3 Down

Yay! Finished Stage 3 of NROL/W on Monday, as planned. The workout went well; I pushed it on everything and was happy with the final numbers, in terms of progress made during the stage. I even reached new levels on the stepmill, although I also almost had an accident on it. I was really churning out an interval and picked my foot up too high, completely off the foot platform, then had a " !!!!!!" moment when I couldn't immediately find the thing on the way down. That was almost not pretty. (And yet another reason to hate cardio machines. I won't miss them when I'm done this program.)

Stages 4 and 5, as those familiar with the program know, basically repeat the exercises in Stages 2 and 3, with a different rep/rest scheme and an optional additional set. Most likely I will usually do the additional set, unless it turns out that doing the additional set turns what now runs as about an hour, hour and fifteen minute workouts into an hour and a half plus workouts. I do believe there's a point of diminishing returns in the gym, and 90 minutes is well over that point for anything other than endurance training.

Had a good run today. I actually ran for the full 30 minutes; that really wasn't intentional, but I was going slowly and the weather was cool and beautiful. I don't plan to change my 30 minutes, walk breaks legal but optional, no measuring, no fast stuff plan just yet; I'd like this to be my schedule for a couple of weeks and most likely at that point I'll want to go further/faster/etc., and just let that happen.

Finally did remember to step on the scale yesterday. I've lost 6 - 7# since I started NROL; considering I've paid precious little attention to diet, I'll take that. I'm still out of my "happy" range but I can see some major differences (more than the scale suggests). One of these days I'll mentally snap into diet mode and get serious about this, but until I do, I'll be happy with slow but continuous progress.