Pace? What Pace?

Somewhere in my former blog, there is a post very much like this one...

When I trained for the Marine Corps Marathon, I used a training plan developed by Hal Higdon. I like it; it worked for me, on balance, and got me to the start and finish lines in one piece and in a halfway decent time for someone who really only had a vague idea of how long it should take oneself to run 26.2 miles. Part of the training plan was the Saturday Pace run, which is a run of some mileage done at what you plan to have as your race pace. This is followed on Sunday by the long run. The combo of the pace run and the long run back to back supposedly, in the world according to Higdon, kicks up your endurance. Or something. In the end, I had some IT band problems that confounded the last few weeks of my training and I mostly just ran the race itself at what I considered an enjoyable pace.

But, the pace runs themselves always confounded me. I am horrible - truly horrible - at sensing how fast I am running. I have several gears, but they're relative gears, not "numbers" gears. Added to that, I have a severe allergy to running by stopwatch. I don't mind timing runs, or sprints, or whatever, but timing stuff on the go, trying to rejigger my pace, and having to remember where all of my miles begin and end (halfway between X street and Y avenue; at the bridge between the lakes; at Z street; etc.) drives. me. nuts.

I ran yesterday right after karate - as in, I took my gear to class and changed right afterward, and did my route near the dojo. Of course I was very, very warmed up, having had a long class, and without realizing began like a bat out of hell. Result was mile 1, waaaay under half marathon pace. Mile two was closer to pace, but still under, and mile 3? Ugh. Somewhere in mile 3 I hit a long uphill stretch of road that was in pure sunlight (did I mention it was in the upper 80's with high humidity, or does that go without saying for the east coast?), and brain fry started to set in, so I slowed down some. Still, my time was once again well under half pace, despite the impending brain death. I was supposed to do one more mile at pace, but things were going so poorly I punted and (heh, very slowly) jogged the rest of the route. I finished only slightly over pace for the whole thing, but the run was basically a big FAIL because I was really never on pace at all.

And somehow, the most important part to me is that I had the freaking good sense to throttle back when things weren't going nearly on plan and the heat was starting to bug me. I don't always do that. Is this a sign of aging?

So - it's on to week 7 in yogaland. This week, as mentioned in comments, introduces headstand, and looks much more interesting than last week. This is the second to last week of the program, and while book gives some suggestions as to what to do after you've finished, I haven't given it much thought. I could repeat the program or parts of the program, or intermix practises from the program with DVDs, or just say, HMMM, interesting experiment, and go on to something else. Guess I'll think about it more in two weeks. :p

I have a lot to do on the potential "back to school" project this week. I've been in contact with some admissions people, and am going to get myself into community college this fall to take anatomy and physiology. I need two semesters of that for most schools, and frankly I'd also like to take exercise physiology, but need to take A&P first. So I'm off to the local CC tomorrow to try to talk to someone in admissions there, because they offer a couple of different flavors of A&P and I don't know which would be best for me. I also need a lot of volunteer hours - some schools specify a number, and some schools seem to stress variety of experience over hours. So I have to start looking into that, too. AND, I have to take the GREs, which totally freaks me out for some reason.

And of course, I finally had the ultimate freak out moment. What if I CAN'T get into grad school? I mean, I've pretty much operated my whole life on the presumption that I can basically do whatever I set my mind to, and for the most part, that's been true. But I'm 20 plus years out of college, with some grades I'm not exactly proud of (nothing too shocking, but not straight A's), trying to get into a competitive graduate program... What if - ? But then again, what if I don't try? I'll be no better off, and won't have learned anything new, to boot.

Heh, so there, negative thoughts. Time to go stand on my head.

A quick bitch

And a quick reference to my workout roll on the right:  See?  I really am boring and predictable.

