I finished week two of the pushup challenge, and will start week three tonight. I’ve decided to take my time with this and do week three at level 2 once through, then level 3 the next week. Last time I ran through this, I did it ll in 6 weeks, and may not have always hit my minimums for the final set. So this time, I planning in going slowly through it to make sure I can get to 100 by the end, even if it takes me 8 or 9 weeks instead of 6.
I went for an easy run tonight to test out my knee (so far, so good) followed by week two, day one of the hundred pushups challenge. I maxed out at 15, which was the minimum. I might have been able to push for a few more, but wanted to get going on some other things.
I decided to put off running until tomorrow, to give my knee that extra little bit of rest. But I still wanted to do something, so I decided to do Insanity’s Cardio Abs DVD. It’s a quick 20 minutes, but it’s a solid core/ab workout. I know I’ll be feeling it tomorrow.
I just finished week one of the Hundred Pushups challenge. My max reps set for Day 2 was 15 (was a minimum of 9) and Day 3 was 20 (minimum of 13). So I seem to be progressing, which is good. I’m looking forward to starting week two in a couple days.
My running, on the other hand, has been delayed. My knee is still bothering me a bit from Disney, but it’s getting better. I may try to run a few easy miles tomorrow, otherwise I’ll just skip the first week of my nine week plan altogether. It’s better to rest now and be fully healed for the end than risk aggravating the injury now.
We got back from Disney last week, and we’re already focusing our running for the Shamrock Shuffle at the end of March. But I wanted to do something more than just running three or four days a week. So I’ve come up with a couple of things I can do, whether it’s the Cardio Abs workout from Insanity, or Ab Ripper X from P90X, or just a routine from Runner’s World, I hope to do some core work a couple of days a week.
I also decided to start the One Hundred Pushups Challenge again. I went through it once before, and it definitely got my pushup max higher, but I never got to 100. So this time I’m hoping to do it right, and not move on until I get the proper max, and hopefully end up with a max of 100 pushups at once. The plan has you doing between 5 and 8 sets of pushups, with a structured amount of rest in between sets. It gets progressively higher, and is aimed at getting to 100 in six weeks. I’m not sure I can do it in six, but Day One last night already went better than I remember from the first time through. I hit all of the first four sets, and maxed out at 20 on the fifth set, where the goal is just nine. I’ll try to at least post my max every day I do it (Mon, Wed, Fri), if not some more thoughts on how it’s going.
Here are my official results from the WDW Half Marathon from this past Saturday:
Clock Time: 1:35:52
Chip Time: 1:35:14
Overall Place: 246
Division Place: 24
And my Garmin data is available here – http://connect.garmin.com/activity/22331046.
Overall, I’m very happy with my results. 246th overall out of over 17,000 finishers is pretty decent. I was about a minute off of my PR, but considering the weather I’m not surprised. It was below freezing at the start, and started raining/snowing/sleeting just before we headed over to the start line. It turned into a light but steady rain just before the gun went off, and stayed that way the whole time. I got a pretty bad cramp around mile 7, so that slowed me down a bit. Other than that, I felt pretty good the whole time.
The weather did not cooperate with me this weekend, so I had to run 10 miles on the treadmill. Universal Sports played the last 10 Ironman World Championship races back-to-back on New Year’s Day, and our TiVo recorded most of them. So I was able to watch those while I ran, which helped with the boredom somewhat. I was actually surprised at how it went, once I passed the 4 or 5 mile mark. I usually have to really push myself to keep running past that point when I’m on the treadmill, but really had no problem with it. And if we hadn’t had something else scheduled for the morning, I might have tried going for 12.
So now that the race is less than a week away, I just have one more easy run tonight, and a short tempo run on Wednesday. I may try to get in a few easy miles Thursday or Friday as well, just to keep from getting stale.
Welcome to the new mattjcon.net. I hadn’t done anything with the design for so long, and hadn’t been updating it frequently, either. So I decided to do both at the same time. The new design is still a work in progress, but hopefully the new behind-the-scenes management system will make things a bit easier for me to keep up-to-date. I have a few idea of some changes I’m looking to make, but if you have any suggestions, please feel free to let me know.
I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas, and is getting ready for a great new year.
I was forced to run my long run inside on the treadmill on Sunday, with lots of snow and slick roads outside keeping me from going outside. It went ok, but I’m not looking forward to doing it too many more times. I can keep myself distracted for an hour or so, but much longer than that and I get bored quickly. And when I’m bored, I tend to want to stop running, so it takes extra motivation to keep going.
I actually kept to my plan and got up early this morning for an easy run. I just did an easy 4 miles, and will have to do a 4-5mi tempo run tomorrow night. I really need to get it in, though, since we’re just under two weeks away from race day.
We’re less than three weeks away now from our trip to Disney for the WDW Half Marathon. The training has been a bit more relaxed than I usually am, but I hope that I can still do well. The first three or four weeks of the training was taken up by the end of Insanity, and since then it’s been a struggle to find the time and daylight to get runs in.
To make things a little bit easier for ourselves, we bought a treadmill at the beginning of October, and it’s certainly helped. I have still been doing my long runs outside, since I try to keep my treadmill time to a minimum. But I have gotten up to doing 10 miles, and my pace was faster than I trained with in the past, so hopefully that bodes well. Also, I think Insanity really helped with my core strength.
I’ll try to get another good Tempo run in this week, and another set of good mile repeats next week, then we’ll start to taper as we get set to travel. The course is much flatter than the Oak Brook course, so even if my fitness is the same as it was then, I should be able to improve my time. I’ll hopefully post some more training details as the next couple of weeks progress, but I’m looking forward to this race, and I hope it goes well for both of us.
