Let the Games Begin!

Well, I'm two workouts in to my 12 week program I've set up for myself. I took a week off after running the Warrior Dash up in Copper Mountain Colorado. It's basically baby tough mudder. A 3-mile course with obstacles and mud. I've never done a race like that before. I've only done road races and I got kinda burned out on those so I thought let's try something new. I loved it! I remember half way through it saying to myself I'm hooked. I love this kind of race!

I wouldn't say it was any easy race like so many jerks on Facebook were saying. I mean, fine it was easy for you, but do you really need to mock others for saying on Facebook that it was a challenge for them? Why take that away from them that they accomplished something major? Let them have their moment, tough guy.

As I was saying, it wasn't a walk in the park for me. It wasn't excrutiating either. It was more fun than tough, but some of the obstacles made my heart jump up to the throat. I've never had to climb walls or cargo nets that were high up. So I felt like accomplished something.

So back to the ole' training schedule. I start my weeks on Sunday and end them on Saturday - I usually take Tuesdays and Fridays off. So I workout five days a week. I will eventually start incorporating running on the weekends once it cools down a bit here in Albuquerque. I say the weekends because I want my running to be mostly in the foothills and on the trails in the Sandias and I can't really get out there during the week  - too much real life stuff gets in the way. You know like work, dogs, husbands.

HIIT - High Intensity Interval Training is where it's at for me these days. I do all of these workouts at home in a sun room that on the back of our rental house. It has hot tub in there, but I made a nice little space for my workouts and now my husband is starting to use the space, too. Cool thing about the room is that the wall is made of dry erase boards and so I can write out all my workouts that I want to do and motivational words. It's funny I know, but I also think it's awesome. I'll have to take a picture of our workout space and post it on here.

So, yesterday I did a BodyRocktv.com workout called Grab Your Balls. Just google bodyrocktv if you don't know what that is because I don't feel like explaining it all here, but I'm indeed a BodyRocker - it will be a year in November that I've been following these workouts. And, yes, I'm well aware about the woman's past. Get over it. She's hot and an inspiration. Anway, I did the Grab Your Balls workout which you can also look up on their site. It's basically a HIIT workout where you get 10 seconds of rest and 50 seconds of hard work. This one involved a medicine ball, go figure. Great full body workout like most of their workouts are. Before the workout, I warmed up and did 4 minutes of interval skipping (jump roping) the intervals are 10 seconds of rest 20 second of fast, high knee skipping for 8 rounds. I like to get my heart rate up usually before I start the main workout. After the Grab Your Balls (I just like typing that, sorry), I did an upper body burnout with my dipstation and good old fashion push ups. It's truly amazing all the awesome things you can do with just your own body weight. You really don't need to spend hours in the gym and a bunch a money on memberships to get the results you want. And this is where I end my infomercial talk, but I'm just sayin'.

Today I did another BodyRock workout which was a 300 rep workout. It killed. I'm not going to sit here and pretend I love these kinds of workouts all the time. Sometimes I love it, can't get enough. Today was not that day. So, they do these workouts that sometimes don't involve interval timing. They just tell you to start your stop watch and see how long it takes you to bust out 300 reps of various exercises. I'll break this one down for you since it's still fresh in my mind. This took me about 30 minutes. I did interval skipping before it, probably shouldn't have since half way through the 300 reps I wanted to scream, cry, puke and call it a day. So dramatic!

Five rounds - so you go through this sequence five times
1. lunge back and twist with sandbag - 10 reps
2. divebombers burpess - 10 reps
3. jump lunge swing with medicine ball (I have an 8lb medicine ball) - 10 reps
4. push off box or monkey pushup - 10 reps
5. sumo squat with sandbag - 20 reps

You go through all that five times and you get 300 reps total. I'll just say I hate divebombers especially when they are attached to a burpee. Puke! If you're curious on how these exercises are performed go to their site. She looks way better than me doing these exercises. Trust me!

So that was day two of the 12 week program. My next week off will be the week of Thanksgiving, but my weeks off will include a lot of stretching, walking and yoga. Plus, I plan on running in a turkey trot on Thanskgiving Day. It always makes me feel better to run hard before I eat like a maniac.

Talk soon!

Lauren 

Cheers to the First Post!

So, here it is! The first post on this blog that I hope evolves into a project that I actually carry out and pay attention to.

The reason I started this blog was to keep myself and my husband in check during our training for Tough Mudder June 2012 - Beaver Creek, Colorado. I'm very fortunate in having a husband who is an awesome cook and he enjoys cooking healthy. So I thought this would also be a good place for me to showcase his dishes. I'm still working out the photography poriton of this blog, but I think pretty soon here I'll be able to start posting his dinners that he creates. Hopefully the pictures I take does the great food some justice.

I already consider myself a fit person. I love a good challenge and everytime I workout I make sure it counts as an actual workout where I sweat and just burn out completely. I hate the idea of going to the gym and running on a treadmill or drudging through a 30 minute elliptical session. All for what?! No results. That's what I think. I do mostly HIIT (high intensity interval training) and I will soon me incorporating trail running into the schedule to get more of that Tough Mudder feel. Every workout I try to go for full body, high intensity training. So far it's been working great for me.

My husband is just getting back into it so it will be interesting to see how he progresses during this training journey. I'm just happy that he is thinking about this and wanting to do this. It's fun to have a teammate! So we will be giving our workout breakdowns on this blog of what we are doing throughout the weeks. Should be interesting and fun!

And the life part? Well, that's just all the silly or serious things that I feel like talking about that's going on in our lives. We have three dogs so they will probably make up the majority of this part.

Well, I better end this because I don't believe in ridiculously long blog posts and I'm sure it's already riddled with typos. Talk soon!

Lauren