It’s Friday, time for another new lunge for the upcoming week of Lunge Club! This coming week is the Side Lunge – as shown in the video below it’s great for the quads, hamstrings and glutes.

So how are you doing? I’ve been doing 60 per day and it’s going good for me. I can definitely feel those last 15-20 in a set, but in a good way! And I thnk they are helping with the soreness I had been having the previous few months. Leave some comments here or over on FaceBook. And if you’re just starting… go back and check out the first week…

And of course I have to give thanks to Alysa over at Inspired RD for inspiring Lunge Club in the first place.

It’s Friday. Through yesterday I had done 220 lunges out of my goal of hitting 300 this week, and I have two days left yet, so I should be fine. With the exception of Monday I have been doing basic lunges as shown in the video from my first posting about this. Monday I was at the gym and actually did the walking lunges I’m going to talk about today.

As you’ll see in this week’s instructional video, these are great for the hips, hams and glutes. I’m think for now I’m going to shoot for doing 60 a day 5 days a week, that way if I miss a day during the first part of the week for some reason, I’ve still got a chance to make up for it later without any major pressure. My “office” is in a back hallway area, so I have room where I can do these while at work. I should be able to do 10 lunges down the hall and 10 back. If I make it to the gym, they’ve got plenty of space to do them there… but you don’t need a lot of room. Even if you just do 2, 3, 4 whatever back and forth down the living room or something, that’s all you need. I would need someone to help me count in that situation though, I would lose count way too easy. I’m odd that way…

As usual, thanks to Alysa over at Inspired RD for inspiring this. She called her challenge the “300 Club” after the aim of 300 lunges a week. I’m hoping to beyond that, and since I’m not wanting to totally plagiarize her, I’ve decide to call mine “Lunge Club”. And the first rule of Lunge Club it to talk about Lunge Club. Get a friend or a co-worker of family member to join in this. Misery loves company right? Wait.. I mean… having someone else to do this with is a great motivator! Yea, that’s it.

Or just share with me either here in the comments or on my Facebook page how you’re doing. We’ll motivate each other.

So, I follow a number of RD and nutrition types on Twitter.. and one that I converse with quite frequently is this really kewl chic by the name of Alysa. On Twitter she’s known as @inspiredRD – though maybe it should be inspirational? Course, on Twitter every letter counts, so yea… inspired works. Last year she was doing this weekly challenge of doing 300 lunges over the course of three months. I contemplated, but never did join in last year… lunges tend to not be a fun thing for my knees.

But lately, it seems like my quads have really been giving me some issues, and I know working on them will also help with my knees, so for some odd reason as I was at the gym last night I thought of Alysa and decided to do some lunges. I did 50 walking lunges. The last ten were a struggle, but I made it. So last night I decided to go back and look at her postings about the challenge last year.. and that led me to decide I’m going to shoot for doing it myself this year. And since, as they say, misery loves company… I figured I would invite you all along for the ride.

Now Alysa made a very good point in her initial posting about her challenge…

No matter what form of lunge you are performing, make sure that you are doing them properly.  This is so important!  If you are new to lunging, do them in front of a mirror to make sure your form is correct.  I encourage everyone to watch this video to see not only how to do a proper lunge, but how to avoid common mistakes that can lead to injury.

Here’s the video she mentions…

So what are the benefits of doing lunges? Well, they are great for shaping/toning all parts of the legs and the butt too I guess. I don’t really need the toning…cause I don’t think they’re gonna do much for the excess skin I have on my inner thighs, but like I said above, strengthening my quads will help my knees, and I’m hoping the stretching of them will help with the issues I’ve been having after running or doing the elliptical. Alysa mentions a couple other benefits in her blog:

Don’t do lunges just to look better in a bikini (although they will help!).  Do them to increase your strength and to improve other areas of fitness.  When I was consistently doing lunges, my legs had so much more energy in them during a long run.  I would hit a big hill and have energy reserves that were never there before.  I know they will do the same for you, no matter what kind of exercise you are looking to improve in.

Ok… no… I’m not planning on donning a bikini anytime soon, I already did the heels thing. That’s plenty. Most days I’m actually ok with my legs – they’re rather built up, probably from hauling around 300+ pounds for so many years. But… some of you out there may be looking for that benefit. Who am I to judge?

