400 Meters at USATF Masters Championships

It was a hot day at the USA Track & Field Masters National Outdoor Championships. It was 95 degrees and all sun at this time of our 400 meter race this afternoon. I ended up placing third with a time of 52.67.

I'm going to just briefly recap my thoughts on preparing and going through the day. The thoughts in this post might seem kind of random, but I've been standing out in the heat all afternoon.

I'm out here without my family. We were thinking about making a trip out of it, but I'm glad that my wife and kids didn't have to sit in the stands on a day like today. It also makes is easy for me to handle meals when I only have myself to worry about. I went to Target yesterday and picked up some groceries. I also have some packets of Shakeology that I use as my pre-race meal. My breakfast this morning was a couple of pouches of oatmeal. You're supposed to mix them with water, but I just eat them. Mid-morning I had an apple and some frozen blueberries and a granola bar. Then the Tropical Shakeology for lunch.

The story of the day was the heat. I waited until almost noon to show up and they were behind schedule because of a medical emergency in the morning. It's a pretty professional crew so they did a good job of getting close. I didn't do as much of a warmup as I usually do because I found myself getting short of breath while practicing accelerations. The check-in area is a big tent so there is shade. We sat in the tent for over a half-hour so I found myself starting to tighten up before the race. I brought some water and gatorade with me in the tent so I made sure to keep hydrated.

We had a couple of guys who were signed up, but did not run. I drew lane two which I wasn't really thrilled with. The one nice thing about having the inside lane is that you can see everyone at the beginning and position yourself coming around the final corner. The world champion for our age group, Antwon Dussett, was there and there are few people in the world in our age group who even come close to us. As expected he won pretty handily. Antwon was not at the National Outdoor Championship last year because he raced in the World Championship. Last year's National Outdoor Champion was in our race and got second place.

My goal has been to medal in the National Championships so I was able to do that again. It seems like I am perennially in the third spot. I've been fortunate to get third in the last two Outdoor Championships and the Indoor this past year. You can't control who is going to show up so I feel better about my time than my place. I had a goal to get under 53 seconds, which I knew I could get based on my practice times. I was able to get quite a bit under that with 52.67. The All-american standard for our age is 52.5 so I was close to that and it gives me something to shoot for next year.

I've got the 200 prelims tomorrow. I have been thinking that it would be very difficult for me to make the final, but based on some of the guys scratching out of the previous events I have a feeling I might have a chance. Mainly I want to be able to get under 24 seconds and if I do that I'll feel good.

Sorry. I've been all over the place here. I've just got a lot of thoughts going through my head right now. I'd better wrap it up and get my rumble roller out while I watch some Olympic coverage.

Finished Another Round of Insanity Asylum

I recently finished my best round of Insanity: The Asylum. I really tried to push hard this time and follow the program exactly as it is written. I did not do a good job toward the end of P90X2 and ended up putting some weight back on. I think that since the USATF Indoor National meet I let myself slide a bit.

I took a lot of video of this round and hope to put something together soon. For now, here are my new fit test numbers and before and after pictures.

I started out at 174 lbs and weighed in at 165 after the 30 days was over.

Not a lot of difference in the pictures from this round other than my chest hair disappearing, but I was able to cut some fat especially in my midsection. I also feel so much better and don't get tired as easily during the workouts.

As Shaun T says, "I'm smiling because I love it."

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.