Ok…I like seeing the improvement. This is the exact same workout I did a few of weeks ago, but the 100s were all faster and most of the kicks were faster. The only thing slower in the Devil Workout this time around was the swim down.
Appcelerator Developer Center – This looks cool…write your app in JavaScript and Appcelerator maps it to native code for multiple mobile platforms. Hmm…..
101 Fast Recipes for Grilling – Grillicious! Can't wait to get back to regular grilling. And by that I mean entertaining the kids in the pool while the real grill master does her thing.
Fannie Mae Cracks Down on Strategic Default – Do you really need someone to tell you that "strategically" defaulting on a mortgage is wrong? Sorry, but I don't feel pity for someone who is behind on their mortgage while they have sea doos and dirt bikes in their garage.
If you want a real playlist to run to, you don’t need anything but 13 Songs.
You can’t be what you were So you better start being just what you are You can’t be what you were the time is now is running out is running out is running running running out You can’t be what you were So you better start living the life That you’re talking about You can’t be what you were The no movement, the no movement, the no movement In a bad mouth It betrays a bad mind
It’s days like today when I reminisce about all the times I visited the Wal-Mart Super Center in Alcoa. Oh the things I saw and heard..
“Upon getting the cell phone to ‘unlock’ and work properly, the Wal-Mart employee saw a picture on the phone of a female subject that was topless and whose breasts were exposed,” the report said.
At that point, the man who brought the cell phone into the store became “furious about anyone seeing his ‘private pictures’ and demanded that the cell phone be destroyed.”
The employee complied with the man’s request by hitting the cell phone repeatedly with a hammer until it was in several pieces.
…
But at 3:11 p.m., video surveillance at the store recorded the man re-entering the store through the Tire-Lube Express entrance while carrying a plastic bottle containing what appeared to be “a brownish colored substance,” which he allegedly poured onto five laptop computers at the store.
…
The brownish substance was believed to be tobacco spit.
…
The suspect was recorded by video surveillance driving away in a green-colored Pontiac sedan with hubcaps missing from both front tires.
If I could make stuff like this up, I’d be independently wealthy.
I’ve been vaguely aware of all of the hype and discussion going on over the past couple of weeks. The outrage has been hard to ignore, even without having cable TV. But learning that Lebron has joined Kevin Nash and Scott Hall as one of the founding members of the NWO…well, I may have to find a way to watch Dubya See Dubya again on Monday nights for Nitro!
The next time someone thinks you are crazy for going on a “short” 10 mile run or spending three hours on your bike, let them know about Charlie Wittmack’s World Triathlon.
12,000 miles total, beginning with a 275 mile swim down the River Thames and ending with a climb of Mt. Everest. And sandwiched in between:
The 9,000-mile bike ride might seem relatively easy compared with the swim and the climb up Everest, but even there Wittmack has his work cut out for him.
“I have to get to the border of China and Kyrgystan by the end of October in order to get over the Tibetan plateau to India,” Wittmack said. “I’ll be riding over harsh deserts through areas with political instability.”
So…(talking to myself now)…you probably can squeeze in that workout today you’re not sure you have time for.
If this passes, hopefully someone with some sense will just install a “switch” in the Oval Office and put a label under it that says “Internet”. It won’t do anything, but that’s ok. The people involved clearly have little understanding of what they’re talking about anyway. We could give Al Gore a lifetime position that requires him to flip the switch when he turns in for the night to cut back on the global warming or whatever other crisis the interwebs contribute to.
Even if the president ordered all U.S. Internet companies to block, say, all packets coming from China, or restrict non-military communications, or just shut down access in the greater New York area, it wouldn’t work. You can’t figure out what packets do just by looking at them; if you could, defending against worms and viruses would be much easier.
“Shutting down” the internet isn’t anything like closing the freeway. It’s like shutting down radio, television, and newspapers all at once. We don’t even have a radio, cable, or a TV antenna at our house, so how would we know the webs had been shut down (for our protection)? You know what that means…get ready for the phone systems to get wrecked as part of the collateral damage with people calling up their internet providers because they can’t do the Googles or log on to the Facebooks.
I don’t really have a problem with eating healthy. In fact, I have a very healthy appetite. That’s the problem.
So while we generally eat pretty healthy food, my issue is with portion size. And no matter the portion size, if Going Back For Seconds was an Olympic event, there would be investigations into my use of performance enhancers due to my consistent domination of the sport.
So I’ve been pulling a little trick on myself I call “Psychological Seconds”. Pretty simple–I make my first serving of everything a little smaller. And I still have seconds, but now Seconds means the rest of the food that would have normally been on my plate for Firsts. I’m estimating I’ve reduced my caloric intake at meals by ~10-15% by doing this. I’m probably making up the calories throughout the day with snacking, but that’s ok since it probably keeps my metabolism more steady, which means they are probably burning off more efficiently.
At 204 today. My Clydesdale days are numbered.
By the way, if you try this and it works for you, feel free to send me a Little Debbie. They are delicious. “Little Debbie–Unwrap a Smile!”
I was chatting over email today with an old rugby buddy of mine about the benefits of spin class. One of the ones he pointed out was that “mean” instructor who you love. In his case, it’s a South African who reminds him a lot of our former rugby coach from SA. This guy was a real jerk. His name was Eugene. I don’t think I ever knew his last name. None of us liked him at all–at least not as a friend.
But we loved him as a coach. He squeezed more out of us as a team and individually than we could ever have imagined. We lived out of our comfort zone for the duration of every training session, and it made us better. We never knew from day to day what kind of crazy fitness drills he’d have us do or what new and creative way he’d contrived to expose our weaknesses and punish us for them.