And on top of all that… you can do these just about anywhere. You don’t need to be at the gym. In fact, this is one reason I’m deciding to try this out. With my upcoming schedule this is something I’ll be able to do here at work, like the walking ones down the hall outside my office for example.

So yea… I’ve started, so if you want to do so as well.. please do. Share some comments about here or on my Facebook page. Let’s egg each .. I mean encourage each other here. The first couple of weeks I’m shooting for 50 a day and I hope to increase that. So let’s set a goal of 300 a week for the first six weeks and see how things are after that. That will take us to the beginning of March. I’ll try to post on Friday’s about a different lunge to try for the following week. It’s not mandatory to be switching it up, though it may help keep it fresh and each type of lunge will give a slightly different workout.

I don’t think Alysa minds me stealing picking up on her idea here, but in return, you should really check out her site and maybe on Twitter or something too.

Most obese folks, like I used to be, know that when you’re serious about losing weight you need exercise. Conventional wisdom dictates that part of that is done by joining the local gym. Like me, you may have been a member of a gym for years and years. I was… I think I first joined (most recently anyways) about 7-8 years ago. I went a few times here and there… the gym I joined wasn’t terribly expensive, which was a bonus. Then like many of the diets I tried over the years… I gave up. I stopped going.

However, I didn’t drop my gym membership.

Part of me kept thinking that seeing that $25 or whatever it was coming out of my bank account every month would motivate me to start going back – eventually. well, for nearly five years it did nothing of the sort. It wasn’t until about three years ago when I made the decision to have gastric bypass surgery that I actually got the motivation to start going back to the gym. And with a few off periods here and there, I’ve been pretty consistent since. Heck, there were times I was going 4-5 times a week on top of exercise I was getting being outside and such.

And the gym I belong to… Ballys… well, I liked the price, but even when it comes to gyms, you do tend to get what you pay for. Don’t get me wrong, they had the full complement of services. Free weights, the weight machines, an open area for doing stretching and such, the ellipicals and treadmills, pools, whirlpools, and probably the thing I used the most – a walking/running track. I discovered something odd early on. Put me on a treadmill, and less than ten minutes worth of “walking in place” has me bored silly. But put me on that track, and I could easily go an hour. Yea I know, I’m just walking in a circle… I don’t know why, but it made a huge difference for me.

The other thing I liked is they had locations where I needed them. One was less than two miles from my house. Another near my surgeon’s office that I would hit after work when I go to support groups and other stuff up that way, another on the side of town I would hit after work before my radio show meetings, another between work my mom’s house I could hit if I was going that way after work. It was great… but getting back to the “you get what you pay for” though – the Bally’s locations are old, most built in the 70s or 80s I think, and most of these were put in to buildings that were even older. The one by my house for example, was grocery store prior to becoming a gym. And unfortunately, they really did show their age. You walk in to these gyms and there’s nothing fancy about them.

Plain white walls with an occasional poster… mirrors on a number of walls of course… some old “tube style” TVs near the cardio machines. You go in to the locker rooms, and you knew you were in a locker room. Most of the ceilings are low, there’s light… but it never really felt “bright” – cept at the one that did have a good supply of windows on two side. The smells, the sounds, the hard tile floors, the rows and stacks of metal lockers, the open shower area. Was sort of like being back in high school again.

Now to get back to the title of this blog – I don’t know if it’s a byproduct of how… old and run down these places felt or what, but I never felt much of the “intimidation” that I hear a lot of others talking about. Now I’m not trying to disparage the folks that would go to the gym when I was there, but there just didn’t seem to be a lot of the “beautiful” people around. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I didn’t come across some very attractive women and it’s not like there weren’t the really buffed up guys around. But for some reason it never felt intimidating. Maybe it’s because there are also plenty of other folks in the same sort of shape I was three years ago. Struggling, like I was at the time to do five minutes on the elliptical. People that you can identify with as another person also struggling to get their health under control.

Flash forward to a couple weeks ago, I get a letter in the mail telling me the local Ballys have been bought by LA Fitness (along with 150+ others across the country) and that most of the locations will be closing – including three of the four I frequent. Sure, I’ll be able to make use of LA Fitness and their dozen or so locations around the area, but at some point it’s going to start costing me more than the $20 a month I’m currently paying. Problem is, nobody knows exactly. In one way I’m sort of lucky, the one location they seem to be keeping for the long haul is the one closest to my home. There are rumors they’re even going to remodel it. But on the other side of this coin is the fact unless I convert my membership it’s the only location I’ll be able to use… and right now I only go to that location about 1/3 of the time I use the gym.

