Bleh

I had a successful Monday swim. As I posted on facebook today - I was feeling a little keyed-up this morning. I blame the weird weekend. On one hand I had a lot of fun hunting - a lot of good walking too. On the other, quite a bit of frustration. The swim seems to have helped some - I'm feeling pretty sleepy now. I swam a little more aggressively today - doing more reps of crawl which is my most active swimming stroke at the moment. The first couple of weeks I alternated between 3 strokes - crawl, breast stroke and back stroke which gave me a chance to slow down in between to prevent burnout. Then the past couple of weeks I went to alternating crawl and breast stroke for the most part. Today I was doing 2 and 2 crawl and breast stroke. Ideally it'll help me build more endurance doing the crawl so that maybe I can build up to an entire 30min workout of crawl. I also worked in a couple of sprints - one at 15min and the other at the 30min mark. The first one wasn't too bad, but I only pushed like 80%. The second was much tougher as I was going balls-out. I was cruising right along until I got a cramp in my right calf. It wasn't terrible but I had to stop about 3/4 of the way through. Eh well - I'll chalk it up to being outta shape. Another 6mo and I'll be able to tear across the pool. :)

Oh - and I forgot to mention last week that I made an executive decision to NOT swim on Friday since I was going to be doing quite a bit of hunting over the weekend. I'm not sure how smart it was, but I didn't wear out on Saturday so I'll just pretend that it was the right decision. :)

Week 4 (I think?)

I had a bit of a slow start into my new and improved routine. I missed my Monday night ab ripper so I added it on to my Tuesday yoga so we're square now. I just have to get off my ass and do some ab ripper tonight. It shouldn't be too much trouble doing it two days in a row since I didn't really push it yesterday.

My Monday swim went really well. I knocked out a full 30 minutes without any trouble at all. I felt much more comfortable in my breathing and I'm starting to feel stronger. I was even feeling good enough that I did some crawl-sprints. On a couple, but it felt good to cruise across the pool with some strength. Hopefully I'll be able to work in some of those sprints regularly as I feel like it. I even felt really good after my swim. I came back to the office and went to Chipotle with the guys I work with and was feeling pretty cocky (a rarity these days if you can believe it). Anyway, it must have been apparent because one of the girls in the Chipotle food-making line gave me a big smile and extra food in my burito bowl. Rob and Warren laughed about it, but I was pretty doubtful she was flirting. That is until she came by our table later and asked how everything was tasting (they don't do that much at Chipotle if at all and she didn't stop at any other tables). Then later she came back and asked if she could clear my dishes when I was done. It was funny 'cause again she didn't ask anyone else - not even Warren who was also done and sitting across from me. We all had a good laugh about it. I sent Kim an IM later and told her she's going to have to beat her up. I'm pretty sure she didn't believe me, but I don't care - it was nice to get a little attention. We'll just call it an unintended bonus to working out.

Enough of my ego trip - I'm feeling pretty solid in my Mon/Wed/Fri routine now so it's just maintenance mode now. I'm also going to try to start pushing it as long as my muscles/joints are still feeling up to it. I also really need to get my heart rate monitor going again. I would really like to do some intentional cardio training using HR thresholds...

Fast 3 weeks

My how time flies when you're old... I just finished my third week swimming, though to be fair I only got in 2 days this week and last week. This week I had an all-day work thing on Wednesday and last week I had to stay home /w the munchkins 'cause of teacher in-service. I suppose if I was very serious about this I'd have made up the missed day somehow. Oh well - the important thing is that I'm still sticking with it right? That said, I think I'm ready to lay down some more goals... here' goes.

I hereby declare that the goal of my working out is to slowly build up some strength, endurance and flexibility so that I can ultimately start (and complete this time) the full 90 days of P90X - ideally without the injuries incurred last time so that I can stick with it and plow through. My goal to start P90X is going to be Monday January 7, 2013. The idea behind the date is to get past the holidays and most of hunting season so that I'll have fewer likely interruptions to the 6-day/week schedule. Now that I've gotten started on the endurance portion with swimming I'm going to continue with the 3-day per week swimming and starting next week I plan to blend in some yoga and core work. I will probably start somewhat conservatively with both. I'll shoot for 20 minutes of yoga on tues/thurs and start working my way into Ab-Ripper on mon/wed/fri evenings. I'll follow this 5-day/week schedule for the next 3 weeks and see how it goes. After that I'll hopefully have some more concrete short/medium-term goals.

