The “fitness center” at the Grand Hyatt Erawan was a joke.  I didn’t take any pictures of the facility itself which is a fail on my part, but what was awesome was the treadmill itself.  This was the nicest treadmill I have ever run on.  It was so nice I took pictures of it.

This thing had a really nice touch screen monitor with integrated picture and video advertisements and about 20 available languages.  The downside of this was that I couldn’t figure out for the life of my how to set up an interval workout, which is what I wanted to do.  That’s why I got stuck just running hard at a relatively steady pace.

The display was really nice and you could hit those arrows on the left of each data field to hide the info.  That was a big deal for me.  Running on treadmills can be boring sometimes and the worst part is having your time and distance constantly ticking along in front of your face.  “A watched pot never boils” has got nothing on “a watched distance counter never moves” for treadmill runners.  So being able to hide those was  a nice feature.  The not nice feature?  Advertisements for the hotel restaurants while you’re running.  Including full color, high resolution pictures of the food.  Yeah, counterproductive.

But that’s not all.  This treadmill interface was so nice it had GAMES.

They weren’t Civ V or Call of Duty or anything but they were good time killers and better than watching food adverts.  The touchscreen interface worked well but the game AI was pretty dumb.  So much so that the connect form game wasn’t even worth playing once you figured out how it played.  I’d also like to point out that I didn’t play the games while I was running on the treadmill but tried them while I was riding on the exercise bike the next night.

Lastly, I want you to notice the two small yellow levers on the side rails on either side of treadmill in the top picture.  Because I didn’t notice them when I started running.  One of those levers increases or decreases the incline and the other does the speed.  If you’re aware of those levers that’s a really nice feature and one that I did use eventually.  It’s way easier to adjust your speed and intensity by giving one of those levers a quick slap than trying to aim a finger jab at a touchscreen button.  The problem arises if you don’t notice those levers and you accidentally increase the incline by 1.5% without realizing it.  Yeah, don’t do that.

I spent last week from Sunday evening through Thursday close of business at the Grand Hyatt Erawan in Bangkok for a work conference.  It was a really nice hotel and the food for the week was out of control in terms of variety, quality, quantity and frequency.

I brought my workout gear with the best of intentions.  However, I only managed two runs and one pushup workout.  I went down to swim one night and found out the pool was less than a meter deep at one end.  Not exactly conducive to lap swimming.

I so poorly managed my time and motivation on Sunday that I ended up running on the treadmill in the hotel’s joke of a fitness center at 23.30.  Not ideal but at least I did it.

I only did a short run but I went pretty hard . . . at least is felt that way.  The time didn’t really reflect that.

More push-ups.  Not too much extra rest.  30-seconds here and 30-seconds there.  The final 58 weren’t as hard as I expected.

I was going to do another 30-minute lap session in the pool but the weather was amazing today so instead I just spent an hour or two at the pool goofing around, swimming, diving and being a big kid.  Had fun, smoked myself and got a good sunburn.  Days like this make me understand why so many people retire here . . .

I didn’t do this run yesterday like I normally would have because I spent the whole day driving back and forth to Bangkok for a business meeting and then went to a business association dinner event that night.  I could have squeezed the run in somewhere but it would have been a ridiculous pain in the ass or would have meant being up past midnight.  Neither of those was worth it so I ran today.  Flexibility isn’t failure.

Week 6, day 1 of Hundred Pushups.

Ouch.  Unlike the last couple of training days where we were doing four double sets of fewer reps followed by one big set, today we went back to five higher rep sets.

This is a lot reps with only 60-seconds scheduled rest.  I have to confess that after the second, third and fourth sets I did give myself an extra 30-seconds rest.  And even with that I still had to break the reps up into a lot of chunks (using APFT standard rest protocols, naturally).

This was a challenging day.  Based on how this felt, I’m predicting a redo of weeks 5 and 6 after my final max effort test.

Another thing that I like about this program is the rep counts.  Instead of just using equal reps across all sets I feel like the pattern they’re using is a huge psychological boost (heavy in the front, “easy” sets in the middle and then a hard effort at the end).  It’s kind of like a mini version of wave programming (BTW there are much more sophisticated and informative explanations of this protocol across the web on sites like T-Nation and others but this is the shortest and sweetest).

I used to (meaning before last Christmas) use Fitocracy.  I’m not really a huge fan of the online fitness community thing but that might just be because I’ve never really gotten into it and I haven’t in the past connected with too many people on the various platforms.  I’m willing to admit that failing to connect with other people may reduce the utility and enjoyment of fitness community apps.

Moving on.  After I got home from my unplanned trip to Michigan in February, my girlfriend got me to sign up for Tribesports because she and her running partner were on it.  So here’s the conundrum:  I don’t really like Tribesports.  I haven’t spent a TON of time messing with it, but just so far I prefer the interface and layout of Fitocracy.  So now I have to decide if I want to use Tribesports – where I have actual connections with actual people but I don’t really like the interface – or if I want to go back to Fitocracy – where I don’t know anybody but whose interface I find more appealing.  Either way I’m going to have to go back and meticulously enter a bunch of back data to get workout credit for all the exercise I’ve done lately that I haven’t entered into either of them.

The best/worst solution would be to simultaneously use BOTH of them so that I get to use Fitocracy where I enjoy the interface (best) but stay engaged with Tribesports so that I can interact with my friends and connections (best).  But that means double the work and double the data entry (worst).

The jury is still out.  We’ll see what I end up doing.  Whichever way I end up going (even if it’s both ways . . . that came out wrong) I think I’ll add a link to my [insert community fitness app name here] link into the sidebar so that folks can take a look at it.