13 Pounds...What?

I lost thirteen pounds in the past two weeks on the Ultimate Reset. I figured after last week's weight loss that I was about as light as I was going to get. Honestly, I can hardly believe it. I even checked the calibration of the scale that I have been using. Imagine if I would have done this before a race. I would have to think that not carrying around an extra thirteen pounds would allow me to run even faster, whether the weight is from water, fat, or wherever else it is coming from. I'm already planning my diet and exercise strategy for next year to see if I can hit that All-American standard time in the 400 meters. I'm not really sure I want to go through this again, but maybe in a year I'll forget and only remember the results I got from the program. Just like every time I would start up another round of P90X and then suddenly remember how tough it was.

I'm on the home-stretch. The last seven days of the Ultimate Reset program and I am looking forward to being done. The food hasn't been bad, but it's the convenience more than anything that usually drives how I eat. I keep a lot of bars and Shakeology shakes around because I'm all about convenience when it comes to eating. I need something good for me, but it also has be easy. I understand now that the meals that I am having are really good for me, but there's a part of me that just wants to be able to throw a pizza in the oven, take it out in fifteen minutes, cut it up and start eating. One more week left. I am feeling really great though and have had a lot of energy lately.

"Can you feel this?"

So we're getting ready for school now. My wife is getting back to work and the kids will be starting up in a couple of weeks. This is the first year that we will have both kids in school so it will be nice to be able to take them to the same place every morning.

T-Dawg started up football camp and this is his first year of tackle football. I never played organized football in school so this is all new to me. We figured it would be a good idea to make sure we could get all of his equipment on so one night we put all of the pads on. Then the kids decided they needed to test them. My daughter got out a big inflatable hammer and started hitting him everywhere he had protection. They quickly realized that he did not have a cup. My wife went out and got him one a couple of nights later because it seemed like a good thing to have. The girls were out so I had him put the cup on and then I hit him with one of my daughter's play kitchen utensils a couple of times. Seems to work.

The quote for today is from Shaun T - "I'm smiling because I love it."

Peanut Butter Eggs

The Reese's peanut butter egg is my nemesis. It's a love/hate relationship. I love to eat them and I hate when I have to stop eating them. I know they are not good for me, but there is just something about them that makes me want them so badly. If I pick up a six-pack I will probably eat all six in one sitting unless I have to give some of them away. I have intentionally not picked up any peanut butter eggs for quite a while now. I know that once Easter is over they will not be available for a while so I thought I would pick some up. I bought four packs of six. The Easter Bunny also delivered some to us. There is one pack left and I'm pretty sure I ate most of them.

I also haven't been working out very regularly since the USATFONMC. I am going to do my last week of P90X2 this week and then switch over to Insanity: The Asylum for 30 days. It's easy to think of being either on or off a program and right now I feel like I am off. My diet needs to get back on track so I don't undo the progress of all my hard work over the winter. After all the peanut butter eggs are gone I won't have anything else to worry about. There is a great chocolate-peanut butter Shakeology recipe that I think can get me through until next Easter.

So I guess what I'm trying to say here is it's time to start working out again.

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.

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.

The cooking experiment

I've been trying out some new recipes lately in an effort to help with the dinner around the house. I also wanted to make sure I am incorporating some P90X2 friendly meals for dinner. So far I have tried three recipes from either teambeachbody.com or the P90X2 diet guide. One has been moderately successful with the family and that was a breakfast frittata. The other two did not go so well.

Normally we do pretty well for having healthy dinners. My biggest problem is that I am a pretty picky eater, especially when it comes to things that are good for you. I could eat cheeseburgers, hot dogs, and pizza every day. But I have to choke down a chicken breast or most vegetables, especially cooked veggies. The rest of the family likes them, so that leaves me to either force myself to eat them or grab something else for myself.

So I picked out a few recipes from the P90X2 diet guide that I decided I would make. My first attempt was fish tacos. Now I'm sure that when prepared by someone who knows what they are doing these are probably delicious. The problem is that instead of someone who knows what they are doing, I attempted to make these. Needless to say they did not turn out so well. My son keeps reminding me of the time that we had fish that didn't taste like anything.

As I mentioned, the frittatas turned out well. For the kids I cheated a bit. What they got was more of a ham and cheese omelette. Mine was completely egg whites, but for theirs I still used some yolks. It's hard to mess up eggs too much and I have been making omelettes for years, so it's a small victory.

