A thousand push-ups and five hundred sit-ups later …

I’m holding up pretty well.  So well in fact that I’m wondering if I should up the volume for the remaining five days.  Maybe 250 push-ups and125 sit-ups per day.  But I’m going to hold to a) trust the process and b) discretion is the better part of valor and stick with the plan.  The push-ups spread throughout the day are the easiest and I really dislike the push-ups en mass.  The sit-ups are sit-ups.  I just need to get faster at sit-ups so they’re not as big a challenge as the push-ups.

Easy four miles on the treadmill tonight.  The weather was fine but it was pretty late and I wanted to give my foot another relatively low impact day.  Combined with my running rest day tomorrow it should be enough to get my heel back up to 100%.  Although, I am now convinced that the footpod for my Garmin is not calibrated correctly.  As you can see from the run data at the end of the post, the Garmin footpod tracked at 4-miles, while over the same period the treadmill tracked 7 kilometers, so I missed about 3/8-mile somewhere.  I know that treadmill’s aren’t exactly finely calibrated themselves but I still think that next time I run outside I’ll recalibrate the footpod.

Another day down; this weekend I’ll try to remember to post my full run schedule for October and also my schedule for the final CPFT and the intermediate diagnostic.  As a special treat, I’ll try and figure out how to post the video that I took of my original diagnostic.  No promises though.

Lightning and light rain tonight combined with semi-low motivation moving in from the west resulted in a treadmill interval workout tonight.  I prefer running outside but this was probably a good thing since I have a little pain in the rear outside of my right foot between the heel and the ankle bump thing.  I may do tomorrow’s easy four on the treadmill as well just to reduce the impact on the foot until it sorts itself out.

So the run workout went pretty well (6 x 400m with 200m rest intervals followed by 4 x 200m with 100m rest intervals at a harder pace).  But at the same time it was really discouraging: the hard pace on the 200m intervals (I’d call it 90% effort?) was still slower than the pace I’ll have to run the whole two miles to meet my goal.  Yeah.  Gotta trust the process.  Have a plan, execute the plan.  Do the work, test and adjust as necessary along the way.  The run program I’m on now is 12-weeks long.  I think I’m going to do a full blown half way point diagnostic CPFT at that point to see where I am and how much further I have to go.  Then I can figure out how to get there over the second half of my allotted time.

The numbers for tonight’s run are at the end of the post.

As for the push-ups and sit-ups, they actually went really well.  I was dreading the push-ups because push-ups suck.  And two hundred push-ups sucks a lot.  Plus just saying the number messes with my mind.  But you know what?  Actually doing the push-ups wasn’t as bad as dreading them leading up to the workout.  I’m still finding my limits on multiple set, high volume pushup work so my set totals are a little variable.  But the key right now is just the volume.  My chest and shoulders are holding up well considering the number I’m doing collectively.  Which shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does considering the numbers of push-ups I’ve done over extended periods of time in multiple periods of my life.

Anyway, the push-up sets for tonight were:

   * 30
   * 30
   * 30
   * 25
   * 25
   * 30
   * 15
   * 15
My goal with these in the next week is to do the 200 push-ups in less than the eight sets it’s currently taking me.  We’ll see.

The sit-ups were fine.  Four sets of twenty-five as fast as I could do them with one minute rest intervals.  I’m thinking of doing sit-up pace/speed training with a metronome after the current workout program runs its course.

That’s it for tonight.  Another busy exercise day tomorrow. I’m going to try and spread the workouts across the day so I’m not killing myself at nine o’clock at night but we’ll see what actually happens.

Lots I could write about today and even some left over from yesterday, but it is too late and I’m too tired.  These conference calls with the States are brutal.  Stupid time zones.

1) Day 3 of the new PU program: starting to feel cumulative fatigue and the cascade of DOMS in my chest and shoulders.  I still cruised through my ten sets of twenty, starting at 0700 and going until I left work around 1715.  But six hundred push-ups in three days is starting to take its toll.  The next seven days will be interesting …

2) 100 sit-ups as fast as I could today.  As fast as I could turned out to be 2:45.  Not great but I’ve got plenty of time to get where I need to be.

3) In the fitness center while I was lifting an Australian guy was working out and watching me lift.  During a break between sets of my last exercise he asked me, “are you training for a sport, or something”?  Yup, that’s right.  When I lift I look like athlete in training.  Why is this hat so tight?

4) Four miles easy is not so easy when it comes late at night and after a plethora of other fitness activities throughout the day.  Ugh, part 2. 

5) On days when I have multiple workouts planned (PU/SU, run, lift, etc.) I absolutely have to figure out a way to spread them out over the course of the day.  Stacking them up at one time just makes them interfere with each other

.

Ugh.

I got a late start tonight on my workouts.  I didn’t get up early enough to do either my PU/SU or run before work so I had to do them both after.  But a last minute 7pm conference call, plus a follow up call after the main call mean I didn’t even leave on my run until quarter after eight.  And the fact that I even got out the door was amazing.  Motivation was low around six thirty.

Anyway, I went out on my scheduled interval run (4 x 800m with 400m recovery intervals) and was halfway in to it before I realized that maybe I should have done my PU/SU work before I totally smoked myself running.  Oh, well.  Something else I realized: this is the first time I have ever done timed 1/2-mile intervals.  I’ve done quarter mile intervals a bunch of times, but never halfs.  Which showed itself, oh, immediately; because I had no idea how to pace myself through even one 1/2-mile interval much less four.  I bonked hard on the last one.  Nonetheless it was a good workout (among other reasons because it sucked) and one of the main reasons I picked this particular run program was that it has a lot of long interval sets.