Two of the things I really like about spin classes are that I never know what’s coming next, and there’s a little bit of an extra push implied just because someone else is telling me how to ride and what to do. So I was thinking, if I could create the ultimate spin class, what would it be like?
A lot like Fight Club.
You do not talk about this class. It’s not on “the schedule”. You have to ride your way in and be invited to attend. (This probably keeps me out of the class, thankfully)
Bikes are arranged in a circle, so everybody can see everybody else. That turns the level of competition up about two notches automatically.
No verbal cues. The class is too hard for that. The instructor is too gassed to tell you what to do. You just have to watch and follow.
Better yet, there isn’t even an instructor. The lead moves around the circle with each person trying to kill the group more than the last person did.
The lights are on. Again, everybody can see what everybody else is doing…or not doing. (Plus I like to be able to see my HRM).
The door is locked. Can’t hang? Get off your bike and stand in the middle of the circle until the session is over. Oh, and the first one to quit has to clean up everyone’s bike when it’s over.
Class will go on as long as it has to.
Some of these are obviously a joke, but I think there’s some actual merit to an idea like this. If a gym offered a two hour class that you had to ride your way into and was super tough, there are plenty of people who’d be happy to subject themselves to that kind of suffering. Unfortunately, the gym I go to has a high population of older folks, and there probably wouldn’t be much of a market for it, but I can honestly say I’d pay by the class for a chance at that kind of punishment.
It’s crazy to me that the hard and uncomfortable seat on my bike is actually much more comfortable than the cushy seats on the spin bikes. I think it has much more to do with the shape and width of the seat than the cushiness.
The SIL sent me a link to this site which lets you sign up to have your name included on a microchip that will be sent to Mars on a rover.
I sort of assumed that lots of my information and various encrypted passwords were being sent into deep space when the Space Bigfoot is playing jokes by moving the satellites I’m trying to bounce data off of.
Mars Schmars. I’m not giving up on hope that I can aspire to have my name sent to an asteroid. I’m not 100% sure this isn’t a trick by the gov’ment to give our personal information to the Martian overlords.
I’ve been substituting my regular run scheduled for Thursday evenings with 7s rugby practice for the summer. Thursdays aren’t really long runs, so I figure I can go out and burn more calories playing rugby while having fun and getting a good run in. It’s good cross training because it works every muscle, especially core muscles. I end up spiking and recovering my heart rate instead of keeping it steady like a would in a normal training run too. It’s just fun to mix it up, and I love playing rugby.
Plus there is beer afterward.
I’ve discovered Coach Brett over at ZenTriathlon recently, and I’ve really been enjoying his podcasts. There’s some really good stuff in there about triathlon in general, and his style totally vibes with the way I like to train. One of the things he talks about are “Push/Pull Workouts” where he’ll do a 6 mile run, stopping at each mile to do pushups, squats, pullups, etc. I realized that’s exactly the kind of thing I’ve been doing at rugby practice, although the intervals of running are much shorter intervals and at a much higher intensity.
I wore my heart rate monitor for the first hour of practice last night and kept splits just to get an idea of the intensity of the non-contact drills we were doing. I averaged right at 135 bpm for the first hour of practice (that included water breaks and the dynamic stretching warmup), but I spiked it close to 180 during the two most intense periods. I know it got at least that high later in the practice when we were scrimmaging and I had long sprints.
A bonus in disguise was that I forgot my rugby boots at home, so I trained barefoot. I haven’t been doing much barefoot running at all, and it was probably good for me to get a good two hours of action without shoes. The only part of practice I skipped was the repetitive tackling drill, but I made good use of the time, doing “Jacos” around the field during that period.
Jacos is a fitness drill we used to do in college. Many rugby teams do variations, but we called the drill “Jacos” in honor of the coach who brought it to our club. It’s a not-so-fun way to run laps.
You start in one corner at the goal line, sprint to the halfway, jog to the opposite corner, stop for exercises–pushups/situps/burpees/squats/jackknives/mountain climbers–jog across the field to the opposite corner for a different exercise, and so on. So it’s sprint, jog, exercise, jog, exercise, sprint, jog, exercise, jog, exercise….
You get the idea, right? This is a great rugby fitness drill because it simulates a lot of stuff that’s going on in a game–high intensity bursts with lower intensity recovery runs and “lifting” sprinkled in. Lots of moving your own body weight around and getting up off the ground.
Keeping my triathlon goals of getting a core workout and staying in a training zone in mind, I like to add two exercise stations at the halfway line on either side of the field and substitute the jogs and sprints with a steadier, more intense pace. I got in four laps of that (about a mile) barefoot while the tackling drill was going on. Sounds a lot like a modified Push/Pull Run, huh? That’s what fitness end of rugby training is like for the most part, and why I think it’s a good substitute for at least one of my workouts each week. It also does me a lot of good mentally because it throws a curve into my training and involves something I really love doing.
Check out this guy…95 years old and still working out with weights, doing cardio, and starting out his day with 1,500 crunches. Most people 1/3 of this guys age start their day out with 1,500 calories of Cap’n Crunch.
“All the doctors that have treated me can’t believe what they’re seeing,” Matzinger said. “That’s encouraging, to go to the doctor and have compliments rather than prescriptions.”
I remember doing a 10 mile race a few years ago and a guy in his 80s finished in under 2 hours. People like that are amazing. I hope I live long enough to have an opportunity to be like that, and I hope I don’t blow it.
Here’s today’s workout. I picked the easier of two options.
Other than the obvious mental fatigue in the third set of the Meat, I have no idea how to look at these split times and interpret them. All I can gather from them is that my kick is really bad, which I already knew.
And apparently, I’m not the first one to try it out.