So, a little over a month ago we switched from P90X-ing to training for the Seattle to Portland Classic. A 204 mile bike ride taking place from July 13th and 14th. It has been a long and challenging number of weeks with all sorts of obstacles and set backs that I couldn't have foreseen coming.
The plan was to be simple. Starting from the last blog I wrote (May 28th) we were going to ride 25 miles EVERY single day until about the end of this week (July 5). I was hoping that on some days we'd ramp up the mileage to get Zu (and myself) used to going long periods. That didn't really happen. We did get a lot of riding in though and Zulema has made vast improvements to her times and attitude (which is vital). I think she's ready.
This year, we're also being joined by my good friend and former co-worker, Leah. She's been kicking ass and taking names all over WA in the Cascade Bicycle Club training for this ride. In fact, she just completed her first Century ride last weekend. She's been tearing it up.
Today, we're going to take our training to the next level finally. Since it's a holiday, we have the time. We're going to do a metric century ride. It's only 100km (62 mi) as opposed to a full century that's 100 miles, but it's the biggest cycling route I know by heart and it's the biggest ride Zu has ever done to date. It'll be the perfect training for STP. She gets through this, and STP will feel like a light stroll on the beach!
Fern Ridge Trail in Eugene
Our training has been fun though. It really made me happy to see her ready to ride most days. I only really lament the crazy schedule conflicts or other "life" issues that got in the way of our training, but either way she's shown some real growth in staying the course and following through on this commitment. Our rides this year have been beautiful and filled with so much to just look at. Oregon is a really beautiful place and you don't really get the opportunity to appreciate it until you do it on foot or on 2 wheels I'd say.
My trusty bike, the "road tank" is doing quite well. I believe I'm somewhere around 4500 miles put on this guy now since buying it in August '11. Well, if I'm not quite there yet, I'll cerainly be there within the next few days :-P
Another pic from the Row River Trail in Cottage Grove
With less than 2 weeks to STP, our biking adventures are almost up. I still aim to try and hit at least one or two more Century rides after the Seattle to Portland thing, but we're probably heading back into P90X land. Though, I'm a little conflicted. There's a brand new workout routine that has just come out called T25. It's basically an intense 25 minute workout. The big key is the fact that it's only 25 minutes a day. P90X is anywhere from an hour to almost 2 depending on the day so this one could be huge in terms of availability to do it.
I'm going to start a fitness challenge group on August 1st. Open to anyone who's interested. I'm still trying to determine whether I'm going to use P90X as the focus for the group or this new T25. I feel like people have a better ability to accomodate 25 minutes rather than an hour+. Also, I could use something new to work out to. So if you, or anyone you know is interested let me know. comment on the blog, hit me up on facebook. Just get at me!
I'll leave you with this awesome smoothie I concocted yesterday:
KCPBBBAM!
4-6 leaves of Kale
1 Carrot
1 Peach
1 1/2 cups of frozen berries (I used a mix of Blackberries and Boysenberries)
1 Banana (frozen)
Almond Milk to consistency
The prior week was pretty awesome and kinda hard to top. This past week sort of came as a bit of a crash from the high. Things just didn't seem to be going right at all. The weather turned to shit. My schedule was getting all sorts of jacked up by random events. I was certainly just a ball of stress. It was all just pretty lame. Until...
Friday came around finally. I'd almost forgotten that we'd signed up for another ride around town. This was the awesome one I'd seen a couple months before wandering around the streets. The Moonlight Mash. I'd been waiting forever for a ride like this. A ride that didn't start UNTIL it got dark outside! Perfect for the bike modifications I made early last year. I'd only wished the weather had held up as awesome as it was a few weeks back because it started getting colder, and colder.
We got out there and it was a total blast. Sure we weren't moving fast like I've now grown very accustomed to, but the fact that we were out and I had my wheel glow going made me happy as a clam. It certainly would've been nice to be warmer, I was losing power to light my wheels as the prolonged cold waged war against my battery. We had an impromptu stop under a bridge on the bike path to have an informal dance party. People were encouraged to bring beverages (beer). We didn't and boy do I wish I did. That might have helped me combat the cold some at least.
The dance party lasted a few songs longer than anybody had really wanted it to. I mean it was damn cold out at this point. I did have a few moments luckily that the group got so split that I got to sort of stretch out and get a serious ride going to catch up. I got up to about 22mph a couple points. We got back out and proceeded to continue filling the streets with loud music and ringing of all manner of bike bells, horns, screams, yells. It was really fun. Then we got to the UofO campus...
We spent a little while circling around this portion of the campus just having fun. My phone decided to die on me making this vid. All thanks to the cold of course, sapping all the life out of the battery in one fell swoop. We kept going with the group after they'd thanked everyone for coming out and officially ended the ride. We kinda got separated at one point. Those of us that were essentially lost decided to head over to falling sky brewery which, as it turned out, is where everyone we got separated from were at! So, all in all, an epic biking adventure was had and it was good. :D
The adventuring didn't stop at that night, however. The next morning we were headed to go participate in the first ever March Against Monsanto. We're clearly not known for our activism, that much is for sure, but this one cause is definitely a cause that everyone in the planet should be on board with. I mean, it does concern each and every last one of us after all. We stood, marched, chanted, and marched some more for what seemed like forever.