So the only thing that has varied much, aside from the runs getting a bit longer and the weights a bit heavier, has been the yoga stuff.  Last week, hand stand and its less flashy sibling, shoulder stand, came into the picture.  I was happy to find by the end of the week I could kick up into handstand against the wall, and hang out there for as long as called for in the program.  That was pretty cool, actually.  Now this week, by comparison...  holy shit.  I did not know you really could be bored to utter freaking DEATH by yoga.  And I write this NOW because I just looked at today's practise and wanted to smack my head against the table, and need to procrastinate.  It's basically I'm-afraid-to-look-at-how-many-minutes of lying around on various props in "restorative" and "relaxation" poses, followed by 10 minutes of meditation followed by 5 more minutes of "breath awareness."  I would dearly love to phone this one in, and maybe, just maybe, if I can prattle on here long enough I'll HAVE to skip it so I can eat dinner early enough so I can semi-digest before heading off to karate, lest I spew on the dojo floor. 

Or maybe I should just get it over with.

Life has otherwise been pretty good. I've gotten copies of my college transcripts, which has been a hoot. Damn, did I take a variety of stuff, everything from the generic sciences and humanities to degree specific stuff to larks like (I am not making these classes up) Strategic Nuclear Policy (for which I wrote a paper that was actually published), Witchcraft and Dissent in the Middle Ages, Animal Science, and Light Horse Management. Anyway, I THINK I may be lucky enough that I will only have to take a few additional courses before doing the grad school thing; I know I'll have to take anatomy and physiology, and I'd like to that exercise physiology as well. I also need volunteer hours, probably lots of them. I've started making contacts and the picture is starting to shape up, but I'll be happier when I can start to frame a timeline/schedule for myself. (The old schedule on the fridge thing...)

Of course, the biggest mystery is how I'm going to pay for all of this - but I guess I'll figure that one out, too.

And crap. I do have time for this yoga practise. *sigh. Things do go back to interesting next week, thankfully.

Easy week - or was it?

Heh.  Looked that way on paper, coming in to the week; my running mileage, overall, dropped a bit (well, except that it really didn't, it was just a bit more spread out) and with the absence of weight work, I spent more time than usual at the dojo.  More on that in a minute.

I also did my first speed workout, which went well.  The plan was to do 1/4 mile repeats at a 5K pace.  The operative question for someone who has never bothered to run a 5K being, what is my 5K pace?  (The shortest race I've ever run was 4 miles, and that was in 1993, IIRC.)  So I settled on "a fast but seemingly sustainable pace, slower than a sprint" and was probably running somewhere about the pace of a high 7/s mile.  I have no idea whether or not I could maintain that for 5K, but the point of these workouts is to improve leg turnover, not train for a 5K, so I'll keep shooting for about that pace.  My 1/4 mile track is slightly longer than 1/4 mile, and is also interesting in that it has some terrain.  I picked a stretch of road reasonably close to home - far enough for a warm-up/cool-down run to and from - that has no cross streets and thus no traffic worries, and good, newer asphalt.  It's also somewhat uphill in one direction, thus downhill in the other.  So one fun pacing challenge, when I choose to do it, will be to try to make the pace as close as possible, both ways.  (Why?  No reason, other than the challenge just presents itself, so why not?)  And it's been a lovely week for running with cooler temperatures that are about to vanish.  Not something I'm looking forward to.

My other new thing this week - some morning karate training.  We have a newer student, a west coast transfer.  He's second dan in Kyokushin and taught in that style, and has a lot of fighting experience.  (Kyokushin folk don't do point sparring, either - it's full contact.  Which is cool with me; we don't point spar often - I've probably done it three times in five plus years of training - and I would happily never do it again, as I don't get the, um, point.  It's karate, not tag.)  Anyway, his techniques are somewhat different from ours, and he's going to help me with power development and I'm going to help him learn our kata, and I am also getting not so vague ideas about putting a kettlebell in his hands.  I've also started doing a bit of teaching again.  I'm trying to keep it to one day a week so it doesn't get to feeling like I'm living at the dojo again. 

In non-exercise news, I'm seriously considering going back to school.  It would be a rather complete change of field, so I know I'm going to need a bit more undergrad work first, but at this point, I can't even remember everything I took in college, so I don't know how much.  I've ordered my transcripts and should get them next week, and then I'll be able to get a better handle on things.  It's scary and I'm a bit overwhelmed; I know I need some guidance and I'm in the process of looking for help in that area, too.  I also have to take the GRE's at some point, but don't know if that should be sooner or later.  (Special side note:  I went to the online test prep area, and the very first question I read was a reading comprehension question that used an environmental issue as the basis for their first statement, or whatever you want to call it.  Well, I RIPPED into the premise of the statement, which in my mind was too grossly overgeneralized to use to draw any conclusions, and found their questions irrelevant.  Bad omen?)  It's a long potential journey, but it feels much more real, tangible, practical, and worth doing than the law school idea ever did.  Oh, and shit, before you ask, I'm thinking about a doctorate in physical therapy.