Now you would think a company as large as LA Fitness would have a plan in place for converting memberships before buying out 170 or so existing gyms, but that’s not the case. So for now at least, I can go make use of the LA Fitness locations as part of my Ballys membership and check out what they have to offer. So I did just that earlier this week, and I gotta tell ya, the difference is like night and day.

If these were cars, Ballys is that used car you buy from someone on Craig’s List. It’s got a lot of miles on it, but it comes from an era when they were made to last. There’s some minor dents and some chipped paint on the outside, and one of the fenders is a different color after having been replaced but never painted to match. The inside has been cleared out, but based on some of the stains and smells you know the previous owner made liberal use of the drive-thru. Under the hood things look decent enough. The exhaust system isn’t too loud, and the engine seems to run ok, even if it takes a couple cranks to turn over. But hey, it’s at a price you can afford and it will get you where you need to go.

Then there’s LA Fitness. This is a used car as well, but only a couple years old. The owner was meticulous about the upkeep and has complete service records, including from the detail shop where the floor was shampooed and the leather interior was buffed on a regular basis. The outside is still shiny because of that fresh coat of wax. The engine purrs to life with just a slight turn of the key.

Yea, it’s like that. In the one I visited, the only tile floor was in the bathrooms/shower rooms and pool area. And the showers were individual showers. The rest of the locker room is carpeted. Hair dryers in front of the large mirrors. LARGE, wood faced lockers.  Carpet throughout the very open and airy workout areas. The cardio equipment is up on a sort of lofted area overlooking all the weight machines. There’s racketball courts, a basketball court, and more. The other big difference was the people. At Bally’s I would run in to people of all ages, from early 20′s to late 70′s. Now I know I’ve only been here once, but the vast majority of the people I saw (and it was PACKED) were mid-20′s to mid-30′s. And I gotta tell ya, there were by far a lot more of those “beautiful” people there.

Again, I’m not trying to slam anyone here. Yes, I realize that a lot of times when we see “those people” at a gym, we marvel at them and lament to ourselves over how they look like they don’t need to be there and how we’d kill to have a body like theirs. And yes, I even know deep down that part of why they have that body is because they are there. But I also gotta say, looking around this place… I felt a twinge of intimidation.

I didn’t realize it at first. It was just sort of an… off feeling I had while I was there. I thought maybe it was just being in a new gym, but no… thinking back, I don’t think it was. I never felt anything like that walking in to the different Ballys locations. And it wasn’t a huge thing either. If you’ll forgive the pun, it’s probably because I myself am no longer huge. But I don’t really recall feeling this even when I was. Maybe part of it is an age thing, because it did seem the majority of those there were at least 15 years younger than I am. I dunno. I’m planning on going to the one near my work tonight. We’ll see if I get any of the same vibe there.

And I don’t know yet if I will keep the membership. Odds are I’ll have to be paying at least another $10 a month. In the grand scheme of things it’s not that much more. But if my school plans for next year pan out, I’ll be working evenings and likely won’t have much time for going to the gym. I’m already sort of planning on using walking outside, along with trying to make sure whatever PT job I get is one where I’m active and on my feet as a way to keep my activity level up. But I like having a gym membership on the back burner for those times where I can go, and maybe can’t be outside because of weather or something. We’ll see how it goes.

In the mean time, I am planning on going to the LA Fitness near work here tonight, check it out and see if I get any of the same vibe there. But how about you? Do you get that intimidating feeling at your gym? How do you deal with it? Or maybe you did and got past it… if so… how? Let me know, maybe it will help me others.

Move.

Don’t think about it. Don’t plan on it. Don’t say you will. Just do it. (sorry Nike)

There’s so many reasons we come up with to not get in our exercise. I know. I make them all the time myself. But really, it doesn’t take much. 30 minutes a day. Is that too much to ask?

I found this video recently that really helps illustrate (yes, pun intended) the importance that just a few minutes of walking can make in your health. I’m not even talking about weight loss here – even though it will likely be a byproduct of this. Just the overall health benefits you will see from something as easy as walking.