I was really surprised to see just how huge of a turn out there was. Something to the tune of 1200 protesters for this event. I guess now that we've got a major protest under out belts, we've basically had the full Eugene experience.
After all that excitement, you'd think that would be enough for one weekend. Nope! Because of these events, we missed on Yoga X, Legs & Back, and Kenpo X for this week. While we decided to do a combination of X Stretch and the Moonlight Mash to make up for Yoga X, we hadn't yet done Legs & Back after doing the protest march. We also hadn't anticipated it taking 4 hours to do. We were just too pooped afterward to do any sort of P90X routine. I decided to look up the GEARs group ride schedule to see what they had going on for Sunday. As it turned out, they were planning their annual Cinnamon Roll ride. Which was split between a 32 mile ride at 10-12mph average pace and a 42 mile ride at 12-15mph pace. Somewhere along the route there was to be cinnamon rolls.
Well hell, sign me up!! I bartered with Zu and proffered that instead of doing Legs & Back Saturday, we instead did this Cinnamon Roll ride Sunday. She sounded down for that, though, a little reluctant because of the rain we were experiencing Saturday night. We barely made it. I got up at 8:30am and looked at the weather. It went from looking like 100% chance of rain to only about 10% most of the day. Good enough for me, so I rushed Zu out of bed and we scurried on down to Alton Baker park to meet up with the GEARs group.
I hadn't researched the route at all and had absolutely no idea where we were headed. We ended up heading out west toward Fern Ridge Lake. UGH.... The last time we ended up on Irving road heading out in this direction was sometime around september 2011. We'd pretty much just started getting in to biking and I was trying to up my biking distance considerably at this point. The furthest distance I'd ever manage to ride was about 28 miles during the course of a day, so with this ride back then, I was hoping to be able to brag about going over 30 miles. Then we hit Irving road... Talk about headwind from hell. It was a fairly traumatizing experience. Back then, my best speed was somewhere around 10-11mph. Going on this road, my top speed was crippled to about 5-6mph. There were multiple times we both were just stopped at the side of the road. Trying to catch our breath. Trying to muster the strength to keep going. All to go see some damn alpacas or something.
So, here we are back in the present. We're on Irving road and the head wind is just as strong as it had been that day almost two years back. This time was a little worse because it was still rainy and we were hitting all sorts of little squalls along the way. This time though, while still tough as hell, I was blasting through on this road going 17mph. It certainly felt like a personal triumph for sure. I was the one dying the first time out on this road. Unfortunately, for Zu, she had been way too traumatized by the road the last time and I don't think she had the same feeling of conquering it quite like I had, but I'm sure she managed to handle her speed heading down this road tons better than our first outing. As if pushing through that gruelling section of windy road wasn't bad enough, we got to the only actual turn on the route and started heading up kirk road which was hilly as hell by comparison. It only had maybe 2 hills, but compared to the last 15 miles, that may as well have been Mt. Everest to Zulema.
I made it to the house without too much trouble. There were about half a dozen or so others that managed to get there before me and were already having their breakfast. I took a rest and patiently waited for Zu to make it there. At that point in time, I hadn't really given much thought to those hills I just blew through to get to the house. More and more people started showing up as time went on and finally, I overhear one of them mention that there's someone out there on the road that's probably going to need a ride back into town. The lady kinda looked at me and asked me if I was out here with my wife. She told me that Zu's blood sugar had been acting pretty erratic and she was worried if she'd be able to finish the ride. I definitely felt a bit bad because we basically just rushed out the door and only had a quick protein shake that I whipped up on the way out. I also knew that hill was gonna be a challenge for her on her bike. She basically has the same bike as me except she doesn't have the clipless pedals yet.
She made it, and this time for a while, she was the hero for the day. She impressed the living hell out of everybody out there on that ride, especially since her derailer wasn't working so she couldn't reach her 2 lowest gears which is what she needed to get up those 2 hills. So she rocked that shit on the harder gears with crazy erratic blood sugar. Most importantly, she didn't give up before reaching the house. She wanted to continue but she was really worried about her blood sugar, which was a valid concern. She'd already done all the hard work. The slower riders were headed back exactly the same way as we'd all come which meant it would've all been tail wind for her this time around anyway. She took the ride back in town, but after she got there, she was a bit disappointed in not having gone the whole 30 miles and only doing 17.4 instead, so she set out and did another half loop around the river, evening her out to about 25 miles.
The spread was incredible at this breakfast and most people just kinda gorged out a bit. So it looked as if most people just opted to go back the short route even if they started out riding the faster (longer) route. I was definitely determined to hit my 40 and I certainly needed it to burn off that breakfast. There were only a handful of us left heading that way at that point so we went ahead. More amazing views of course and unfortunately more crazy headwind at times, but it was definitely a fun ride overall.
