the potential for fantastic eats. Steve is always raving about his smoking abilities, and I confess I am aroused (my curiosity, that is).
In addition to my eating and workout habits (No-S Diet and Shovelglove), I’ve also taken on running, chin-ups, dips, and bench presses as sort of “extra” things I’m working on. To this point, I’ve mainly just sort of said that these are movements that I’m doing without any real structure or end game. These seem like the perfect issues to focus on for the contest.
So, my goals for the end of the year are as follows:
- 95% or better compliance with No-S and Shovelglove (i.e. 5 or less failures for these systems)
- Do 8 unassisted chin-ups
- Do 8 unassisted dips
- Do 8 bench presses of my body weight
- Run a 5K on the treadmill at an average speed of 8.2 mph
The first goal is the most important, but it’s the one I’m least worried about. There’s two reasons for this: first, both No-S and Shovelglove are full-on habits now and I can’t really see myself failing to reach this goal; second, it’s the only goal that focuses on behaviour, not results. By framing my other goals in terms of results, I am taking my behaviour out of the equation, and relying on my body’s ability to get stronger and faster.
That being said, I do have a plan for meeting all of these goals. This week, I was able to do 8 chin-ups and 8 dips with 50 lbs of assistance. I was also able to do 8 bench presses of 120 lbs. In all three cases, if I add/subtract 5 lbs of resistance/assistance each week, I’ll meet my goal with a little bit of time to spare. The last goal is a bit more nebulous. I’m going to run at a speed of 7.0 mph on Friday and see if I can go the whole 5K. This is only slightly faster than my time on the cross-country run, so I think it is attainable on a treadmill. If I’m able to sustain that pace, I’ll simply add .1 mph to my pace every week. At the end of the year, I’ll hit my goal (again with about a week to spare). This would shave about 4 minutes of my 5K time over the course of 12 weeks. You can see why I’m nervous 
Part of the contest is posting results every 10 days, which is another nice incentive to keep on top of these goals. Perhaps I’ll add a widget in the sidebar to track these goals as well.
If you’re interested in participating, head over to Steve’s blog and post a comment!
September 21, 2009
Well, I was running a bit late this morning, but I still managed to squeak in a full 30 minutes on the treadmill. Unfortunately, the treadmill was in miles, which I don’t use (making it difficult to do calculations in my head while running). Also, I didn’t figure out that the “Speed” variable was miles per hour until I was halfway through the run. The upshot is that I didn’t hit 5K.
I was pretty sure this was going to happen, though, so I told myself from the outset that the only requirement this week was to run for half an hour on both days I’m at the college, nothing else. This (hopefully) avoids the problem of me giving up because I’m not sure how I’m doing. It worked–despite the time crunch, I went the full 30 minutes. Here are the details:
Time: 30:00 minutes
Distance: 4.65 km (2.89 miles)
Calories: 398 kcal
Average Speed: 9.3 km/h (5.78 mph). I did 5.5 mph for the first 15 minutes or so, then realised what the speed meant, then I bumped it up to 6 mph, then I did 7.5 mph in the last minute.
I also decided to complement the running with just a few lifts/movements that I want to improve: the deadlift dip, the chin-up (and its variants), and the bench press. Here are the results for those:
Deadlift Dip: -50lbs 8/6
Chin-up: -50lbs 8/7
Bench: 120lbs 8/7
My running program also has a new wrinkle: I have a competitor. My friend and verbal sparring partner David purchased one of those Nike+ iPod dealies. He suggested I should also purchase one of these gizmos so that we could compete with each other. Sadly, these dealies don’t work with my iPhone 3G(which doubles as my iPod). I will need to rely on the information from my treadmill and my manual data-tracking for now. I’ll figure out a way to get our two running arcs compared later, but for now, I shall throw down the gauntlet with my opening salvo!
Updated Sep. 25 ‘09: I’d mistakenly typed in “deadlift” instead of dips. While setting a goal for deadlifts is great, it isn’t what I’m doing.
