The Week After the USATF Indoor Championships

Well, it's been about a week since the conclusion of the USA Track and Field Indoor National Masters Championships. I need to come up with an acronym for that to shorten it up. From now on it is the USATFINMC. That's much better.

I didn't get an update posted after the meet, so here's what happened on the last day. I ran the 200 meter dash. We had preliminaries in the morning. My goal was to make the final if possible. I knew it would be a fast field of runners and only six spots for the finals so it would be tough, but possible if I ran well. I ran my best indoor 200 and made the finals in the 5th spot. My time was 24.04 (so close to being in the 23s). My left hamstring was starting to get pretty tight so mentally I was concerned about it in the final. I tried to stay as relaxed as possible and get a good warmup in prior to the race. My time was not as good as the prelim, but I still managed to get 4th place.

Overall it was a pretty good meet. Since indoor times are usually slower than outdoor I am pretty optimistic about the outdoor season. It's also bee nice enough that I can start some training on the track early this year.

Since I've been back home I did one P90X2 workout of P.A.P. Upper and Plyocide. I also did one Insanity workout and a short workout on the track. The track workout was three 200s with a 200 walk recovery between each one. I try to stay around 27-28 seconds for each 200 so they are not too fast. It's important not to take too much rest in between. This will help to build up to some of the endurance workouts I have planned for next month where I run 4 - 200s and keep increasing the speed and reducing the rest as the season goes on.

My back has been feeling pretty good lately, but I will continue to keep an eye on things and keep stretching and icing. I have been feeling pretty sick the last couple of days. I normally don't take days off from working out, but I think I can afford to take it easy right now and let my body recover before hitting it hard again.

Indoor 400 Meter Dash Results

I just got back from day one of the USA Track & Field Indoor National Championships. Most of today was pentathalon events and the 400 meter finals. After running a little behind schedule, we ended up with two heats for the 35-39 age group.

There were so many amazing athletes, some former Olympians, and outstanding performances. I saw at least three world records broken today. What a great venue for the meet. The USA Track and Field staff does a great job of building the excitement for the events and letting the fans know when something big is taking place. One of the biggest moments was when a 75 year-old broke the world record in the 400 Meters by running 1:03.90. The announcer pointed out that he was on pace to break the record after his first lap and the crowd went nuts. I'm sure that was somewhat of a factor in his great performance.

The other thing that I love about Masters Track and Field is that there is less of a feeling that you are competing against each other, and more that you are there to help each other. I've seen people giving advice to each other in field events where they are directly competing. People aren't keeping training secrets. They encourage each other and want others to do well.

So you're probably wondering how I did in the 400. I ended up getting third place and taking home the bronze medal. It was pretty well known that World Champion Antwon Dussett was going to win the gold, but after that it was a pretty even field. I had not put together very good performances this winter, only breaking 56 seconds once. I knew I needed to run a much better race. I ran 53.35 today which was better than my outdoor championship 3rd place time last year of 53.42. Not bad for only training using workout programs that I do in my basement (and the fire station once a week). Normally it is hard to run a faster indoor time, so I'll have to look through what I did differently for this meet and apply it to the outdoor season. I'm not sure if running on a track would help me or not.

I have a day off and then the 200 prelims (and hopefully finals) on Sunday. There's a chance we could try to get a relay team together, but I'm not planning on that right now.

I Made It

I made it to Bloomington, Indiana after almost ten total hours of driving today. I needed to go down to Iowa for work this morning and then left from there. It looked like the GPS was going to match my printed directions pretty well so I trusted it. Not always a good idea. I went through so many small towns and took so many turns when I should have just stayed on one road for the first hour. After that it was all good. It was about 80 degrees outside so I tried to take advantage of not being in a hurry and made a lot of stretch stops. I also listened to about half of the audio version of Tony Dungy's book - Uncommon. Very inspirational stuff. I must say that I got a little emotional when he was talking about the 400 meter runner in the Olympics who pulled his hamstring coming around the last turn. His dad came from out of the stands to help him finish the race. That's my all-time most memorable Olympic moment.

My legs were getting pretty stiff from all that time in the car so I really had to be deliberate about getting out every once in a while and stretching. My back had been bothering me for the past couple of weeks. I saw my chiropracter and massage therapist yesterday to try to get ready. I've also spent a lot of time with my rumble roller lately. Overall, now that I'm here I feel pretty good. I felt like I should have taken advantage of the high temperatures lately by doing some training on the track, but I didn't want to take a chance on doing anything that would make me too sore, especially with my lower back issues lately.

Tomorrow's the big day for me. I run the 400 meters in the later afternoon. It is set up as a timed final for my age group and we currently have enough guys where there would be two heats. It's nice to not have to run a preliminary round, but I'm not sure how they will set up the heats. We've often had guys who sign up and then don't show so it's possible that we could have one heat.

So my preparation for today was just to try to stay loose. No running and no workout. I'll do a little foam rolling on the rumble roller tonight and then again tomorrow. My diet for today was a couple of grilled chicken wraps for lunch, an apple and Gatorade for snack, and a turkey sub with a lot of vegetables for supper. I'll see what the hotel has for breakfast tomorrow. I have some Shakeology and a shaker cup and I will have that sometime in the morning.