P90X for the week was great. Zu really started stepping it up and moving on to heavier weights. I was definitely impressed because she'd already been moving up into heavier weights than I'd been doing on some of the moves at that point on my first round. To my credit, I guess I really just didn't know the weight of the dumbbells I was trying to use at the time, so to there's that. Like I thought I was using 10lb bells... turns out they were only 7lbs... Oh well...
With STP this close on the horizon, and Zu hasn't really been training on her bike at all, we both came to the conclusion that it's probably best if we shift focus from P90X and place it mostly in riding. I told her that if we can basically ride at least 25 miles every day until STP, she shouldn't really have any problems doing STP. I'm thinking on the weekends, we'll continue catching GEARs rides, or doing other bigger events like the strawberry century coming up in a couple weeks. I'm still getting my training up myself, so I'll probably only do the 72mi ride and not go for the full Century as I hear it's pretty hardcore. One thing I know, Oregon rides are friggin hardcore and the hills do not pull any punches, so I'm definitely wary when I hear about a ride being "hilly" or specifically for "advanced" riders.
I still don't wanna end up losing this upper body strength I've built with P90x, so I may still continue to do the resistance routines on my own and biking after work with Zu. She sounds like she basically has the same idea and plans on probably doing the routines before heading off to work in the morning. I'm still planning on having us complete this 2nd recovery week and then maybe do 60 day progress pics before we start exclusively shifting focus to riding. I'm really proud of zu for sticking this thing through. I'm really glad that she's starting to take the upcoming ride a little more seriously and that she's getting into doing the activity. I'm happy that she wants to actually finish the program too, so that's exciting too!
I'm nearing the end of this challenge month of eating 5 servings of fruits/veggies which I guess I don't plan on really stopping. I'm just not gonna have to be on the hook about reporting it daily which is a bit of a relief. Even so, it's been giving me some cool new recipes to tuck in my hat... Never came up with a name for this recipe. Oh well I guess.
1 banana1 cup of kale 1/2 a mango 1 lime 1 cup of strawberries (frozen) 1 tbsp of peanutbutter Almond milk to consistency.
This week was a pretty damn good week all things considered. I ended the previous week with my first big ride of the year. The OSLP Pedal for People Metric Century. I'd been looking forward to this ride for so long and it means so much to me considering last year it was the first I'd ever done. The reactions from the people I met that first time. Sort of joking about me at first, and later turning to some serious respect and admiration when I actually made it the whole way on the type of bike I was riding. It was just awesome.
This time was a blast. It all felt so familiar this time. It just fit like an old glove. Saturday was a perfect day outside and I started making great time. At the beginning there, I sort of felt it. I hadn't been training nearly as much this time around and at the start on the route, I was finding the inclines a little troublesome. I started to think to myself, "Oh shit, what the hell was I thinking not really training for this." I think it was just because it was early. I hadn't really warmed up or anything. There wasn't anything to consume at the start of the ride and I only had enough produce to make like 16 oz of Juice... TOTAL. I was kinda starting with my internal gas light on. No good.
I ended up scarfing down half of a big-assed brownie I bought at some stoner-themed sandwich shop the night before. Good thing I decided to take it with. It definitely came in handy at this point. I got the rust sort of knocked off for the morning and as my body actually warmed up, then came the speed. Last year, everybody I saw out on the road with a bike had passed me up and I was pretty much by myself. This year, I was the one doing the passing. I charged by a group of 3 on carbon fiber bikes about 3-4 miles into the ride... uphill... I got to the first rest stop and there was only one couple there. A brother and sister. The brother is from somewhere down in CA, and the sister lives in Sequim. WA. They decided to do this ride because it met in the middle and neither one of them had to travel a great distance to get here. Two more people showed up. The couple looked a bit familiar. Turns out they were the same couple I met at this exact spot last year. They happened to be the first group of people I sped past when heading up the his around mile 3-4. This was the guy that originally called my bike a "tank". It was definitely cool running into them again this time. He was like "it's great to see you're still out here doing this stuff". I do love how nice some of these cyclists are out here. It definitely feels good to keep you going.
I kept up with all these people for the majority of the ride. Or, well, they kept up with me I guess. They were only a few minutes behind whenever I reached the next rest stop. I got to feel like the "expert" with the brother/sister, because they'd never done this ride before. In fact, I hadn't realized that last year was basically the first year, they even held this event. I got to tell them about the hills which is something I wished I would've known about last year to mentally prepare. OOH and on that note.
I handled those hills like a BOSS!
Last year, I was crawling up them at maybe 3mph. Just ridiculous. This year, I managed to maintain a steady 6 mph up the entire hill. That felt pretty badass. The downhill, I managed to smoke my last Max speed record of 39mph, with a smokin' 46.6mph!
