In the Loop

Last night I felt like I’d done one of my regular full-on Saturday workouts. Other than being tired, I’m fine today. I rested and am ready to resume my rehab training tomorrow. It’s going to be really tempting to do more, but I’m going to keep my heart rate in the 65-70% range.

Groundhog Day. This is the perfect day to say hello again after a long absence. Let’s take a little inventory:

In the last seven months…

1. I’ve learned I’m going to be a father to a son.
2. I earned my MBA.
3. My daughter turned 1.
4. I got pneumonia.

Son

Samuel Martin will be here very soon. He’s going to be big like his sister before him, so we’re not going to let things go on more than another two weeks.

MBA

I finished with all A’s, excepting the blight of an A- in Crypto a couple of years ago. I’m the most proud of our Capstone project. I graduated with honors in November. There has been a withdrawal of sorts. I do miss the week to week, term to term grind, but my family does not. I have promised my wife that there will be no more graduate school or certifications for at least a year.

One

Brooke turned 1 just before Christmas and she is the delight of my life. Watching her grow from first sitting up last summer, to crawling, standing, cruising, walking and now running has been the most amazing experience of my life. She’s going to make an awesome big sister.

Pneumonia

I’ve had a sinus infection since roughly Thanksgiving. It has come and gone, but I haven’t knocked it out. I went to an urgent care clinic on New Years Eve and got a flu test, which was negative. They wrote me a script for Cipro, which knocked it back, but unfortunately did not knock it out. A couple of weeks ago, I started getting tension headaches in the afternoon. I woke up one morning with a fever over 104, but no other serious symptoms. I trudged back to the urgent care clinic, was given another flu test, which was negative, and sent home to treat the symptoms. I slept all day and felt better that night.

I felt well enough the next day to workout, and felt better still the next morning. Then the relapse came. I had fever back up over 104 on a Sunday afternoon, so my wife ordered me to go to the ER. The ER gave me a flu test, which was (again) negative, diagnosed me with “fever” and sent me home to treat the symptoms. The respiratory distress from the pneumonia flared during the night and I thought I was going to be done for. Thankfully, I survived until I could see my regular doctor the following afternoon.

If you go to urgent care or the ER for very high fever, or any kind of relapse of fever — other symptoms or not — don’t let them give you a flu test and send you on your way: get a chest x-ray.

I’m almost finished with my course of Levaquin and Medrol. I’ve been cooped up at home all week and I’m champing at the bit to get out of the house and to resume my training regimen. I think today is that day. I’m going to start back very slowly with a treadmill walk. I’ll work up to a 65-70% BPM level on the cross-country machine this week and then stay at that level at least through the week before I start adding the high intensity stuff.

So that’s where I am now. I need to do a ton of updates to the site, and those will get rolling sometime soon.

Stay tuned…

This is only a test.

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This was only a test.

I’m doing something different with my training this spring. From a strategic perspective, I’m no longer trying to lose weight so by necessity my training program has to change to support new goals. With that in mind, I’m going to try a new powerlifting program. I’ve powerlifted in the Fall of 2005 and 2006 following a basic power cycle of squat, bench, and deadlift days on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, respectively. I followed a percentage of 1RM pattern, starting at 60% and increasing 5% each week. After two years of doing this, I’ve decided that I can do better.

I’ve found that my training sessions are more satisfying using a repetition-based system. If I’m feeling like pushing myself, I can reach for the upper range and if I’m fatigued or if I just don’t “have it” that day, I can make the lower range and still feel accomplished. This is more effective for me than trying to keep a percentage with each workout. It also promotes sensible increases in intensity. If I’m consistently reaching the top range, then it’s time to increase the intensity. This is more faithful to specific adaptation than following a strict percentage of 1RM program.

The study authors’ solution to the BMI issue isn’t the best one. From the Reuters article:

They call for adjusting BMI thresholds to more accurately reflect the body composition of college-age individuals; based on the current findings, they say, the best BMI cut-off points for overfatness would be 27.9 for male athletes, 26.5 for male non-athletes, 27.7 for female athletes, and 24 for female non-athletes.

Furthermore, for really big male athletes such as football linemen, the BMI cut-off should be even greater, at 34.1, they conclude.

