Find more bodyweight exercises at Greatist.com
I can absolutely CAN fit this in twice a week, right? Odd how I can create a new money saving habit, a new kitchen cleaning habit, and can push myself to run greater & greater distances on the weekends (even every day of a 3-day version), yet I am failing HARD at the mid-week full body workouts at home.
Ah well – March is a new month – let’s do this!
Catching up from last week, I put $7.25 into the change fund so that is up over $44 as we rolled into Feb.
If I can keep up a $40/mo total I will be plenty happy at Christmas!
FWIW, what I do is get $20 cash every Sunday just to have something on hand for small things, usually snacks at work 
When the following Saturday rolls around I empty out what is left into the change fund. Last week was a little lower because I had to give 16 money for school supplies he needed to get for the start of the the 2nd semester and I instructed him to shop after school for what he needed so he got $10 towards that.
Meanwhile, on the working out at home front – I have done three workouts in the last 6 nights.
The first night it was:
It was a rotation situation, but then I also added extra squats at the beginning and end because I really want to get my hill running legs built up.
The second night I worked on my arms using some bands and the 10lb weights:
Finished up with hip flexor steps with ankle bands (40 steps) and then 90 seconds of bicycles for the abs.
Tonight was totally without equipment of any kind:
Each night’s workout was 30 mins long (no longer than 35 though) and I was sweating and growling through the last few of each set every night. I was damn sore after that first night for sure!
I took the first and third workout almost totally from the videos on this site:
http://www.runnersworld.com/workouts/ironstrength-workout
The other one was from exercises we’ve done while cross training with coach Tanja over the years. I bought some resistance bands and hand weights so that I could duplicate a lot of what she showed us in the gym on my own time.
So far, so good! I’m trying to stay really disciplined keeping to a daily schedule of both work, chores, working out, and rest/reading/tv time. The workout tonight was MANDATORY no matter how tired I was and I am really glad I stuck to my plan.
Monday night was all drama because my car died on the way home from work and it HAD to get fixed because Tuesday night 16 and I had tickets to see The Who in concert. I bought those tickets in August for his birthday so we have been waiting a LONG time for this event and I couldn’t believe the car failed me so close to that! I guess that was still better than having it die ON Tuesday…anyway…it was thankfully a quick and not horribly expensive fix so we got to the concert without issue last night and it was FABULOUS as we expected but then that meant two nights of missing my routine so I to re-establish it tonight.
The aggressive work plan is already paying off - I started out Feb having to enter 30 leases into the new system with just 19 work days in the month in addition to my regular work load. Less than a week later and I’ve knocked out 10 of those so now I have 15 days to convert 20 leases and I am a lot closer to a very manageable 1 lease per day rate. The key has been working at home! Saturday I knocked off a LOT in just 4 hours and then because of the car situation I had to work from home on Tuesday and I got three leases entered all before 5pm! I know some people have a harder time working from home what with the various parts of the house calling out for attention (wash me! sweep me! dust me! pet me! OK, that’s the cats but still..) but I haven’t found that to be a problem for me.
IOW – I can ignore cleaning like a champ!
So, it was nice to take this mental break tonight and log an entry, but now I must shut it down and gear up for another three day push of tasks. Including getting new tires for the troublesome car on Saturday. Because, oh yeah, there’s chord showing through on the tread of the front tires. Nothing like crossing your fingers every trip out that nothing happens until then!
Because I sort of forgot that I am not 17, or even 27……and yesterday AFTER a nice 1+ hour trail run and then some serious latte drinking and burrito gulping….Renee, Eve and I were feeling the need to go for a walk to not feel so stuffed. So we walked to the school and park near me where – hey look! There are MONKEY BARS!!
(I swear we didn’t spike our lattes with any booze – really!)
I think it is good that no one thought to take any pictures and that the one video I did take didn’t actually record as I expected (you are so lucky Renee!) because we spent quite a bit of time goofing off doing pull ups and just generally hanging from the bars and rings on the playground. Yeah, we thought were big time gymnasts or crazy cross fit elites or some such. Actually, Renee kind of is pretty good at that and pulled off quite a few hard core pull ups. Way more than I could.
BUT – the thing is that I COULD do some! That is largely thanks to the weight training that I started a couple of years ago so once I realized that I COULD, I had to repeat it right?
Lord…
Lemme just say that around 2am I woke up with a burning pain in my neck and shoulders like no other! It’s taken two 800 mg doses of ibuprofen to calm down the pain to a tolerable level and still I moan if I have to lift my arms even a teensy bit.
This is all my way of saying – hey, wanna come join our crazy group of nut job fitness geeks who think sore muscles are the bomb?
OK, we don’t really think that, but anyone who knows me knows that getting me to graduate from walking to circuit training and then to running was not an easy psychological leap for me.
It took the motivation and then the support of a cool group of people to get me motoring along. It doesn’t matter how far away you are, if you are even remotely interested in getting or keeping fit, please sign up here:
http://my.corporatetriathlete.com/
It’s free and you can drop in and read and post questions in the forum and find people who will be able to answer your questions and help get you motivated. Here’s a snapshot of the topics in there now:
See? Not intimidating at all! It’s really for people who want to get started just moving in general like I did.
And no, you don’t need to make yourself as sore as I did! Also, there is a GREAT link to a cross training video workout (30 mins) that anyone can do at home. That’s in the Cross Training topic. I’ve done it twice now while watching TV and it’s fantastic. I mean, it’s not EASY – but it’s also totally something you can build up to and do.
Meanwhile, I am going to stay away from those damn monkey bars. Evil things.
As promised, a post about running.
Sort of.
If you can call what I did this week “running”.
To make a potentially long intro short – I really want to work on running to my heart rate and gaining speed. Sure, I met my goal in that first 5K race, but at a certain point I stopped really paying attention to my heart rate since I just needed to be able to go fast for 3.1 miles. I plan on running in another 5k in Feb but this time I’d like to be more efficient at that speed so that I have some kick left to perhaps sprint to the end like Alex did and break that 30 min barrier.
Which means, than in order to go fast, first I have to go slow again.
Really, really, REALLY slow.
With a top heart rate of 185 when I do wind sprints (also in my range for my age/gender), that means my aerobic heart rate range is between 150-160. Coach Tanja said I should be shooting for even lower – 130-140 if possible. Lordy! All I do is barely jog the one length of my street and my heart rate is up to 140!
So, I whined about it to Eve and she told me about how damn hard it was for her to start off like that last year, and how frustrated she was watching Renee gallop away but that it did work. The psychological pain pays off. Because it really is only psychological. At those slow paces nothing else hurts that’s for sure!
So, off I went twice this week by myself so I didn’t feel bad about dragging anyone else down. Over an hour both times on the fairly level 56 trail both times. Kept the average heart rate in the low 140s both times. Max rate was 153 both times.
And my “speed”?
Oh, barely over 3.5 miles an hour. Or a 17 minute mile pace. (By comparison I ran a 9.52 min mile pace in the 5k).
S-L-O-W
How slow?
Let’s talk about the folks who passed me while I “ran” causing much embarrassment and then fits of giggles for Eve after I shared my pain with her.
Sigh….this better work. Not sure my ego can take much more
As a beginning level runner, what I learned the last two weeks is:
1) Run slow enough that you keep a conversational breathing pace (or, better yet, wear a heart monitor and keep the heart rate between 140-150). Slow and steady really *does* win the race – or, at least, allow you to gradually increase distances.
2) Running too many days in a row, or increasing the distance too fast will make your knee caps ache like mine do today.
Did I mention slow and steady wins the race?