Flax field
Clover field
The day was perfect. The weather was perfect. The ride was beautiful and scenic. I didn't do too many pictures this time around since I took a lot last year. I'd already done a timelapse of the ride before so this time, I just concentrated on making a fairly good time and trying to make it through all of the rough spots as efficiently as possible. I think I did fairly well. So much fun.
The next day was Mother's day. Zu had been planning to go on this Eugene Cyclofemme ride celebrating women on bicycles. Sounded like fun. She mentioned that they'd like to celebrate the ride with skirts and balloons and I made a joke saying "well, I don't have a skirt to ride in"... well, turns out we took care of that on Saturday after the metric century. We rode over to the closest downtown St Vincent De Paul and did a quick bit of skirt shopping. I found the perfect one (it matched my hat). $2.99. Done!
The ride on Sunday was way super laid back but really fun. I think the general pace was about 6mph (the speed I was going up those ridiculous hills in Springfield), But with the music going and everybody just having a blast, it was impossible to not have fun.
Towards the end, my damn skirt got caught or something happened and I totally went down in a hilariously spectacular fashion. Thankfully I got out of it relatively unscathed which I'm especially thankful for since it was one of the rare times I wasn't wearing a helmet. Took the fall like a stunt man though. Kinda wish someone recorded it.
This week in P90X felt pretty awesome. We've both been steadily kicking it up a notch with the moves here and there. I got Zulema thinking about and increasing her weight. She needs to realize that if she's doing high rep counts, then she definitely needs to be upping her weight. She needs to be barely making those upper limits of her preferred rep counts to really be making a difference. I know it's tough because we're broke as hell so we can't afford a bunch of weights to share between us. I'm kinda at that point where I'm starting to outgrow my weights a little again too.
I recorded some of our Chest, Shoulders, and Triceps routine to show how we're stepping it up and kicking some ass. I've gone from the bent knee chair dips, to regular straight leg chair dips, to raising a leg every 5 reps, to now chair dips suspended on 2 chairs. I'm hoping by the next phase, I might actually be up to raising a leg every 5 reps on the chairs.
I've also been working really hard on hitting all of the poses in Yoga X. I've pretty much got all of them down... except crane. I've been chasing after crane forever and each week I keep getting a little bit closer. Yesterday, I was actually able to hold it for a few seconds before falling on my face this time. I feel like now I'm sort of just up against a mental block. I think my body can handle it though so in time I guess. Until then, there's always this hilarity.
I also ended up recording my runs through shoulder stands and ploughs. I'd never actually seen how I looked and while I've got a ways to go, this still looks impressive as hell. It's hard to believe I've become this flexible.
It's cool watching Zu making these improvements as we go along. I feel like she's picking things up a lot faster than I did my first time around. Though, we are basically halfway through this entire thing so that feels good. I think she's starting to get more into it and resent it less. This pleases me. My evil plan of getting her to stop hating and maybe start actually enjoying working out might still be on track. Muahahahaha.
The May Challenge of getting in 5 servings of fruit/vegetables has been going well. I've basically been knocking them out every morning with a smoothie or juice. Typically, on Fridays, I end up doing a smoothie because I'm just too lazy to do all the juicing stuff. It's pretty quick to handle anyway. So what I have up is what I call the PBJM (Peanutbutter, Jelly, and Mint) Sounds weird, but tastes pretty good.
PBJM Smoothie: 3-4 Leaves of Kale 1&1/2 - 2 cups strawberries 1 banana 1-2 tbsp peanutbutter 1 tbsp chia seeds 2 sprigs of mint almond milk to consistency.
May seems to be a landmark month for me in terms of anniversaries. Some of the best and worst events in my recent adult history have happened at some point during this month. I just recently passed up one of the first of my anniversaries on May 4th. That was a year from the date of me coming off of the 122 day juice only fast that completely changed my life forever. I emerged that day, a different person inside and out.
What makes it significant this year is the fact that I've maintained the loss. That was the month I went from a 3XL t-shirt to a L, and I've been there since.
Tomorrow (May 11th) marks the anniversary of my first ever big cycling event. The OSLP Pedal for People Metric Century ride. At the time, I was definitely nervous but optimistic. I'd already signed myself up for the Seattle to Portland Classic back in January so as far as I was concerned, I was too far to turn back on that one and while this wasn't 100 miles (65 and some change), I figured this would give me a good gauge on how I'd be able to handle STP. I'm doing it again this year. I'm still using my road tank of a Hybrid Cruiser.
The only real difference between this year and last was the training. I haven't been doing nearly as much riding as I'd done last year, but what I've been lacking in riding, I've definitely been making up for in P90X. Either way, I'm fairly confident that tomorrow's ride will be way less painful than last year's and I'm hoping to finish this guy a lot quicker than the first time as well. Here's a glimpse of the ride I'm doing cut down to about a 5 minute timelapse:
My list of anniversaries and memories aren't all awesome in this month. That's for sure. Then again, it really depends on your point of view. In about a week from today, I'll be on my 2 year anniversary of being "let go" from my steady job in the game industry...
