Marathon Me

This morning I started P90X. What is P90X you ask? Well in their own words:

P90X is a revolutionary system of 12 sweat-inducing, muscle-pumping workouts, designed to transform your body from regular to ripped in just 90 days. You’ll also receive a comprehensive 3-phase nutrition plan, specially designed supplement options, a detailed fitness guide, a calendar to track your progress, online peer support, and much more. Your personal trainer, Tony Horton, will keep you engaged every step of the way, and you won’t believe your results!

But basically it is a super intense ass kicking set of workouts and diet for 90 days that will supposedly get me into great shape. I actually really enjoy lifting weights, but I haven’t done it regularly since right after college. Then once I started running the weights have been left by the wayside. I still like to think of myself as fairly strong and in shape, but comparing pictures of myself in college versus now, it is clear I’ve lost a lot of muscle mass and taken on more of the build of a runner. Which is not a bad thing, since if I had to categorize myself, it would indeed be as a runner.

But I would like to get a little more muscle mass and drop some body fat and kick my metabolism back up. I think I will really enjoy doing the actual workouts, but will come to loathe the diet portion of it. I’m not even sure it makes sense for me to try the diet portion (or at least the first 30 day piece) as it removes most carbs. Not having carbs will kill my running which I am not prepared to totally sacrifice. But I am going to give it a try. I have a half marathon coming up in a couple weeks that I need to do well in so that I can qualify for the New York Marathon. (And by well, I mean sub 1:23). I don’t think I can do that without carbs, so I will probably cheat the 2 days prior to the race. Then I have the Austin Marathon, which since it is my home course I want to do well on. I will be past the first 30 days by then and be able to add some more carbs and hopefully will be able to run on that portion of the diet. But if necessary I will cheat again to have a shot at a good race.

But let’s cut to the chase, how was day one? Well I woke up early (for me) at a little before 6am so that I’d be able to knock out the first workout which is “Chest and Back” and takes a little over 50 minutes. I wasn’t totally prepared for the workout and kind of just winged it (which is typical for me). Next time I will have my printed out worksheet to track how many reps I am actually able to complete (which I will dutifully report to you avid readers), and a chair. Why a chair you ask? Well there are some exercises that would have been easier with it and it will enable me to get some half reps on the chin ups after I can’t lift myself anymore.

There are 12 sets of exercises you do twice, they are:

• Standard Push-Ups
• Wide Front Pull-Ups
• Military Push-Ups
• Reverse Grip Chin-Ups
• Wide Fly Push-Ups
• Closed Grip Overhand Pull-Ups
• Decline Push-Ups (Need a chair)
• Heavy Pants (which is not at all what I was imagining thankfully)
• Diamond Push-Ups
• Lawnmowers
• Dive-Bomber Push-Ups
• Back Flys

It was a pretty tough workout and 50+ year old Tony Horton kicked my ass. I know I will get better but it was pretty ugly the second time through. I just need to take a man pill and get after it.

Afterwards it was challenging to lift my arms to shave. Haha, I guess that’s how you know you’ve started it off on the right foot.

After the Chest and Back workout I took Christopher to school and then came back for Ab-Ripper-X, which is a 12 minute ab workout that also kicked my ass. I really need to work on my flexibility because my back was hurting sometimes before my abs. This is definitely a great core workout and one that I am hoping will pay off in the final 10k of a marathon. I wasn’t able to do as many reps as the guys on the video but I was able to get a nice burn.

Day number 1 is in the books, 89 more to go. I’ll post my before photo sometime soon if I remember.

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Tags: P90X, Training //