Please… watch this video, then get up and go out for  walk. Heck, I’ll even excuse you if you cut today’s short because you took the time to watch this video. But tomorrow… that’s another story.

“I’m cold.”

A few years back, if I’d said those two words you probably would have probably given me a funny look. See, when I was 300, 350, 380+ pounds, I would work up a sweat just walking across the room. I was the guy that would be out there in 30 degree weather in light shirt, steam coming off my head from all the heat coming off me.

Then come summer… well… get me out there for a bit of paintball in July, and I would come off the field drenched in my own sweat. Heck, there were times I didn’t even have to move, just sitting there … in the shade … for me it was like sitting in a steam room. It sucked.

Then I had bariatric surgery. And one of the side effects you don’t always hear as much about is that you are pretty much guaranteed to turn into the proverbial “freeze baby”.

So yea, that first winter after surgery was a very different experience for me. I was still losing weight too, so I didn’t want to invest in a new winter coat yet, but fortunately I still had my old high school letter jacket, which was a pretty heavy coat. That and layering sweatshirts and such got me through that first winter with no frostbite or hypothermia or anything.

But there was another side to all this as well. The sweating. That first year… no matter how hard I was working out, it seemed like I couldn’t break a sweat. And honestly, it was kinda freaky. For as far back as I could remember it was all I could do to NOT break a sweat, and here I was… biking, jogging, and much more and I wasn’t sweating.

I don’t know the science behind all this. Is it as simple as I don’t have the insulating layer of fat, so my body is able to more easily regulate it’s temperature? But then again, sweating is an important part of that… it’s how the body cools itself off. So what was keeping my body from heating up in the first place? Is it a metabolism thing? And if so, what’s different now?

See this year, I’ve been sweating more.

It’s not like it was where I’m just sitting in a warm room and I’ll start. But when I’m exercising; out biking or running laps on the track at the gym. These days I can work up a pretty healthy sweat. Actually, the first couple years (and I’m not sure I should be admitting to this) not sweating was kinda nice in a number of ways. When it came to going to the gym, I could wear the same shorts and shirt for a couple gym sessions in a row, no big deal. Now, after a nice workout my stuff is a bit drenched and goes right to the wash when I get home. But at the same time, and maybe this was just a mental thing, I often felt like I wasn’t doing enough exercise because I wasn’t working up a sweat.

So what is it about weight loss that makes us get so cold? I mean, sure, I’ve put on a few pounds since last year. But based on how my clothes fit, being able to lift more, etc… by far it’s mostly muscle I’ve added back. So it’s not like I’ve been adding a bunch of insulation here – so what’s different? And maybe it just shows how wonderful our body is at adapting to what we put it through (to a certain extent), and maybe it just needed some time to adjust to this new normal? But then again, I know of a few people who years later still haven’t gotten over the whole “freeze baby” thing.

I dunno. One of those mysteries of life after WLS I guess? One that’s on my mind more and more now that we’re definitely in to the chilly fall weather here in Minnesota. What about you? Are you still a Popsicle, even in the summer..? How do you survive the colder months?

I did it.

I survived the Warrior Dash. And on top of that.. I beat my goal time of 50 minutes by almost 10 minutes. I don’t have the official time yet, but my friends told me I crossed the finish at 2:10, I was in the middle of the 1:30 wave, so yea… 40min give or take a minute.

Speaking of crossing the finish line… here I am about to…

The course was… well, not much like that they had listed that I previewed for you a few weeks back. But like I thought, I didn’t have any trouble with any of them. No, what got to me was the hills. I should have exptected it more, I mean we ran at Afton Alps. A ski area. Granted, this is Minnesota, not Colorado… we don’t have mountains, but yea, there’s hills, and plenty of them.

Not even a quarter-mile in we hit what may have been the worst… a long climb up. I made it a bit over half-way before I dropped to a walk. I wasn’t alone, not by a long shot. Then the first obstacle was the junkyard.. four sets of cars to climb over with block of tires to deal with between them. I ran along the tops of the tires, not stepping inside them.

Then almost right after as… well, remember how I said this was a ski area? Around here they make snow. They do this by blowing water through these be… sprayers. When it’s winter and it’s cold out, POOF! instant snow. When it’s summer, and it’s not so cold out. FWOOSH! Lots of wind and water. And we had to run almost right in to it. I would have preferred to do that one more towards the end when I was really heated up.