For the longest time, this has been an immense sore spot for me. Of course, if you knew the story behind it, you couldn't blame me either. I've definitely bled for that company and would've died for them. Truth be told, I might have had I stayed there and taken the abuse. I certainly was all too happy to, even after all of the internal vilification of my character heard both directly and indirectly since my departure.
As I reflect on what's transpired since then, it's pretty easy to see that what I've managed to accomplish would never have been possible had I stayed there. So, this year, rather than lamenting that day I was "let go", I'm choosing to celebrate the day I was "liberated" from a job and life that was bullshit. At this point, I really owe them a debt of gratitude. Up until that point, I wasn't living.
At the end of the month, that's my big anniversary. The one where I met my partner in crime.
Crazy to think it'll be 10 years this year.
On to P90X...
We've gone into Phase 2 of the workout. We're technically on our second week in, but last week had way too many missed dates so I called a "do-over" on it. Zu can be pretty annoying with her bucking the workouts at times, but I'm still impressed and happy that she doesn't let it stop her completely. Some days are definitely better than others and she'll just blast through it. I do take special pleasure when I see her blast something out and surprise herself and get all stoked about it. Hell, I still do that sometimes.
I think she's definitely pulling through pretty nicely on the routines. Sometimes, I think she could probably handle more weight than she's using though.
Zu's bike progress is becoming a lot more favorable recently. I was genuinely worried before whether or not she was going to be able to make it through STP. Not because I didn't think she could've been able, but she had a pretty horrible attitude toward riding and thus, would never ride and wouldn't be prepared. Last weekend, we had a pretty cool lazy-ish Saturday. We actually rode everywhere on bikes. We made a stop at Paul's Bicycle Way of Life to get our back wheels checked up. I wanted everything to be good for this weekend's event. She got her wheel tuned up and dialed in with full tire pressure and low and behold, she was able to keep up!
Her biggest hang-up and contributor to her bad attitude toward biking was how she felt about not being able to keep up. It seemed like no matter how hard she tried, she just wasn't able to break 8 mph. Well... it just turns out she never had enough wheel pressure and her back wheel was a little crooked. Once it got all straightened out, she picked up immediately and was cruisin' 13 mph, and up to 18 mph on flat ground! She's definitely in business now. Now she just needs to get her but out there on the path and get to training!
We were planning on meeting with a local cycling group last Sunday to go on a 35 mile ride but I couldn't find them. I was pretty bummed, but I got cheered up relatively quickly when she suggested just riding around and sort of creating our own ride. I was happy to have the company finally. I took it relatively easy this time around and only hung around 12-13 mph and everybody else was keeping up so it was pretty fun. It was pretty damn hot out there and all that direct sunlight was sapping it out of everyone. I still wanted to go a bit further and round out the loop at above 20 miles so I blasted ahead and did a quick 4 miles. It took me roughly 15 minutes. By the end of the day we all pretty much crashed. I think there might have been a bit of sunstroke on all of us.
For May, I've signed on to this online challenge group which is handling a different health and nutrition related challenge each month. This month happens to involve eating at least 5 servings of fruits and/or vegetables coming from at least 3 different varieties and 2 different colors every day. My solution for this is to basically make a juice or a smoothie for breakfast. Here's one of the recipes:
Juice:
1 large beet
1 cucumber
2 granny smith apples
2 cups of greens (spring mix/ spinach)
1 knuckle of ginger
smoothie:
juice (as the base)
1 banana
1 tbsp peanut butter
1 tbsp chia seeds (optional)
1 packet of Spiru-tien (chocolate)
While I meant for this to be a review for week 2, I'd just been too distracted with life's general struggles to talk about the week. Now we're prettymuch finished with week 3 so I might as well try to cover it all.
Week 2 was tough. It was the overall week of soreness that I had to get through due to not having done P90X in a long while. That wasn't actually all that bad, but Zulema presented an entirely different level of toughness...
Kicking. And. Screaming.
Usually without fail, the beginning of the routine I'd sort of see her go through most of 5 stages of grief right before we'd even start. Although, a little out of order. It would start even while she's at work before we'd even be about ready to get going. She'd sort of hit her own personal stage of denial. I'd get a message like "what are we doing today?" sort of as if one time, I might actually magically say
"Nothing Zu!!"
Of course, this never happens which sort of starts her on her path to anger. By the time she gets home she always attempts to bargain. "Can't we just skip today and make it up tomorrow?" She only gets one of those a week and it usually means she gives up her 1 day off from working out on the weekend. I can imagine that raises the anger some. Her depression about it may happen some time before even reaching home and maybe briefly while I walk in and start up the PS3, because at that point she knows there's no escaping.
The anger usually tends to rear it's ugly head while we're in the workout. I don't know what it is with her, but it seems to be amplified on the day we need to do Yoga X. On one hand, I guess I can kinda understand. Yoga X is very, very uncomfortable. The Moves are tough and it feels like it just goes on forever in the beginning. On week 2's Yoga X, she hit full tantrum again. I mean like flailing and losing her shit. Now usually, when something like this happens, I'm just expecting that she's done and I probably wouldn't see her again until the workout is done. So I just take that into account and continue on. What happens next surprises me every time.