The Shakeology Cleanse

I've got a lot to cover so I'm going to try to get it all down while it's still in my brain.

I'm less than a week out from the USATF Indoor Masters National Championships in Indiana. I don't yet have my entire trip planned out , but I'm pretty close. Just working out some details of what time I can leave on Thursday. My first race is the 400 meters on Friday afternoon at 3:30 pm so I've got a little time if I didn't want to get all the way there on Thursday night. They are going to run the 400 as a timed final, so we should have a couple of heats and I'm not sure how they put them together. Then I think they just go by time for the places. So you could win your heat and not place. I guess I would rather do that than have to run prelims and a final.

I have been tracking my exercise time for a thing at church called the Journey to Jerusalem where we log our miles and try to make it a certain distance by Easter. As I tracked my time over the past few weeks I realized that I have not taken a day off from exercise during that time. I also did about a week and a half of two workouts a day. Some of those workouts were Insanity: The Asylum followed by P90X2. No wonder my back is mad at me. My lower back problems have returned, but I have stayed ahead of it so far. I had a few days at work with a lot of standing and that seems to be the worst thing for it. I just need to be really careful right now not to push it too hard.

I also weighed in last Friday and the scale showed 172 lbs. That's probably lower than I usually am at this time of the year, but when thinking about having a national track meet next weekend, that's a little higher than I would like to be. I still think I need to take about a second off of my 400 times that I ran so far this year and the lighter I can be while still maintaining strength, the faster I should be. I don't want to add too much more cardio into my workouts and I realized that it is probably my diet more than anything right now that is keeping me above 170 lbs. It's odd to think that not too long ago I was 200 lbs and would have been more than happy to be under 190.

What I decided to do was something called the Shakeology Cleanse. I will go into more detail on what it is on Promisetobefit.com, but basically it is replacing breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a shake. Then you only eat fruits and vegetables for the rest of your snacks. You're supposed to do it for three days. I am just doing it for one as a test run. Drinking the shakes is the easy part because I have three different kinds here at home and there is a lot of variety in some of the recipes. The eating of only fruits and vegetables the rest of the time was the difficult part. I think I could do this for three days and I'm sure it would really take some weight off in a short period of time.

P.A.P. Upper and Lower - P90X2 Phase 3

I've gone through both the PAP Upper and Lower body workouts this week. One thing I can say for those who are just getting started with P90X2. It all leads up to this. Just like the Karate Kid had to learn to paint the fence before he learned how to do Karate, you must first master Phase 1 and 2 of P90X2 to get to the P.A.P. (Post-Activation Potentiation). The workouts were not that bad. It's more of a circuit than many of the other workouts in Phase 1 and 2.

Dr. Marcus Elliot can explain things much better than I can so here's a video about how P.A.P is used in P90X2.


Good stuff. Well, I'm a week away from heading to Indiana for the Masters Track and Field Indoor Championships. I can feel that I am not in as good of shape as I would like to be right now. My lower back has also been bothering me so I've been trying to back off a little bit on some of the workouts after doing 2-a-days until early this week. Now I'm just trying to maintain some conditioning and keep my back healthy until next week.

What a month

February was a very busy month. I haven't posted to the blog much this month and probably haven't been doing a very good job checking in with the people I am coaching. I had a big project at work that took up a lot of time including nights and weekends. The problem is that even now that the project is almost done, everything else has built up behind it. It's like being gone on vacation for three weeks and coming back to everything that has come in during that time, only without the break of actually being on vacation.

So here's a quick update. I decided to run the USA Track & Field Masters National Indoor Championships in a couple of weeks. I plan to run the 400 and the 200 meters. Since I am not currently training on a track all of my workouts will be Beachbody programs. I'm still going through P90X2 and plan to stay on schedule, but I have also added Insanity: The Asylum workouts as well. I think the Asylum workouts help me to train my speed and endurance as much as possible without actually running on a track.

I'm currently doing 2-a-day workouts on about half of the days each week. Typically this would be some kind of cardio workout in the morning and then the P90X2 workout at night. I may also work in a high intensity cross-trainer workout for 20 minutes when I can get away at work. If I do the cross-trainer then I only do one other workout. I need to work on my endurance and also burn off a little fat. I'm about 7 lbs heavy right now for where I would like to be for competition. I'll need to focus a little more on the diet and may do a Shakeology cleanse this week.

I'm also planning to move to Phase 3 of the P90X2 program. I hear the workouts are pretty intense so that will be a good thing right about now. I'll take part of my competition week as the start of a recovery week which will include a few days of Yoga. I've got it all figured out in my head so we'll see how my body responds.

I'll try to update a little more often than I have been lately. It helps to keep me on track and think through what I am doing. We'll see how this all works out. Last year was the first time that I ran an indoor meet for a long time. This year I ran three indoor meets so far so I have at least been on the track. The competition looks pretty good for the Indoor Championships so I will have to step up my training, especially this week.