So here are the numbers for tonight’s run:

My PU/SU workout is worthy of a long saga itself but it’s really late and I’m really tired.  Let me just mention here that I am ridiculously proud of my push-up workout tonight and even if I’m completely crippled and can’t even dress myself in the morning it was totally worth it.  And if I’m not I give all the credit to chocolate milk.  The sit-ups were okay too.  Bottom line: 200 push-ups in nine sets with two minute rest intervals and 100 sit-ups in “speed sets” of 25 with one minute rest in between.

Not bad for a night when I almost didn’t get off the couch.

Today I started my new push-up workout.  Starting with a set right after I got out of bed this morning I did ten sets of twenty push-ups spread throughout the day.  About ever hour or so (if I was working on something I waited until I finished) I would close the door to my office and knock out twenty quick push-ups.

I’m not sure what my coworkers thought of me closing my door every hour and re-opening it in just a moment slightly flushed and breathing a little heavily.  Oh, well. The cost of progress.

The push-ups felt great all day.  The sets never got too hard and I didn’t have any significant collective fatigue or anything like that.  I was pleasantly surprised.  

Tonight I suddenly realized that I had no plan for sit-ups!  So in true “git ‘er dun” fashion I sat down, hooked my feet under something heavy and knocked out one hundred sit-ups as fast as I could.  Which was not very fast.  Although I didn’t time it.  Which in retrospect seems like a mistake.  Next time I will time it.  For time.

Ahem.  Moving on.  What I have decided is that I’m going to do the same thing with sit-ups that I’m doing with push-ups for the next ten days but in reverse and focusing on speed instead of volume.  So on days when I spread my push-ups out over the day (like today) I’ll do one hundred sit-ups as fast as I can in one set.  On the days when I try to do all my push-ups at one time in as few sets as possible I’ll do four sets of sit-ups, twenty-five each going as fast as I can and with some as yet undetermined rest interval in between.

When I rest and then test my push-ups after the ten days I’ll do the same with my sit-ups and then come up with a new plan for both of them.

I picked a new plan for push-ups this week.  I found it the way that everyone finds everything these days: on a Google search.  I was cruising through a ton of search results and found this one on Military.com (http://www.military.com/military-fitness/workouts/try-pushup-push-workout).  I liked it for a bunch of reasons:

1) It’s simple.
2) It’s high volume.
3) It claims to over a significant increase in my one set maximum in a short amount of time.

So for the next 10-days I will be following this plan which is basically to do 200 push-ups a day; either as a single workout done in as few sets as possible or throughout the course of the day.  

Push-up workouts really subscribe to the paradox of choice.  There are so many things you can do and honestly most of them are probably going to work.  Let’s face it, if your goal is to be able to do more push-ups and you just DO MORE PUSH-UPS, you’re probably pretty close to the solution.  I have a bunch of old workouts from my past, from friends, from the internet … so I just grabbed this one out of the ether and we’re going to knock it out.

One component of this routine is a couple days of rest at the end followed by a two minute push-up test to see the effects.  Check back in two weeks and a day to see how I do.

(Sit-up plan pending.  To be determined before I workout tomorrow.)

Today was the first long run of my running program.  It was only five miles, which is a distance that I’ve been running on my own during my training up to this point.   Nice easy run on my standard run route.  I only have two run routes from my apartment and one is much better than the other with regard to traffic.  I can see myself getting very, very bored over the next few months.

The five runs for about eighteen and a quarter miles is the heaviest running week I’ve done in a long time.  A long, long time.  My legs have definitely felt it.  My leg fatigue has been definitely noticeable although there hasn’t been any extra soreness which is good.  I’m going to stick strictly to the schedule for at least one more week to gauge my leg fatigue and settle into the schedule.  After that I’ll try to work in some biking and swimming for variety.

Yesterday I actually woke up early (and even more amazingly actually got out of bed rather than just going back to sleep until the last possible minute) and knocked out my run BEFORE work. It felt great and I really liked doing my workout first thing in the morning. For years – and years and years – I worked out in the morning but without extrinsic motivation I haven’t been up to it for quite a while. Yesterday I finally did.

Today I woke up early again but I just didn’t have time to workout, cool down (I sweat gallons) and get ready in time to leave for work. I’d have to get up around four-thirty in the morning given my current commute. So I’ll have to revisit my time scheduling.

On to today: right after work I knocked out the standard PU/SU workout. Felt good. Felt really good. I was able to maintain a strong cadence through all five rounds of push-ups and didn’t notice my shoulders at all. Good things. Sit-ups were sit-ups. I’m glad I stuck with the boring routine for another week but it’s definitely time to mix it up. I’ll have to look around for some good workouts and plug them into the calendar.

Later in the evening I went out and took an easy 4-mile jaunt along my standard run route. Nothing exciting here, just some routine, boring, essential base building. Gotta pour steel into those legs.

I’m going to do one more week of the run program without trying to incorporate anything extra (i.e. biking or swimming). Once I see how I’m reacting to the additional mileage and what days and after what workouts I have energy and could squeeze in some extra work without impinging the next day’s training I’ll start to sneak back in some of my other cardio work.