Rouse House Musings

Training 1/29/10

Rest day.  I'm STILL sore from Wednesday.  I honestly still feel like I did after I finished running in a half marathon.

Tomorrow is our trip down to Tan-Tar-A for the Missouri All-State Choir performance!  Go Maddie!

Training 1/28/10

Didn't make it to the treadmill again; was too fried from Wednesday's workout.

Training 1/27/10

What a day.  Got Maddie to school, picked her up early, ran out and got some shoes for her, then made it to Parkway Central for the dropoff.  Whew!  All before 1pm.

Hopefully she'll have a great time!  Everyone is looking forward to the show on Saturday.

To make my day even more unusual, it snowed! 

I did make it to crossfit; one hour prior I had to prebowl for this Sunday's bowling league; my average is 151 and I rolled 148, 154, and 154.

Crossfit:

Warmup WOD: 25 jumping jacks, 5 burpees, 20 mt. climbers.   x2

Weight/Skill: Deadlift, 5x3.  I went 135, 165, 205, 215, 225

The skill was an overhead KB windmill, which was a very awkward move; I don't think I did it completely correctly.  I'm not flexible at all, it's actually kind of pathetic.

WOD: 14 minutes, at the top of each minute do 6 split lunges, 8 pushups, 10 squats.  Whatever time you have left before the top of the next minute you can use to rest.  For the last set, we did double reps.

My one major accomplishment that nobody saw was my first deadhang pullup...EVER.  First one in 41.75 years.

In case you were wondering, YES, I DID take the day off!

Training 1/26/10

Well, I was supposed to do a running WOD today, but unfortunately life got in the way.  Maddie is going on a trip to Tan-tar-a this weekend for the All-State Choir Conference; it took a huge effort for her to make this group.  She had to make All District, then All Suburban, then be in the top 20 to even qualify to try out for All-State.  She did qualify, made the group, and was even in the top 4 in her section!!  Huge!

So, today we spent a lot of time doing prep work for the trip, and before I knew it it was too late to get started on the run.

Oh well, no biggie. I'll either make it up tomorrow morning or just push it to Thursday.

Training 01/25/10

Crossfit Day.  No weight lifting today, just a bunch of other stuff. We had to benchmark max rep pushups and one round of Fight Gone Bad.  We'll get to that later. 

Warmup:

 8 over-unders, 15 squats, 10 pushups.  x2

Strength/Skill:

10 Knees-To-Elbows, 10 pushups, 5 OH Squat #20 KB  x3

For our first set of pushups, we had to max out.  That was going to be our benchmark total.  Of course by this time I've already done 30 pushups in warmups and other small exercises.  Oh well.  So I maxed out at 27.  I think I could've gotten to 30+ without all of the warmups.

WOD:

Fight Gone Bad is a CrossFit staple.  It consists of the following:

Wallball with #20 medicine ball, #75 sdlhp (sumo deadlift high pull), box jump, Push Press, Rowing for calories.

You work at each station for 1 minute without any breaks inbetween, trying to get as many reps as possible for each.  Rest for a minute, repeat.  Rest for a minute, repeat.  Whew!

Today we only had to do one round. I've never used that much weight before for this workout and it showed; the only saving grace is that I'm sure I can beat this score in 10 weeks!  Anyway, my totals respectively were 21, 20, 14, 13, 16, for a total of 84.  I was hoping to get closer to 100, but oh well.  I'm sure it'll get easier as I lose some weight.

Training 1/24/10

Sunday was my first long run of the 12 week training period before the Go! St. Louis Half Marathon.

Long Run: 5 miles, around Creve Coeur Lake.  Time - 49:30.

Just some interesting tidbits about that...my first 5 mile run time ever recorded was 1:04:18, while my fastest 5 miles ever was 46:48.

Training 1/23/10

Workouts started at 8am today.  I was up by, oh, 6:45.

Warmup WOD:

500m row

50 jumping jacks, 5 burpees, 60' bear crawl x 2

Strength/Skill:

Backsquat: 115, 135, 145

OH Press: 65 (5), 75 (5), 95 (5), 115 (3)

WOD:

2000m row - 8:42

The program I mentioned yesterday is called the "Next Level Challenge".  Part of that is to benchmark various movements, and today I recorded two; overhead press and 2k row.  I was hoping for a faster 2k row time, but after about 1200m I was fried.  We'll see how that time improves 10 weeks from now.

So, the rest of the day will be spent getting the house cleaned up some for a mini-dinner party.

Training 1/22/10

So today was a rest day for physical activity.  Although, it most defintitely was NOT a rest day for mental challenges, as you can see from what was present not 20 feet away from my desk all day:

That's just not right.  We're starting a program at my gym that is emphasizing a diet "makeover", including using either the Paleo or Zone diets for 10 weeks in addition to my normal workout schedule.

Oh well, I surived.  Later that night for dinner we went to a restaurant called Las Palmas, which unfortunately was not in top form; I've been there a few times and it was always great; last night they had a packed house and were short in the kitchen.  Dinners were late, people were complaining, but all told, I avoided the beans, cheese, margaritas, and all of the typical stuff you find at a Mexican restaurant.  I did have some chips though.  Yeah, yeah....

Training 1/21/2010

I'll try and get these workouts posted on the actual day they happen, I just need to figure out the timing for this blogging stuff.

My goal is to do a running WOD on Tuesdays and Thursdays; I'm getting them from www.crossfitendurance.com.   I don't do the WOD they have posted for the current day; I'm starting about two weeks back in their posts.

All of these runs are intervals; the experiment I'm doing for this next set of runs I have coming up is to see if I can still perform by doing CrossFit three times a week, intervals two times, and a long run once per week, instead of just piling up the miles like I did last year. 

If you're unfamiliar with interval notation, 30:20x8 means 30 seconds running, 20 seconds resting.  Perform that cycle 8 times.

Running WOD today:

30:20x8, 12% incline, 0-30 seconds slower than fastest 5k pace

So my fastest 5k pace is 8:52, so I set the treadmill to 8:38.  It might not seem like much, but a 12 degree incline is a bitch, and those 20 seconds don't last nearly long enough.  :-)

I used the treadmills at Monsanto's fitness center; not too bad of a place!  The machine weights they have there are almost identical to the ones at the YMCA that I used to go to.  At the Y, the shoulder press machine always gave me fits; I could NEVER get more that 80 pounds up in the air.  Never.  Well, I thought I'd try out the shoulder press machine here, just to see how CrossFit has helped in this particular arena; I was able to get 120 pounds up!  Nice!

Training 1/20/10

CrossFit

Warmup WOD:

60' bear crawl

10 jump squats

60' bear crawl

10 split lunges

x2

Strength/Skill:

Back squat, 5x3 - 115, 125, 145, 155, 175

Pullups/GHD Situps - 8/10, 5/10, 5/10

WOD:

80 walking lunges

70 situps

60 KB swings (#40)

50 pushups

40 cal row

30 box jumps (24 in)

20 pullups

10 burpees