After that was a cargo-net … bridge? They had the nets stretched out over a framework about 4ft off the ground. You have to climb up on to it, and across… about… 40feet long maybe? With the sagging and other people stepping around making things shift, it was interesting. But I stuck to the edge, hands along the boards that made up frame, side stepping along.

Them more hills to climb. Then the first water break at about the 1mile mark. Grabbed two cups, doused my head with one, a couple sips from the other. Then some down hill action… keeping in control while going down hill is harder than one might think. A lot of pressure on the knees and quads.

At the bottom of the hill was the over-under. Over a 4ft wall, under some barb wire. Over wall, under barb wire. There was four or five sets of this to deal with. Some fairly flat running, with lots of zig-zagging of the course. Then the cargo-net wall. Up about .. 12 feet maybe? then over the top and down the other side.

UPDATED: There was one more in here I forgot about – there was an area where … well, you know those pop-up canopies you use camping and such… where you can also put up side walls to block the wind and such? Picture one of those… about 40 feet wide and about 60 feet long… and only about 2feet off the ground… and then picture the canopy and walls being all black. And yea, it’s sitting out there in the summer sun. We had to crawl under this thing… by the time we got out the other side, the 80-degree temps were feeling almost soothingly-cool.

Next what was supposed to be a sharp drop.. but wasn’t really, followed by running through about 50-60 feet of sand Kind of under-whelming actually. Then another wall.. 12 feet .. maybe 16? Solid plywood wall with cleats that ran along it about every two feet and a rope you use to climb up. You go over the top, then there’s braces that basically made it a ladder climb down.

We were pretty much back at “ground level” at this point.. so there was a bit more running before a bunch of muck.. thick mud. I joked with some of the runners near me that it smelled like it was fresh from the farm this morning. Then there was a sort of balance beam deal… 2×8 boards, you go up an incline to about a 3-4ft height, then they angle down, then up, then back down again. maybe 30-40 feet total distance.

There was one last hill to climb, not a huge one. At the top of this, you’re maybe 100 yards from the finish…there’s about a 40 foot… slip and slide.. plastic sheets covering the hill as they spray water down.. and you slide. I got a good running start and slid down rather quickly, nearly taking someone out at the bottom that started cutting across the spot I was about to land at.

Then there was the flaming log hurdle before leaping in to the mud pit – I did about 50 feet of crawling/swimming under barbed wire before pulling my self up out of the mud to run the last 40-50 feet to cross the finish line. I was greeted by someone with the event putting the “I Survived” medallion over my head.. then I grabbed a glass of water and threw it in my face. I had managed to splash muddy water in it as I was crawling from the mud pit. Then I grabbed another to start drinking.. and they me a banana too.

My sister, G and two of her girls where there to cheer me on and the girls had picked some flowers to give me. We wandered around a little bit.. I posed in my warrior hat…

Then I went and got cleaned up… they were using a couple of the snow makers to hose folks off… and I tossed my shoes on the donation pile. They get cleaned up and donated to Green Sneakers.

I am thinking I will do this again next year… not sure if I’ll do other running events in the mean time… we’ll see. And I’ll be posting the winners of the Dash From Obesity fund raising very soon by the way.. winners have been notified, just finalizing a few things before I can announce it all.

UPDATE!

So… got the official results. I finished in 40min 58.6 seconds. I finished 189th out of 385 men in the 40-44 age group for Sunday. Overall, there were nearly 9000 participants on Sunday (over 10,000 on Saturday). With an average of 13:34 per mile, I finished in the top 39% of men in my age group, top 45% of all men, and top 31% overall.

Week 7, Day 1. 25 Minutes.

That’s where I am on the Couch to 5K training. Day 1 of Week 7, and my second 25 minute run. And I did it. Despite it being a balmy 86 degrees out, I think I actually felt better at the end of today’s lil jaunt than I did after doing it on Saturday. On top of the run I had another 3/4 mile to walk to get home.

I was feeling pretty wiped at the end of the 25 min. I couldn’t even push myself to go an extra minute to get to the 1/4 mile mark… so I ended up just shy of running 2-1/4 miles. The pace in the training is to shoot for 2-1/2, so while I’m making it time wise… I need to try and pick up the pace just a little. 