Hope everyone has a safe 4th!

New Rules of Lifting for Women - The Verdict

Yep, I finished yesterday, on schedule. Woo! Stage 7, Workout 12. It still hasn’t really sunk in yet, probably won’t until I don’t go to the gym on Monday (I’m taking a bit over a week off weights - the bod has earned it). I started the program on January 4 and have basically done it straight through, sometimes taking mini-breaks (3 - 4 days) between stages, and sometimes not, when I had mini-breaks (again, 3 - 4 days) handed to me to recover from oral surgery, of which I had my share this past spring. As some of you might recall, I decided to do this program because I felt as if I were starting over, in a sense, in working out. I was sick for quite a while last year and spent some time in hospital. I came out deconditioned, to put it mildly, and overweight, and wanted a comprehensive program that would go a long way toward reassembling both my strength and cardio fitness. I read NROL several years ago and basically agree with much of what is presented there, in terms of a general approach to weight training for someone like me - a recreational athlete who takes that recreation pretty seriously.

I used some of the workouts from that original book previously, but they really didn’t seem to apply to my situation. I had picked up the Women’s version of NROL somewhere along the line, and in it I saw a progressive, varied program based on the same principles - the perfect solution. I also liked the fact that the would not have to think about what I was going to do in the gym for the next six months, more or less (heh, almost exactly, as it turned out), which is a huge bonus for me. I like to think (OK, agonize), settle on a plan, put a schedule on the fridge, and follow it for as long as it’s working.

And, this worked. Did I follow the plan exactly? Yes and no. The workouts, I did almost to the letter. The notable exception was the abdominal exercises, which for some reason got easier as the workouts progressed (I strongly suspect this was an oversight/brain cramp on the part of the program designer), and around stage 3, I abandoned them pretty much in favor of whatever seriously challenging exercises I could find on my own. I also cheated on a few rest periods in Stage 5, which should very much be noted for its long-assed workouts, but not by much. Other than that, it all went according to Hoyle (or Alwyn, as the case may be).

Granted, I was starting from what was, for me, a below baseline state, but it was clear that I put on some serious strength. My squat and my deadlift both improved. My capacity for pushups went from (this is embarassing)2 sets of 15 with more than half done from the knees to 4 sets of 20 with good (full) form. I haven’t tested my dead hang pullup/chinup capacity lately, but it’s gone from nil to some, and I don’t plan to let up on it. My stomach has never been flatter. I have, as mentioned, an ass. My arms look good, my legs - well, they never look great, but they look at least as good as they ever have, perhaps better. My body fat percentage has dropped. I lost 18#, and am in what I refer to as my normal happy weight range. Overall, I’m very happy with the way I look and feel. (Do Iook like a goddess, as the subtitle of the book implies? I have no idea what a goddess is supposed to look like, so I have no idea.)

Did I follow the diet? Nope. I’ve never followed a diet from a weight lifting book, and frankly, there was nothing in the diet section of the book that even vaguely interested me. The recipes were uninspired. I don’t think the section is BAD so much as I’ve read plenty on sports nutrition outside this book, and really wasn’t looking for tips. And, my goal of getting back in to “happy range” was achieved entirely without it. Which is not to say it won’t work, just that IMO if you have something that works for you, stick with it.

Did I do more than he calls for? Yep. I started back in karate not too long after I started the program. I knew my cardio would suck at first, and it did, and I had hoped that the cardio in the program (all interval work) would be enough to get me through a full-out class, with sparring, drills, kata, the whole nine yards. It became apparent to me that it would not, so I started running again in, I believe, March. I started running about half an hour on my non-lifting days, and when the workouts got shorter and no longer included cardio (Stages 6 and 7), I ramped up the mileage to mid-high teens per week. I also started a glute activation program at some point. I took a very simple test described in an on-line article and failed miserably, which was a slap in face. (Me? No glute activation? But - but - but I do deadlifts and step ups and split squats and full squats and lunges and... and I failed the test.) So I started using the program described here:  Dispelling the Glute Myth.  I didn’t do this exactly according to plan, in that I’ve stayed in each Phase roughly twice as long as recommended, just moving on when it felt about right to do so. I’m beyond thrilled with the results I’ve seen and felt, as you’ve probably guessed if you’ve read any of my recent blog entries.