oops - I forgot to capture how my workout went today. It was actually kinda crappy. I know it's normal to have an off today and today was no exception. When I first got in the pool I felt comfortable and started off pretty smoothly, but by the second or third lap I started to get that uncomfortable breathing thing where I started holding my breath for no reason at all and couldn't really even it out. For me in the past, swimming for exercise has been all about getting to the point where I'm comfortable breathing so that I can concentrate on working. Today was definitely NOT the day for that. I'm also having some annoying issues with my HR monitor. It seems to be really bitchy about when it likes to work. I suppose it's not that big of a deal now that I know about how hard I have to work to get to 75% and 80%, etc. Maybe I'll just skip wearing it.

First Week

The first week is in the bag. My Friday swim was pretty uneventful. I swam a solid 30 minutes with about a 25sec break at the half mark. Unfortunately I don't have an average heartbeats per minute because my HR monitor wasn't picking anything up. I suspect the batter was dead so I just got back from CVS with a replacement. Anyway - of to a good start. Hopefully I can keep it up.

Holy water weight Batman!

This morning when I got up and ready for work I decided to weigh myself to see if the swimming this week has had any impact at all. Apparently it has. I started off this week a little over 165lbs and this morning I weighed just over 160. It's pretty common for me to lose 5 or 10 lbs fast when I start working out, but I didn't expect it to happen this week. Yeah - I swam quite a bit but I also ate quite a bit of junk. To be honest, I'd take gains in flexibility and strength over weight loss any day of the week, but it's still nice to know that what I'm doing is working. Oh - and slacker me has not yet taken the time to reevaluate my resting and max heart rates. Maybe I'll try to estimate it while I'm sitting here at my computer today... cheers!

Seconds

Yep - the verdict is in... I officially set the bar too low. Today was my second day swimming and I did just over 30min with an average of 79% of my max heart rate. I'm still tired but not noticably more than on monday. I think the plan for now will be to keep going on my original plan while I reevaluate. Since I don't really have a lot of extra slack time in my lunch hour (it currently takes me about 50 min to get to the gym, work out and get back), I'll probably consider picking up the intensity if my hear-rate baseline holds up. Remember that the resting and max heart rate I'm using on my handy/dandy heart rate monitor are left over from last year. That being said, I'm not sure it'll make much difference if they're off. My resting is listed at 60bpm which is low, but even if it were 65 or 70 I don't believe it'll make much of a difference in the average pct. No, I haven't calculated it yet. Anyway - more to come here, but I'm feeling good back in the saddle. I just hope it doesn't negatively effect my ability to hunt tonight.

Hunting season is here!

Late Sunday afternoon I decided that I should probably get off my butt and hang up my deer stand. The guy that farms the land just behind our house had finished getting all of his soy beans out the day before so it was pretty easy to just drive the truck across the field and hang it up. I'm not completely happy with the deer stand I have. It's an old hand-me-down from my step mom's first husbands stuff. It appears to be fairly sturdy - much more so than the one I tried last year anyway. The seat was ruined so I fashioned a make-shift one out of a rope so at least I'll be able to sit. Anyway, I drove across the field to the tree-line to a place where I've seen lots of deer and turkeys go in and out of the trees. When I got there I could see why they seemed to frequent that location. Right there in the corner is a place where a creek crossing (a "Missouri crossing" as Steve would say) was made to get from the main field to a smaller field that is completely surrounded by trees. It looked to me like the perfect spot to setup a stand. I can cover the crossing as well as anything that walks the edge of the trees on the main field AND anything that is walking the creek bed since it's dry (lots of tracks on the creek bed by the way). So I got the stand hung on a tree pretty high-up. Climbing into the stand is going to be a little sporting, but I screwed in a couple of 2x4s to help. I was a little tempted to just go buy a new ladder stand since it would be much safer, but I'm not sure the boss would approve of the expenditure at this point. So rather than have that conversation in the midst of everything else, I tried to make it as secure as possible with what I had. The stand has a strap that goes with it. It's a little old, but appears to be strong enough to hold a little dude such as myself. I also added a ratchet strap that I keep inside my truck for good measure. I'm also planning to take a rope to see if I can tie myself to the tree somehow without sacrificing freedom of movement. Yyyyeah - I'll let you know how it goes.

This one is getting a little long so I'll end here. I'm hoping to get into the stand in the evening or even in the morning this week. I wonder how much support I'll get at home for such a thing?