This week it’s all monotony – all three days are 25 minute runs. I’ll be doing the next on Wednesday… then again Saturday. The schedule works out pretty good.  Next week is supposed to be 28 minutes, or about 2-3/4 miles, with Week 9 hitting 3 miles in 30 minutes.

My “problem” though is that the Warrior Dash is at the end of 8th week. But that’s ok. I mean.. I’ll be ready to go the distance, even if I’m not at a speed I’d like. Also… my radio show premieres that Saturday… and I don’t want to run the day before the dash… so I haven’t decided yet what I’ll do. Probably just do M-W-F that week.

Oh, in case you missed it… my post title is a take on the whole 6 degrees of separation thing, and just for giggles I thought I would see how many degrees off I am from Kevin Bacon – and it’s four. I know this cause my radio show co-host, Gizelle Erickson, is 3-degrees from him according to the Oracle of Bacon.

And yes… I’ll tell you all about the radio show… soon.

Ok, it’s been a busy week, but I have been keeping up my Couch to 5K training all week. If you follow me on twitter, you know I took a bit of a plunge and bought an actual pair of running shoes. The folks at the running store were pretty helpful. I hadn’t gone in there intending to buy right away… but… well, I did. After checking out my gait, having me do some squats and such, the sales person showed me the area with the types of shoes that would give me the support they figure I need.

After trying on about half-dozen different pairs of shoes I settled on this pair of New Balance. It came down to these and a pair of Adidas. i went with the New Balance cause… well the best way I could explain is that while I felt like my foot was fitting in to the Adidas, the New Balance seemed to fit themselves to my feet.

So, I picked those up last Saturday. Then on Monday, the 4th of July, I was up bright and early. A friend of mine was hosting a pig roast as part of a surprise party for a friend of ours who was retiring from being a county sheriff – and I was the one that got to cook the pig. So after I got the thing in the roaster and going… it was time to go running, and my friend Chelle decided to go with me. Now, she walks at least a couple miles every day with her dog, Zorro… so while she’s trying to lose some weight, she is by no means inactive. She doesn’t really run much though, so this was a nice workout for both of us.

So yea, Week 6 – Day 1 was a 5-min run, 8-min run and 5-min run with 3-min of walking between (plus the usual 5 min walk to warm up and cool down). I gotta say, I felt good the whole time. I think we kept up a decent pace, and Chelle did really good too, though at one point she did make a comment about how I found a way to get her to shut up for awhile.

oh… and in case you were wondering how the pig roast went, I got lots of compliments and such… here’s a couple of photos.

So come Wednesday, I had my regular support group meeting, but I had a chance between work and it to hit the track at the gym. This was my first time running inside again in a couple weeks. Day 2 cycle was two 10-min runs with a 3-min walk in between. I tried to count laps during the runs and I think I got at least 12 laps both time, which means I was doing about a mile… or a 6mph pace. Pretty good I think.

Now this morning, I had planned on biking to Lake Phalen near my house and doing my run around there. And for Day 3 I’m looking at my longest run yet… 25-min.

But, things didn’t quite work out as planned. I got called in to work (on my only friggen day off of course) to fix some vandalized equipment. Ok, fine. Not a huge problem, cept I didn’t want to run out there and come back home cause I had to be back in the same area at 1 for a radio show meeting. So I threw the bike on the back of the jeep, packed a change of clothes in my gym bag and headed in. After I fixed the problem I biked over to a lake near work – Lake Calhoun to be more specific. I think it is about… well, just a touch smaller than Phalen. Maybe about 2.5 miles around?

Another difference, Calhoun is in the Uptown area of Minneapolis, it’s part of a chain of lakes that are linked together, and very very popular. And the crowd was very different than Lake Phalen over on the Saint Paul side of town. Let’s just say there is some very, very nice scenery around Lake Calhoun.

Anyways, I locked the bike up, turned on my podcast and started around the lake. I was having some major doubts about making it after just about 12 minutes. But c’mon! I did 20 last week… I knew I should be able to keep going… and I did. But, by about 16-min I know my pace was slowing. There was someone that for most of the trail had been about 20 yards ahead of me and they slowly pulling away. By about the 20-min mark they were maybe 100 yards ahead of me.