In the final analysis, I can’t say I can attribute ALL of my “results” strictly to NROL/W, but it played a big role in the collaborative effort. I kind of wish I could have run the pure experiment, but frankly, the pure experiment wasn’t going to suit my needs. My goal, when it comes to gym work, is that it contribute to my performance in other areas, namely in the dojo and on the road. I think the program did its job.

AAAAAAnd for my next trick, a half marathon!

The end is near...

The end of NROL/W, that is. TOMORROW will be my last workout. Wow. I'm sure I'll have a ton of shit to say about it once it IS done, but right now I just can't wait to get to the gym to actually DO the workout. I'm somewhere between proud of myself, relieved that this high rep stage will be over, and thrilled at the outcome of the project. But, I'll yammer on about that when I'm actually done.

In the mean time: I said I'd been playing around with a few things. I actually got very curious about a couple of new DVDs - curious enough to actually buy and try them. Yes, me, actually doing a DVD workout! Hard to believe I used to do them all the time. For all I know I'll do them again in future, but for now, these little add-on things are probably all I'll be trying. The first thing I tried is Tracie Long's Focus: Lift Higher (and yes, that link takes you right to Amazon... I'm trying out the Amazon Associate thing, and if I like something, I'll link to it - for your convenience, of course. :p ) Because the glutes are my new plaything, I figured I'd try this WO. I have a lot of respect for Tracie, even though I generally have not gotten heavily into her workouts. I believe she constructs her workouts with a lot of forethought; she's very pre-hab/rehab focused, and as a result, if you're used to maxing out weights and blasting through workouts (and I am), the result can be a WO that feels light and unsatisfying. If I were using Lift Higher purely as a leg/glute workout, I'd definitely feel that way, but as an occasional change of pace from my usual glute stuff, I like it, believe it or not. There's a ton of variety in the workout, which makes the time fly by. One of my criticisms of Tracie's style has been that there is almost too much variety, to the point where you never really have a chance to get into an exercise; she just jumps to the next thing. LH isn't free from that, but for whatever reason (perhaps because my legs were already tired) it didn't bother me too much.

LOL, I don't know if that counts as a ringing endorsement, but it's as positive a review as I've ever given one of her workouts!

I've also tried something called V-Core, but haven't done the whole thing so that review will wait for another day.

My major project, however, has been the addition of a near-daily yoga practise. (Yes, me, yoga.) I tried something like this before, a couple of years ago. I did something called a yoga sadhana, or 40 days of yoga. For me, that looked like me trying to cram in a yoga DVD or part thereof on a daily basis. By the end of it, I was so sick of yoga, I'm surprised I ever went back to it. However, I've really come to enjoy my live class, and I just wanted to play with it a bit more. So, I got a book: Moving Toward Balance: 8 Weeks of Yoga with Rodney Yee. It assumes you are a complete yoga newb, and while I'm not, in the sense that I've done DVDs and taken classes, I have no problems with calling myself a beginner. The book is, as suggested, an 8 week program. The first day goes through the poses/movements of the week, all of which you practise (this winds up taking a good while, but isn't very intense). The next four days, you do a practise that sequences you through the poses, and the sixth day is devoted to relaxation and meditation. (There's one day off each week.)

I must say, this has been a revelation for me. I can go at my own pace, move in my good time, play with what I want to play with, not listen to what for some instructor passes for good yoga music (my regular instructor uses a waves and windchimes track, and I can take that - but some of her subs... yuck!)... It's not what I'd call a strenuous practise, but that's not what I'm after in yoga. I run and hit the gym and hit the dojo - I'm not looking for more intensity, and this is just perfect for me.

And speaking of intensity, a major storm is rolling in, so I'm going to end now in case the power cuts out. I'll post more tomorrow, after the end of NROL/W.