Yesterday I made up some chicken bacon ranch wraps. It's one way that I can eat chicken and enjoy it. It also has a good mix of vegetables inside that I can make up to bring to work. It's a complete meal all wrapped up in one convenient package. My son didn't like that there were onions in it and my daughter took all of the insides out and just ate the tortilla shell. My wife ate hers, but only wanted a little bit because she was not very hungry when we started to eat.

So I guess the moral is that I can still make up these foods for my lunches, but maybe I should stick to homemade whole wheat pizza when I cook for the family. I know they like that.

Insanity Week 2

I'm starting to notice more differences in the Insanity workouts as I get used to them. The most difficult workout for me has been Pure Cardio. Unlike most of the other workouts, this one has no breaks once you get past the stretching portion. You start out with about an 8 minute warmup with no breaks, then some stretching, and then a whole lot of cardio. Each move is one minute and you go right from one thing into the next. It is challenging, but Pure Cardio has the most variety since you're not repeating the moves like in the other workouts.

I have Cardio Recovery today which is good since I have been a bit sore lately. It's a lot of stretching moves and holding of Yoga-like positions. There are a couple of times in the workout where you have to hold some uncomfortable positions for about a minute and do small pulsing movements. Those are really the only areas where I have had to take a little break now and then. Otherwise it is by far the easiest day.

The only other thing I need to work on right now is to quit eating peanut butter cups. I haven't had any today so I think I'm getting back on track. People say that Thanksgiving and Christmas are the most difficult holidays to get through in their diet. Mine is Halloween.

Vacation Time

I've been out for the past week at Disney World in Florida. I chose to take a break from most online communications during that time. I'm back now and writing my first blog post since getting back from the trip. I knew it would be difficult to work out so I didn't plan any workouts, but I did get the Insanity program ordered in time so I would have it by the time we got back. I started with the fit test today.

I didn't have the best diet when we were there and did not bring any shakes with me, so I am planning to double-up on Shakeology for some of the days this week to get me back on track. I wouldn't say my diet was terrible, but it could have been better.

I don't want to be too hard on myself so here are some good things. I did plan to take the week off from structured workouts so I did that successfully. That was the easy part. I did purchase snacks at a grocery store that were not that bad for me. I also walked quite a bit each day with a backpack that had two full bottles of water. I went swimming with the kids one morning and did some laps in the pool. And one morning I did 100 push-ups. It's not much, but it was something.

I also know that there were some things I could have done better. The place we were staying had a blender, so if I would have done a little research I would have known to bring some Shakeology packets with me. They would be easy to pack and don't take up very much space. I also could have ordered a little better at some of the restaurants. There's always that part of you that says, "I'm on vacation so I'm going to eat whatever I want." I think that's fine, but there were a couple of times I went a little overboard. I think our eating schedule just got delayed enough that I was so hungry by the time we got to our meal. Then it is easy to overeat or make poor food choices.

I do think the best thing that I did was make a commitment to start up 60 days of Insanity for the week after getting back. It's good to give your body a break now and then and this will take me right through the holidays and give me a running start for P90X2 in January. So I should be back on track this week.

As Tony Horton says, "Cheeseburger bad, fries bad, Coca-cola...oops I said it. Drink your water people."

My Diet Plan

Diet is a very important element of health and fitness. While I've followed a number of different plans over the years I haven't settled on just one. Rather I have taken elements from many of the programs and incorporated them into my everyday eating program.

A diet is no good if you can't stick to it and your progress will often be lost as soon as you go off the diet. So I have decided to stop with dieting and just use things I can follow all the time.

Although I generally eat things that I want, I do try to follow these rules:
1) Eat 5 to 6 times a day.
2) Consume most of my carbohydrates at the beginning of the day.
3) Try not to eat after 7pm unless I have just finished a workout (then it's usually a recovery drink, Shakeology, or whey protein powder).
4) Eat 5 servings of fruit and vegetables each day (can include Shakeology).
5) If I don't like it I don't need to eat it.
6) I don't deprive myself of foods I love, but I don't need to go overboard either.
7) If I'm full, stop eating.

That last rule is one of the most important, especially if weight loss is your goal. This is a key principle of a program called Winning Weighs. Imagine your body is like a car and you fill it up with fuel. If you keep filling after the tank is full you will end up spilling gas all over. In your body the excess food that usually would get used for energy is not needed so it is converted to fat for use later. Since you're probably not going to be going for an extended period of time without food, you most likely don't want that fat.

Whatever you do for your nutrition plan, find something you can stick with and that gets you the results you want. I could stick to an all pizza and peanut butter cup diet, but it probably would not help me to run faster or feel fit and healthy.