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.

We’re now four days into the Insanity program, and it’s going well so far.  We’ve now done the Fit Test (might post the results later), Plyometric Cardio Circuit, Cardio Power and Resistance, and Cardio Recovery.  We’ll take them each one at a time below.

The Fit Test walks you through the eight exercises you do for one minute each to see how fit you are.  You’re supposed to do as many of them as you can for one minute, and write it down.  You then do this again every other week to track your progress as you go.

More later.

I’ll post a little more about it later, but just wanted to quickly let everyone know I’m about to kick things up a notch – with Insanity.  It’s a new 60-day workout program from the same company as P90X, and they claim it’s the hardest workout ever put on DVD.  From what I’ve seen, that could be true.  We’re two days in but have only done one workout (plus a Fit Test on day one) so far.  Tonight we do the second workout, and I’m hoping it lives up to the hype.

Today was my fourth consecutive Naperville Sprint Triathlon.  I wasn’t expecting too much from the swim and bike since I haven’t been in the water since this same race last year, and have only biked a handful of times in the same period, but felt fairly confident in my running ability with hoping half marathon training would carry me through.  Well, I guess I was all wrong, since my swim and bike times were only seconds off my fastest splits, and my run was over a minute and a half slower.  And I lost almost another minute in the transitions.

The 400m pool swim start, besides taking almost 40 minutes to get in the water, was fairly uneventful.  I got a good start, and stayed pretty consistent when I wasn’t trying to get around slower swimmers.  I got out of the water, and felt pretty good, a quick look at the clock had me estimate my time around 9:00, which I thought was pretty good for my fitness – official time 8:07.

It’s a decent run from the pool to the transition area, and I was a bit out of practice, so the T1 time was a bit over 4:00.  Then on to the two-loop bike course which had a few hills.  It was also pretty windy this morning on the course, which hurt heading south, but felt great coming back north.  Altogether, I was able to average a 19.7mph speed, with a finish time of 41:42, seven seconds faster than last year.

T2 was pretty uneventful, I switched shoes, grabbed my hat, and was off running in just under 2:00.  As soon as I started running, I knew I was in trouble.  Usually my legs feel sluggish getting off the bike, but my Garmin shows my pace right in line with a normal 5K time.  Today, I felt extra sluggish, and I was barely faster than my normal easy run pace.  I really struggled to stay under 7:45/mi pace for the first half mile, and was able to slowly pick up the pace.  My third mile, I finally felt good and got into the low 6:00/mi range.  There was another runner over the last quarter mile or so who was trying to kick it in around my speed, so we kind of paced each other in, and my final 5K run time was 22:03.

Overall, I was satisfied with my effort, I just envisioned losing time on the swim and bike, not the run.  I finished in 1:18:07, for 249th place overall, out of over 1,700 finishers, and 25th place in my age division.  Considering I was not properly trained for it, I’ll definitely take that.

Saturday was my Long Run day, and it seemed to go pretty well. I was able to keep my pace fairly consistent for the whole eight miles, and actually felt pretty strong in the end. The Garmin data is available here.

I only did pushups and Ab Ripper on Wednesday, so I will be restarting Week One of the Hundred Pushup Challenge tonight, followed by Ab Ripper X. This is my first recovery week for half marathon training, so it’s just three days of easy mileage.

I think I’ve finally gotten a somewhat solid routine down, after six months of irregularity. I’m doing six days of workouts, with either Saturday or Sunday off, depending on when I have more time to get my long run in.

I’m following a modified Runner’s World SmartCoach training plan to get myself ready for the Oak Brook Half Marathon on Labor Day. I’ve taken the SmartCoach printout, and changed it from four to three days a week (Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday) due to time constraints, but kept the same mileage. I’m also going to be modifying the paces with the help of the Daniels Running Formula.

On the days I don’t run (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) I’ll be doing the Hundred Pushups Challenge again. Once I complete my pushups for the day, I’ll do the 16 minute Ab Ripper X (part1 part2) routine from P90X. All of that should help me regain some of my core strength, which should help with my running as well.

I also hope to start using this blog again as a training log, to keep track of how each of my runs are going.

Last time I wrote, I thought I had about two weeks until I became a father. Well, it turns out I only had a few days, so a lot of the plans I had written about got changed. My Fit Test which was planned for the Saturday after I finished P90X turned out to be the day my wife went into labor. Then the first two weeks at home were spent just trying to survive with our new little roommate, without much thought of working out.

Now that our son – Gavin William – is 8 weeks old, my wife and I have both been able to get some workouts in. We started a couple of weeks ago with some P90X Yoga, which I despised when I went through P90x, but is much more bearable when not doing it alone. We also did Legs and Back, and Shoulders and Arms. I’ve been trying to get a few runs in, and have also gotten in some time on the stationary bike.

I signed up for the Shamrock Shuffle at the end of March, so I’m going to try getting in some quality running workouts over the next few weeks as the daylight lengthens. My PR for the race is 34:08 (8K), so ideally I’d like to beat that, but I’ll have to see how much time I have for training to see if that’s a reasonable goal. I’ve got 8 weeks until race day, and the longest I’ve run so far this year is 10K, so I’ve got some work to do. But I feel like I’ve maintained a decent level of fitness, so hopefully it’ll come back quickly. I’ll try to make some more regular updates as I hopefully run more frequently.