Crazies come, Crazies go

And peace is restored to the world. My world, anyway.

Upstairs neighbor moved out yesterday, just about two months after she moved in. She actually didn’t move away, just to another unit in the apartment complex. I’m not sure why; I did see her and we chatted but I didn’t ask, and she didn’t offer an explanation. Either way – yay! Although she and I had reached an easy truce, it’s still very nice not to have anyone overhead. Of course that means I will eventually get another neighbor who could be worse, for now, I’ll enjoy the situation.

Also, Drama Girl officially moved away about two weeks ago. To give credit where credit is due, before she left she did stop by to apologize for what happened the night of the art show, and to let me know she was leaving. I didn’t ask where she was going, but I presume she went to Philly, as she’d mentioned she might move there one day when we were out walking. (And then, she wasn’t moving; and then, she was going to stay with her parents; and then….) She dropped her lawsuit against the building management, and dropped her campaign against the guy who allegedly assaulted her (I presume he’ll still be prosecuted, but by a real lawyer on behalf of The People, not by her as a part of a dog and pony show it’s not even worth my trying to describe here). So, that weird life chapter is done!

I haven’t been motivated to blog that much lately, obviously. I belong to a couple of fitness boards and am in two check-ins, and I post my daily stuff there; probably what I should do is post my dailies here, and C & P them there. However, I’d probably bore y’all stiff in no time. Maybe I’ll do them in a sidebar… hmmm. I’ll play with that one.

I’m about to start my final week of New Rules of Lifting for Women. It’s very hard for me to believe this is almost over! And if I hadn’t decided to do two laps of Stage 7, it would be over. This stage has been a bit more grueling than I expected. The workouts consist of one or two “big” exercises followed by a circuit of four exercises, 15 – 20 reps each, done four times. Let me tell you, that is a lot of counting. I usually do it half in Japanese, half in English, and vary the way I count (i.e., twice to ten, four times to five, five times to four) so I don’t go insane. Adding sweat to the fest, the AC in the gym has been on the fritz, so I’ve come out of there absolutely drenched the past few times. I hope to hell it’s fixed by tomorrow; temps are back in the 90’s (grrr) and that place has got to be getting pretty rank.

The running is going very well. My speed is going up, pretty much without much effort on my part. In fact what feels slow now is a half minute plus per mile faster than fast felt last month. To that, I am crediting both general increased fitness, plus my glute exercises, which still have me thrilled beyond belief. I cannot get over the fact that I have an actual ass – it’s like having a new toy. In fact I’ve changed my plans for weight training during the half marathon prep because I don’t want to give up these exercises.

To that end, I’ve decided to use the workouts from the first two stages of Female Body Breakthrough instead of workouts from NROL because the FBB workouts have built in glute exercises; I can do them as-is or ramp them up to the necessary degree of difficulty, but in either case I don’t have to add them on, as I’m doing now. I don’t plan to do her warm-up; in fact I wouldn’t say I’m doing her program at all, but I am using what amounts to four workouts from the program for my own purposes. At some point, possibly even right after the half, I’ll do the program properly, but for now it’s just not what I need or want.

I think the scale has finally stopped moving, although I haven’t remembered to step on it in some time. I quite honestly don’t think I’ve dropped any more weight, nor do I now think I’ll even try to. I’m fitting into clothes that used to fit when I was about 5 pounds lighter than I think I am and they’re falling off; I almost need a belt for my favorite shorts. My stomach has never been flatter, and it’s very clear to me, by sight and by feel, that I’ve added muscle. My body fat is – if accumeasure calipers are to be believed – 15%, and if they’re not to be believed, it’s significantly less than when I started this program. Could I lose a few more pounds? Sure, but I really don’t have the motivation to try. My face is close to the border of looking, well, closer to my age, and as is, I can without a shred of self consciousness run around the neighborhood in a bra top, which is something I’ve never dared to before. Lots of credit there to both NROL/W and the glute exercises.

I’ve been playing with a few other things, as well – mostly out of curiosity – but I’m about written out for today, so I’ll hit them later this week. Probably. :p

Dream a little dream...

OK, this was a weird one.