At about 21-22 minutes I started getting a bit of an ache just under my rib-cage on my right side. Nothing stabbing or anything, just .. a soreness. But I knew I just had a few minutes to go… so I kept plugging along and the weird thing is, no matter how out of breath and such I seem to get when running… a couple minutes after I start walking again and I don’t even feel like I had been running. It’s just weird. I don’t know if there’s something I can do to make my breathing better or what. But yea, it’s something I really need to work on.

On the other hand, it’s making me hopeful that during the Warrior Dash I’ll be able to keep up a decent pace between the obstacles, using that time actually doing them as my “recovery” time. If the lines for the obstacles themselves don’t slow me down too much, I don’t think I’ll have any problem beating my goal of finishing in under 50 minutes.

Oh, my meeting went really good, and I’ll share some info on the radio show I’m going to be part of coming up soon… but like I said before, I had planned on hitting the gym to shower before going to my meeting and of course I get there and their hot water wasn’t working. whee. I did a quick soaping and rinse in the cold water of the shower then went and jumped in the whirlpool for a few minutes to warm up a bit. And it just plain felt good too.

Now I’ve only got two more weeks before the Warrior Dash – which means there’s less than two weeks to participate in the Dash From Obesity fund raiser – so get over there now! And it also means I’ll only get through Week 8 of the c25k program. But the next two weeks are gonna be a couple of doozies. No more of this starting out “slow” and building up. Next week all three days are done as 25 minute runs and Week 8 is 28 minute runs. Yikes.

Well, I’ll have an update for you before the end of next week I’m sure. Till then…

So by now you should know that I’ve been doing the Couch to 5K training to get ready for running the Warrior Dash (now just three weeks away). I’m on Week 5, and on Wednesday I did my longest runs yet. 8 minutes, with a 5 minute walk in between. By the end of that second run I wasn’t so much running, or jogging… I was … plodding along.

Today was Day 3. The longest running set by far… no walking breaks, just a straight up 20 minutes of running after the warm up. I was not looking forward to it. I was ready to fall back in to repeating Day 2. I didn’t think I would make it.

Well, unless you just plain skipped reading the headline, it won’t come as a surprise to you that I did it. Actually, I did nearly 21 minutes.

I started from my house, played a lil music as I started walking towards the Gateway Trail… hoping to it would work out that the run portion of c25k podcast would start about the time I got to the trail which is about 3/4 mile from my house. Cause right by where I pick up the trail, someone has marked quarter mile marks in the pavement along the trail… so I figured it would make a good starting point. I was maybe a bit less than a quarter-mile short when I started running.

The way this weeks pod cast works is it’s timed for Day 1′s 5min run, 3min-walk cycles, with cues for the cycles for Day2, then well.. Day 3 is easy… start running, stop running. Though he does give a head up at the half-way point.

The first five minutes went by really good. The next three… I was actually still feeling decent. I need to work on my breathing, I know that’s what’s killing me overall. A friend told me something a running coach told her, breath in through the nose, out through the mouth. It sounds much easier than it is.

It was weird, by the time that first eight minutes was up though, I knew I was going to make it. Well, I didn’t know, but I told myself I was going to make myself make it. And oddly enough, part of the motivation I used was trying to think of headlines I could use when I got back and wrote about this.

I Can’t Believe I Ran The Whole Thing – too obscure.

It’s The End Of The World As I Know It, And I Feel Fine – too long.

Running On Empty – didn’t quite ring true actually.

Believe In Yourself – too hokey.

A few others were running through my mind that I can’ recall now… and you can see what I ended up with. Something short, simple, and to the point.

Oh yea, I actually did close to 21 minutes total because I wanted to get back to the 1/4 mile mark (I turned around at the 1mile mark on the trail) so I figured I did 2 miles total in just over 20 minutes.

Anyways, Monday I’m helping a friend do a pig roast for the 4th of July – I’m set to start Week 6 that day. So after I get it cooking, I’ll go head out around her neighborhood. Week 6 is another where each day is different, and Day 1 is 5min-3min-8min-3min-5min of run-walk-run-walk-run. After today, it’ll feel like a cake walk I think. By Day 3 though, we’re looking at a 25 minute run – but honestly… I’ll be going in to the end of next week knowing I can do that.

Kinda weird actually.