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.

Short, hard run this morning.  I did a little warm-up and cool down jogging but otherwise stuck to the schedule.  Four repeats of 400m hard running followed by 200m of recovery running (i.e. very slow jogging). 

I really hate the area around my apartment for interval running.  It’s a busy pedestrian and vehicular area with irregular footing.  I need to do some reconnaissance and find a running track or path that I can use for my intervals, especially when they get longer.

I ran the first 400m harder than I probably should have since I kind of wanted to set a new (recent) PR for the quarter mile.  It still wasn’t a 100% effort but pretty well run.  It’s a little discouraging to think that in order to achieve my goal I need to run FASTER than the pace of that first quarter mile for an entire two mile run test.

No one said it would be easy, just that it would be worth it.