She calms down, grabs some water, or gloves, or socks, or whatever that was driving her nuts. She gets back into position, and then she's back usually by the next move even. Even after verbally saying "I'm done with this... I can't do this". She breaks through to that last stage and accepts that she needs to do this. I don't really show it well (probably because I'm nearly dying myself) but it fills my heart seeing that happen. Every. Time. Once she finally breaks that last barrier down (it happens on every single day) she actually starts enjoying the workout. She'll finally start to push herself and then she amazes herself with something she's done. For that week 2 Yoga X, we were finally into stretch positions and right after being angry at the chick on screen doing the hamstring stretch holding a yoga block beyond her foot, she goes for her foot...
...and actually reaches them!
I'm sitting here going "holy shit!" I decide to give it a try because I figured what the hell. I was totally able to touch my toes! I've NEVER been able to touch my toes in a seated position. I was not always an overweight kid. I was pretty average up until about the 3rd grade I'd say. Even so, there was never a point that I could reach down and touch my toes without having to bend my legs. Just couldn't do it, and now here I am touching my toes. Then Zu reaches a bit further and grabs the bottom of her foot... You little showoff!! :-P
Week 3 after Shoulders & Arms. Check the definition forming!!
It's good seeing her push herself on these routines. She always ends them way happier than when she started. I think she's starting to get it. We just finished Yoga X again yesterday, and she went through without any tantrums. That's awesome! She still had the sour mood at the start though, but I knew that Yoga X would take care of that, and it did. She even skipped using the yoga block for a lot of the bent over and balance postures.
I'm improving a lot still as well. My weight is on the rise, but I'm pretty sure it's all muscle at this point. I'm happy about that.
With our 3rd week of P90X pretty much out of the way, Zu's going to get her first taste of the recovery week. Hopefully it feels like a recovery week for her. Maybe not with Core Synergistics, but I know she's got it in her.
I'm gonna end this with a smoothie recipe. I call this one "Peachy Greene"
Peachy Greene Smothie:
1-2 handfuls of greens (I used spring mix)
1 cup peaches (frozen)
1 cup blackberries (frozen)
1 tbsp peanutbutter (or favorite nut butter)
1 tbsp chia seeds
1 cucumber (juiced)
2 granny smith apples (juiced)
I sort of trailed off toward the end of my Round 2 of P90X. I never did quite complete the final week with as strong a finish as I'd been hoping, but I stayed active nonetheless. I ended up switching gears back to biking and starting to get prepared for STP. I got all signed up at the beginning of February and was stoked. I just couldn't wait to get out there.
The weather started to get a little bit more favorable, albeit still cold as hell trying to bike in 45° weather and all. Every day that wasn't raining, I was taking full advantage. I managed to put about 465 miles on the bike in about a month. There wasn't much ramping up this time. The first couple rides, I was doing about 15 miles. By the last week of March, I'd been habitually doing 36 miles a day. In fact, that week from sunday to saturday, I'd put 200 miles on the bike. Definitely a good place to be when I have a 2-day 200 mile ride on the horizon.
Well, my knees didn't seem to think so. After that ridiculous amount of amazing biking weather, my knees were beginning to revolt so I decided to give riding a break for a bit. I think it was because I literally went from zero to hard training, doing 15-20+ mile rides every day without actually ramping up like I'd done last year. I was just trying to resume my biking fitness level of where I was post STP last year which was pretty ridiculously good and my body was totally not in the conditioning for that. I guess it was just as well because April brought in it's famous showers and I still don't have any rain gear. So, I opted to do the next best thing... P90X!!
I managed to actually net my wife this round! I'm pretty stoked about that. She wasn't as stoked as I was but at least vowed to make an effort.
Me after Plyometrics week 1
Zu after Plyometrics week 1
Starting this last week was rough. I was there mentally. I was ready for it, but my body was struggling to keep up. It's nothing short of astonishing how quickly muscles atrophy when not really being used. The month I took off of P90X really showed on that first day of Chest & Back. Man, I was struggling to catch those numbers from the last time I did it. Didn't even come close. However, I was still doing a lot of things unmodified so that still felt good. What really impressed me was Zu hanging in there. She wasn't really nailing the moves all that well most of the time, but was I really on my first week? There were a few moments where she lost it and I thought she was going to just give up then and there. I wanted to tell her that she shouldn't get frustrated over not being able to do something the same as I do. I did when I could, but a lot of the times when she was losing it, I just didn't say anything and kept going. Partly because I figured she'd push onward if she really wanted, but mostly because the move was really freakin' hard and I was too out of breath or focussed.
