Thursday, January 3, 2013

My Plan To Get Fit: Adam's 2013 Fitness Goals


So it’s a New Year, and with the New Year tends to come people using the arbitrary trip around the sun as a means of marking out a time for making new goals. Far be it for me to be contrary, so I felt I could join in on the frivolity. It’s not exactly as if I need to do this for the upcoming year, mind you, as 2013 has a pretty high likelihood of being one of, if not the, most eventful years of my life to this point. I’m getting married in May. I’m finishing my dissertation. I’m going to be finding a job somewhere and in all probability preparing to depart from Nebraska.
So yeah, I’m gonna be kind of busy.
What this leaves for actual territory for the aforementioned “resolutions” is somewhat limited, and I've found that the majority of these tend to come in the form of physical fitness objectives. Since my divorce, this has been an important part of my life, so it should come as not a huge surprise that this is something I’m putting a lot of thought into. For one, it was my poor-man’s psychologist during the most stressful parts of the transition from married back to single life and then, within a couple of years, back to coupledom with the new experience of step-fatherdom piled on top of it.  I can literally feel “the itch” settle in within a few days if I don’t find my way to a gym, and my mood definitely suffers.
Additionally, my physical shape is not really where I want it to be. There are excuses for why this has occurred, but they are still just excuses. I’ve known for a while that I am capable of losing a lot of weight, as I dropped about 30 pounds on the always popular “post-divorce diet.” This weight, plus some more, unfortunately have now found their way back over the intervening years. At the end of 2012 I had already managed to lose 17 pounds (five of which I then proceeded to find hidden inside Christmas dinners of various shapes and sizes) so I’m well on my way, but my biggest goal is to get back to 250 pounds, which is a weight loss of 38 at this point in time. I’d like to have the lion’s share of this done by the wedding, as I want to cut as sharp of a figure in my tux as I possibly can (with the bow tie making this much more possible since, of course, we all know that bow ties are cool.)
In the past, I've approached this goal mainly through a process of progressively running longer over more and more days. I am a large man, to put it bluntly. It takes a lot of calories for me to move myself a mile. It takes many more for me to move 8 miles. You can see where this is headed. On average, it takes roughly a half-hour of aerobic activity to exhaust the stores of carbs in your body at any given time (subject to your diet, of course. More on this later.) As such, going on an hour run for me was a great target to go after my body’s fat stores. There are, however, issues with this plan of attack. First of all, I live in Nebraska, and it is cold as expletive outside right now. There was a point in time when this wasn’t a big deal, but for some reason there appears to be an inverse correlation between my age and my weenie-ness when it comes to dealing with cold. As such, right now my running is confined to a treadmill at the gym and, unfortunately, is somewhat limited as the hip injury I've been rehabbing (one of the big reasons my weight went back up) has me currently working my way back through the couch-to-5k program. At this moment, I’m up to being allowed to run a whole mile (woo) before I’m supposed to drop it back down. And, of course, running on treadmills doesn't really factor your weight into your calorie burn at all, so that takes the size advantage away from me.
The other problem, of course, is learning to control the increased hunger that goes along with the amount of running I like to do. It doesn't do a ton of good to put in that amount of effort just to put the calories back at the dinner table, later. I've already made an effort to eliminate sugars from my diet (having my family discover a new-found joy in baking is not making this easier) and am considering going after carbs as well. I’m not sure I have the commitment or, frankly, availability of resources to switch to an all-out Paleo diet, despite the number of glowing recommendations I've heard for it. There are, however, still areas where these cut-downs can happen. My family likes our pasta, and I’m not about to start complaining about having a fiancée who more often than not has a home-cooked meal waiting when I get home. I eat oatmeal for breakfast which, while carb-heavy, I think has enough positive benefits to outweigh the negative. So, the main area of effect for this is likely going to be my lunch. For financial reason I was already planning on packing it most days, so I just need to learn to make better choices on what to include here.
The newest addition to my fitness regimen came from the fact that I was unable to run for somewhere in the neighborhood of four to six months while I rehabbed: weightlifting. I freaking love weights, which I never would have expected to hear myself say even up to a year ago. While I’m far from impressive in the amounts I’m doing (I bench, like, 125 for 3x5) particularly when it comes to upper-body work, it’s just a lot of fun for reasons I really can’t quite describe. At the moment I’m doing an upper-body day with bench/body-weight rows/one-arm dumbbell row/pull-down and lower body/core day with goblet squats (my back is still dicey enough that I’m not extraordinarily confident attempting the classic barbell squats)/dumbbell lunge/leg press (the one I’m strongest with, probably from running)/ and various lower back/ab exercises. I start out with the treadmill C25K stuff and then move on to the weights side of the gym. And, of course, the real vanity joy of it comes when I flex an arm and realize “Ooh, there’s a little bicep showing there.” Or when I throw a play punch against a wall and feel stronger then I remembered. Or when I go to do a push-up, cruise from top to bottom effortlessly, and pause at the top to realize they have literally, even when I weighed much less than this, never felt anywhere near this easy. Add to that the fact that I use Fitocracy.com to track my work-outs and score fake work-out points (leading to leveling up which, obviously, makes my gamer brain very happy) and my motivation to really go push it with the free weights has never been stronger.
Which leads me to the other big goal for the year: I’m going to do a pull-up. There’s a whole pile of pent-up, middle school fitness challenge shame tagged onto that particular feat of strength. I've never been able to do one. I've never been CLOSE to being able to do one. If I use the assisted pull-up machine at the gym, I have to counter out two-thirds of my weight to realistically do a set of five of them. Before the end of 2013, I will do one unassisted pull-up. I’m doing everything I can to strengthen my back and shoulders, following this plan http://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2011/04/25/do-a-pull-up/. I’m currently doing the bodyweight rows (incorrectly, I just realized from re-reading the blog entry. Oh well, they were still hard and I've still gained from them.) As I said, I can already feel a difference from things like push-ups. I can do it, and I will.
Both exercises will help me out with my other fitness goal: to do better in the Lincoln Half Marathon than last year and beat the 2:30 that I ran it in last time. Last year’s Lincoln Half was a real mixed bag for me, due mainly to a misjudging on my part of what was a realistic pace for me to maintain for that distance and my making the exact wrong choice when picking out how much arch support and which type of shoes I needed for running. My feet hurt abysmally by the end. I ended up having to walk one of the miles (feet burning with every step) and shuffle through the last three miles at a pace where some of the walkers were actually passing me. It was not the pleasant experience that I sign up to these things for. This year is going to be different. I’m not going to set any kind of speed records, but I’m going to race strong the whole way through and beat that time. 

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