Merely raising the thresholds doesn’t correct the error that the BMI fails to account for the percentage of muscle or fat mass.

I was very happy to see this article from Reuters Health:

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Standard body mass index (BMI) measurements are an inaccurate way to judge whether college athletes and non-athletes are carrying too much fat, a new study shows.

. . . .

“Because of a larger muscle mass among the male and female athletes, BMI incorrectly classifies normal-fat athletes as overweight,” Ode and his team explain.

I’m not willing to say that Body Mass Index is completely worthless, but it simply is not useful for people with a lot of muscle mass. I’m 6′ tall, weigh 225 and have body fat percentage in the single digits, but my BMI is 30.6 classifiying me as “grade 1 obese”. Right. For me to hit the top end of the “healthy” range, I’d have to weigh 183. I’ve been known to go catabolic below 220, so I don’t think I’ll use BMI to assess my health.

Nary a post since February. A wise man once said, “I was unavoidably detained.”

The Spring I training program is going well. I’ve been running a four-mile endurance period on Tuesdays and treadmill intervals on Thursdays. I’m really enjoying the structure of these runs. On Tuesdays, I start out at a 10-minute mile pace for five minutes, then I run a 9-minute mile, an 8-minute mile, and another 9-minute mile before cooling down with the second half of the 10-minute mile. On Thursdays, I jog a 10-minute mile pace for four minutes, and then crank up the speed for a maximum of one minute. I repeat through 30 minutes. I’ve been doing 60 seconds at 9mph, 45 seconds at 10mph, and 30 seconds at 11mph.

I lift on Tuesdays and Fridays and I’m doing drop sets for the first time since the fall of 2005. It feels good and I’ll be ready to go into an eight-week powerlifting program in another couple of weeks. The last two years I only powerlifted in September and October, but I’m going to do it twice this year and see how I feel. I’ve sketched out a program for the next few months that includes two months of powerlifting and then a summer running at the track, then another two months of powerlifting. If everything continues to go smoothly, I should enter the summer much healthier than I did last year.

I’ve started my fall training program this week. I’ll be doing drop set circuits on Mondays and Fridays, best mile and three mile time treadmill runs on Tuesdays and Saturdays, respectively, and I’ll do another cardio day on Wednesday or Thursday. I had to bump my mile run to today and since this was the first time I’ve done a fast run this year I started with a goal of eight minutes. It was relatively easy to maintain the 7.5 mph pace, but what was hard was the 10 minutes of striding at 7.0 at the end. I kept right on pushing through it even though my mind and body were complaining a bit, mostly my mind. Once I got to the five minute mark, I knew I’d finish it and I started feeling a lot more comfortable with the pace. I never did break a seven minute mile last year, but I’m going to go for it this year and if I do well, I’m going to see how deep into six I can get.

My powerlifting schedule has come to a successful end. I modified it a bit over the last couple of weeks by switching to the Smith rack for bench and incline bench. That allowed me to lift heavier than I would have otherwise. I train alone and though I’ve never minded giving someone a spot, I never feel comfortable interrupting other people to ask for one myself. My lack of development on the bench press is completely due to confidence. I’m pushing it to be in the intermediate range. Working on the Smith rack has allowed me to greatly improve my strength levels without worrying about dropping the weight. I don’t think I would injure myself — I don’t lift heavy enough to do damage — but I have to admit that it’s pretty embarrassing to ask someone to help you get the bar off of your chest. » read more…

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks babying my hamstrings. Now it’s time to cycle out of powerlifting and into a new fall program. This is my last week of powerlifting and it’s gone well, but I’ve already made adjustments to my cardio. I’ve cut sprinting, put in more distance running, and added stretching. Part of the difficulty I’ve been having with my hamstrings is due to the fact that they’ve become so tight. Distance running and stretching will help that.

I started a new running routine on Saturday to build up my long run time again. I run 40 minutes with an increasing number of 30 second pickups. This week was pickups at 10:00, 20:00, and 30:00. Next week, they will come every eight minutes, the next week every six, and so on. As for lifting, I’ll likely go to circuits; I just don’t know when. I might keep the same M-W-F pattern for now and back off of the intensity. I’m enjoying the schedule, but that might have to change soon. I’ll post a new training schedule soon.