The dream, or at least what I remember of it, starts with me, in some strange, very large bedroom. I am setting it up for what is clearly a nuit d'amour, although I have no recollection of whom the amoureux was. (Drat. Although I suppose it's nice to have room to add fantasy to a dream...) When I'm in the last stages of the prep, a party breaks out. Family and friends are there, as is Don Drysdale. Yes, Don Drysdale. I guess he got an invite to the dream because we were discussing pitchers at a Memorial Day picnic yesterday, a conversation sparked by Roy Halladay's perfect game this past Saturday. My little nephew, Matthew, asked me who the strange man was, and I said, "Oh, that's Don Drysdale. Go up to him and call him Dandy Don." Which, little nephew did, promptly. Later in the party my father told me Don wasn't so up on the Dandy Don thing, so I go up to him and apologize, and we have a good laugh.

I leave the party, and find myself in what appears to be an academic building crossed with a shopping mall. I meet up with a couple of old co-workers, and we set about looking for my missing lover. They vanish, and I find myself NOW walking out of the mall and onto a baseball field, then into a trailer. And who is there, but Tyra Banks. Apparently, I am a contestant on America's Next Top Model, and we just had a lingerie photoshoot. Instead of handing out copies of photos, she's handing out boxes of chocolates, and if your box of chocolates has lingerie in it, you move on to the next round. I get the most massive box of chocolates, which does not contain lingerie. Tyra informs me that I'm just a bit too old to be America's Next Top Model (ya think?) but she likes me and suggests I could become a cameraman for the show.

I take that all as a bit of a massive win, and return to my bedroom to find the party has broken up, and my mystery man is still nowhere in sight. The dream dissolves there. I'm not big on dream interpretation, and all I can say about that one is, it was entertaining.

Back later to post on workouts.

OK, here we go:

The Fitness Stuff

Two things of note from last week: First, I finished Stage 6 of NROL/W, and I also put in a 20 mile running week. The second was a landmark I had hoped to hit this week, but we didn’t have karate this past Saturday due to the holiday weekend, so I too advantage and went for what for me constitutes a long run right now, over 7 miles, bringing the weekly total comfortably over 20+.

As it happens I’m glad I was able to build so much during Stage 6, because Stage 7 is a whole new ball game. Stage 6 was supposedly about building strength in relation to body weight, hence there was an emphasis on working toward chin-ups and working on push-ups. I believe I prattled on about this in the past so I won’t do it again. The workouts tended to be short, and while they were generally challenging enough during the work, they didn’t leave me feeling all that taxed. Hence, I started adding short runs (2 – 3 miles) after a couple of them per week. That helped me get the weekly mileage up. It was also good, I thought, to try out lifting and running on the same day, something that’s on tap for the half training.

So, mission accomplished for the month of May. Special bonus: I lost a total of four pounds on the month, bringing the total to 15#. All with embarrassingly little effort on my part. Two more pounds lost, and I’ll be at the top what I always considered my comfort range. Four more will put me square in the middle. I don’t plan to change a thing I’m doing. Frankly I think this has gone so easily so far is because it was a bit of an artificial gain, all tied in one way or another to my illness – lack of activity when I was ill and a need to prioritize food basically without restrictions when I was getting well. That’s how the weight went on; resuming normal activities and normal eating is how it’s come off.

Too bad that’s not something marketable.

As mentioned I started Stage 7 yesterday. The workouts are different from the previous workouts in that they start with one or two “big” exercises (squat, deadlift, or a superset of bench press plus cable rows – and why cable rows instead of barbell rows, I’m not quite sure, but whatever) followed by a giant set of four exercises. These include two upper body exercises and two lower body exercises, all done for 15 – 20 reps, four sets of all exercises total. So it’s lower, upper, lower, upper, rinse, repeat – 30 seconds rest between all exercises. Heh, it was fun trying to dial in a weight for that many reps – I had no clue where to start and started too heavy for some things and too light for others. Oh well. Got it all figured out within two rounds and that IS why we keep logs, eh?

It made for a sweaty, partially aerobic workout that I definitely feel today, especially in the butt/hamstrings, although I’m sure my glute work played into that. I’m still really impressed by the results I’ve been getting from my glute activation exercises. Dare I say, baby’s actually got back? (Well, SOME back, but for me, this is a minor miracle.)