She'd have her little fit, dust herself off, and join back up. She'd really impressed me each day as she made it all the way through each routine all week. I never did that my first 2 weeks even. I think a lot of what makes it better for her is having me doing it with her. I didn't have anybody doing it with me so if I was giving up, who was going to stop me? Who was really going to encourage me to keep going in that moment? Even though, a lot of the time I wasn't saying much, just me being there and doing the moves with her I think gave her the motivation to keep moving. It definitely felt great to see her finish and see the look on her face of satifaction... after the look of pain and death wore off first.
This time I've taken more of a look at the nutrition plan. I'd basically ignored it my first 2 times through the program and being where I am now, I was still a little hesitant on some aspects of it but I really did wanna see just how I could nail the results this time around. I decided to google around looking for some vegan alternatives. I figured even if I'm not 100% vegan, I could still find some alternatives to things that would work for me better than eating a ton of meat since I wasn't really into that anymore. And I found it!
This has been pretty awesome and following a sort of traditional/vegan P90X nutrition hybrid method has definitely led to it feeling better of the bat. Tonight, we just started week 2 and wrapped up our 2nd round of Chest & Back. My strength is coming back rather quickly. So that has me a bit excited. Not sure if I'll be all that prolific with these updates, but I'll at least try to do a weekly recap or something of this round's adventures. Until next time!
Feels like I've been avoiding posting. Hell it's nearly been a month. I was actually supposed to be done with my round 2 of P90X last week... I'm not. My train hit a bit of a derailment. At the time a couple weeks ago, it felt huge. I was getting upset with myself and getting sort of discouraged. Then I'd sit and think about it a bit and realize it wasn't all that bad. I ran into a series of distractions.
First and biggest: Moving
We got a new place and moving was a bit of a pain. Moving's always a pain. Especially when you have routines. It disrupts the shit out of routines. We actually did a fairly good job of moving everything. We got all the big stuff done in one move, and pre-empted things by moving a lot of little stuff before hand. It made for a somewhat easier transition that we've dealt with in the past. The big issue was all the little things I needed for P90X. I kinda let laziness set in. I didn't really "feel" like going all the way over to the other place just to pick up my pull up bar, or my chair. Things like that.
Then Dead Space 3 came out...
So between the move and my friend hounding me to co-op through Dead Space 3, I let a week slip past. Not doing a single P90X routine. It was bad. And let's be honest, I'm not blaming my friend's peer pressure for me not doing the work. I could've just as easily told him to chill. In fact I did, because I had a bunch of other crap I needed to work on too. There was just a lot going on. By the following week's weigh in, I was worrying that I'd somehow magically put on all the weight I lost back. In one week. You start going nuts about these sort of things. There's certainly a very thin line between healthy and unhealthy obsession with weight when you're working on it that's for sure. The results were I largely stayed the same. I lost like maybe 1 pound and I was friggin' ecstatic.
Then Aliens: Colonial Marines came out...
Now, I AM gonna blame my friend for this one. He basically pressured a group of us to drop down and preorder this thing and we were all ready to go at midnight sharp on release night. Unfortunately(thankfully) the game turned out to be complete and utter shit, so it was short lived. Back to the P90X!!
I had a really sporadic final resistance week of P90X and I was feeling kinda bummed about it, but at least I was starting to get back into action and that's what mattered. Last week, I'd stayed about the same in weight. Maybe another .4lb loss. Still happy I was maintaining. This week was my first actual gain. I came in nearly 2lbs up over my prior week's weigh in. You would've thought by the way I was feeling about that week of inactivity that I would've just been devastated. Nope. Not one bit. I guess with every weigh in week, I was more relieved that I hadn't somehow magically jumped 10-15lbs.
I think it may have been because either tues or wed (my weigh in day) I stumbled upon this chart:
I feel like at that moment, everything sort of fell into perspective. I definitely feel like I'm in the Endomorph body type. It figures it's the one that has to work the hardest, but whatever, it's just a matter of perspective. I guess it just means that I actually AM more badass when I look more badass because I have to put in the work for it. Ok, I can live with that. So when I weighed in on wed, it didn't feel bad at all.
I started my final rest week late. Like Tuesday, and I'm still happy about how much I've improved. The new place affords a bit more space for me to work out so now I can actually do ALL the moves for every routine. I'd been limited with some of the moves in Yoga X, and in Core Synergistics simply because I didn't have enough space. I was basically doing all my workouts, hell, all my living in one room. This final week, I'm just concentrating on getting it done no matter what. If I have to miss a day, I'll make it up the next day. If I have to stop early, I'll resume and finish later if I can, or just do the routine over the next day.
I also still need to decide what is coming next after round 2. I've got a crew signed up for the Seattle to Portland Classic this year. There's going to be 4 of us in total and we're all rocking the TRON suits! It's gonna be dope! I'm most proud of my wife Zulema, and friend Leah for jumping in with me and Joel this time around!
I finally got back on the bike Sunday and did a quick run around the river. I hadn't actually been on a bike since some time in October or November. It was cold, and a bit slow at first, but once I got the rust knocked off, the speed picked up a little. It's amazing how tuned P90X made me. 15 miles in just over an hour and didn't even feel winded. It actually just felt like I was warmed up and ready for a ride haha (just kiddng, I totally got winded once or twice :-P)
So there's definite bike training that has to start soon. I'm eager to get out there and get going. That's definitely something that I can get more people involved in and makes it a lot more motivating for me to keep up. Since, it seems I'm this Endomorph body type, it might be a good idea to do bike rides every day in addition to P90X. So a round 3 might be happening. I'm still not to the point of doing pull ups without a chair so there's room for improvement.
I'm calling the Juice only today. I've felt pretty great for 31 days of juicing, but I'm worrying a bit about not getting enough full protein in for the P90X stuff. Juice fasting is great when you're not doing a lot of heavy impact activity. Basically, you need to be walking, jogging, or bike riding and you're golden. You'll burn calories, fat, and you'll end up burning up some muscle tissue. It's just the name of the game. It's generally not recommended to do any sort of heavy resistance training while on a juice fast. Your body is just simply burning through too many calories, and if you're not compensating, well, it can't be too good for you.
I started out pretty strong. I was adding spirulina and wheatgrass which I think was helping provide complete protein and giving my muscles what they needed, but as the month progressed, I started getting that stuff less and less. While I was improving in some areas, I was falling short in others. For instance, I could do 20 Incline pushups monday during Chest & Back... That's the most I've ever done in one set, but I couldn't do 30 standard pushups which is something I was totally able to do before I started the fast. I'm not quite sure why that difference occurred but it has and I sort of have to take that into account.
I'm basically in my last real week of P90X resistance, then I'll be on to my final rest week the week after next. I then have to decide where I'm going from there. Am I going to try my hand at a round 3? Am I going to go for P90X+? I have Rev Abs now, should I give that a go for 90 days? My focus is on trying to see abs at the moment, that's part of the reason why I did the fast this time around anyway.
So, moving forward, I'm going for a modified juice fast where I'm juicing mostly. I plan on doing basically one meal a day where I can get in some complete protein combinations and basically incorporate some nuts, beans, and seeds. I'm keeping it plant based for the most part and this should hopefully yield some pretty cool results. I figure I'll keep this going for the month of February, and if successful, I may continue through March.
When I woke up this morning, I felt pretty awesome. It was day 26 and I was ready. Zulema had given me a birthday present before going to bed. It was a heart rate monitor. I was stoked because I'd been wanting one forever. I'd started setting it up but it was late and I figured I'd save it for the morning. I got it all set up and checked my resting heart rate.
55BPM, Nice. I didn't know what my resting heart rate was supposed to be so I googled it. I searched "resting heart rate 31 year old male" and here's what I got:
"Anything between 60-80 is normal.
Below 60 can be fine if the 31 year old male is a well-conditioned athlete."
...what?! It's just so nuts because of how I looked a year ago today.
Last year, I'd already been losing quite a bit. I was 286.8, down 19.7 lbs from the 306.5 lbs I started at on Jan 4th. I'd just completed a 20+ mile bike ride to celebrate my Birthday and further train for STP which wasn't coming for another 6 months at least.
Today though? I woke up with a resting heart rate of a "well-conditioned athlete". I tested my blood sugar and it read 101 (no meds of course). I hopped on the scale and it read 223.6, down 23.4 lbs from the 247 I started at on Jan 1st. 63.2lbs down from a year ago today...
Today, I did P90X: Legs & Back and I must have been so hyped from it being my birthday and the way I looked and felt. I was just bursting with energy, and Legs & Back is usually a routine that has me dying. That isn't to say I wasn't feeling like I was gonna pass out at some points, but I'd just hit pause, calm down, and jump back in with more.
We went out to get more juicing supplies and get prepared for my big Juicy Birthday party that was going down later. We'd already gone out prior to me doing my P90X routine and got a bunch of things, but I sent Zu out with Liz to get the rest of the stuff while I knocked that out before everything got started. Zulema was going to make Chili since I'm really the only Juicing at the moment and I got the sudden urge to try my hand at making Hummus from scratch.
I basically knew the majority of the ingredients but was unsure just what quanitites and how it all mixed together so I decided to google it out on the computer in the livingroom. I open up chrome and it defaults to google. It kinda looked funny. The logo was all changed up like they normally do it when something special's happening. I look at it and say to myself "who the hell's birthday is it today? The inventor of birthday cakes?!"
Curious, I hovered over the logo to see and...
...my mind...
Anyway, we got everything prepared and the party got under way. It was awesome seeing friends bring things to juice and trying out our concoctions.
We got serious, setting up our masticating and Centrifugal juicers. Zu started out by making everyone something tropical and fruity with some greens in it. They all loved it of course. Then we made them a batch of mean green, and they also dug it pretty well.
My Hummus was a huge success. I made everything from scratch even down to the tahini. the only thing I didn't do was like soak chickpeas or anything like that. I had Zu pick me up a can of organics while I was working out.
It was a definite blast having everyone over. It really speaks to the amazing amount of support I have from my wife and friends for doing this. So all in all, I say this was a great Birthday!
