Not a whole lot going on

So I have not done a lot of running this week. As a matter of fact I think Saturday was the last time I went out and when I did I only went two miles total and ran just over one of them. Felt like quite a step back the next few days got pretty bad for me. My wife got a stomach virus and it seems in the process of taking care of her I got it by the end of the day of Sunday. I spent most of the night up being sick and sleeping on the bathroom floor, then I spent the entire day in bed yesterday trying to work but finally having to throw in the towel around noon and sleeping the rest of the day until this morning. I am trying to get work done today and am going to give it all that I have to make it through the entire work day but I am not going to push it too much to the point that I get myself sick again. I hope to be healthy enough to at least do some walking in the morning to try to get back to being normal again.

Rest day yesterday and good day today

So yesterday I woke up and my legs were a bit less sore than they were the day before (I know this because I was actually able to walk like a normal persons). I decided  not to look a gift horse in the mouth and chose to let my legs rest a day since I had ran 5.5 miles in two days when the only other running I rally ever did in my life was running in place in EA Active. The good thing is even though I didn't run when I weighed in yesterday I was down .9 pounds. This morning I did get up to run and I learned one thing that I had an idea about and that is the getting up and the first lap and a half around my neighborhood are the most difficult. I did go another 3 miles today and I did it in just about 45 minutes so right now I am averaging a 15 minute mile and I would like to get it lower than that before I do the 5K. When I finished  running I weighed myself again and I was down 2.2 pounds from the day before so I have almost undone all the damage I did to myself during fathers day weekend. I am at 171 pounds which means that I am back to only 6 pounds from my goal. Here is how my run went this morning. I left the house at 4:51 AM started with my normal fast walk around the first lap of the neighborhood (.5 miles) then I started to run after the first lap. I pushed myself again and ran three laps without stopping to walk although by the end of it I was not running all that fast but I was still going. When I finished the three laps I waked about 1/3 of the next lap then ran another full lap from that point for a total of about 2.2 miles or so of running. When I finished that lap I waked the rest of the way for a total of six laps and three miles again. I was back in the house and weighing myself at 5:36. I am pushing to get to two total miles ran without stopping and my goal is to get to that point by next Friday. I think what I am going to try and do is two days in a row of running then a day off until I am ready. By the way I did sign up for the race for the cure that is happening on October 29th so if you feel so inclined to check out the page for my registration here is where you can find it.



My Race fro the cure site

Thanks,
Justin

Today was a good day

So I set my alarm again and hit the snooze button twice before finally deciding to stop being lazy and get out of bed. I took my first step to start getting ready to run this morning and could still hardly walk from the soreness of the 2.5 miles I did on Monday morning. I was just about to say the heck with it and try doing some more yoga to get loose and give running a go again tomorrow but then two things popped into my head that I remembered from this weekend. The first one was that some how I had gained almost 5 pounds between Friday morning and yesterday morning. Some of it was muscle I can tell because even my new size 34s seem to be fitting better than when I bought them before I gained the 4.5 pounds but some of it also was the amount of food and the type of food I ate over the fathers day weekend. That memory got me out of the door and on the road to start running and getting ready for the 5K. I started by doing exactly what I said I was planning, walk the first .5 miles of the 3 miles to get warmed up then start running as much as I could. I got through about half the first lap and my legs were killing me so I started to think I would push through the lap and go back inside. This is when the second memory of the weekend popped into my head. On Saturday night I heard a great sermon about finding God in the wilderness, even if that wilderness is just your back yard, and that God is able to make us do things that we didn't think we could do. With that in mind I finished my first lap and ran a little bit of the way before I had to stop again and walk the rest of the second lap due to the soreness I was feeling. Once I finished the second lap I started to run again, this is when the whole doing what you didn't think you could comes into play. I made myself push hard but I ran the next 1.5 miles without stopping to walk once. I was going to try to finish up the three miles by running the last lap so I could say I ran a total of 2 of the three miles nonstop but I just couldn't do it. By the time I finished the 1.5 miles I was still "running" but was going about the same speed that I would walk. I decided to walk the last half mile to cool down and get me to the 3 mile total I said I was going to start shooting for. At then end of all of this I went a total of three miles, ran almost two of them, and got it all done in under 50 minutes. Then I got back inside and weighed myself again and lost 1.1 pounds so I hope to be getting back on track there as well. After the car ride into work today my legs got pretty stiff and I am having a little bit of a hard time walking plus I have to teach tonight but I am hoping that walking and working today will get them loose again. I am going to make an attempt at 3 miles again tomorrow now that I know the biggest thing standing in my way is my own head. If things keep going at this pace I should have the 5K distance down no problem before the race for the cure.

Life after EA Active

Well, today started my post EA Active fitness journey. As I have stated several times in the past I have been wanting to start running and working toward being able to run the 5K race for the cure that happens in October. Being that this weekend was father's day I opened the flood gates when it came to eating since I figured i deserved it and could always work to get whatever I gain back off. Let me tell you, I really gave myself and uphill battle this week. I know that some of the weight gain is due to muscle mass building again but I also know a lot of it is all the food I ate this weekend. Between Friday morning and this morning I was able to gain 3.8 lbs which now means that I am 8.8 lbs from the WiiFit goal and back up to 9 lbs away from losing 100 total. Not that big a deal, just meas that I am going to have to kick it into high gear to get back on track. Anyways now for the good news. I did start running today and making it toward getting to the 5K. This morning I traveled a total distance of 2.5 miles almost 1.5 of which I did run then I did speed walking for the rest so I was able to go that distance in a little under an hour. My legs are throbbing a little bit and I can't wait to see what kind of shape they are in tomorrow. One thing today did give me was an idea on how I am going to train for this. I am going to start by going 3 miles every morning, which means I am going to have to wake up a little sooner than I did today, I will start the first .5 miles by speed walking to warm up then the remaining 2.5 miles running as much as I can and resting into a speed walk when needed. I am going to continue to do this until I can run the total 2.5 miles without having to stop for a walk. Once I can do that  I will add another .5 miles for a total of 3.5 miles in the morning, the first .5 will be the warm up and the last 3 will be the running for the 5K. I figure since it is only June and I am able to go almost half the distance of the 5K running I should be able to make the entire distance before the run itself. I did buy a pedometer this weekend but think that I need to calibrate it just a little bit since when I finished the 2.5 miles this morning it said I went a distance of 1.8. Once I get that taken care of I am going to wear it to work and school to see how much I am moving around in a full day. I will keep everyone posted on how it is going.

It is finally over

So today I finished the 36th and last workout of the 9 week challenge so I can now put that one behind me and say that I finished all the challenges on all the different EA Active games. This morning was pretty hard since 7 of the 34 exercises had the work mountain in them. I also did a bit of squatting and jumping and what not so it is going to be pretty hard getting up and down stairs on the project  I am on today but I will get by. Today's workout as I expected was the longest one that I have done to date and burned off the most calories of all the EA Active workouts I have done. It took 48 EASA minutes to complete and burned a total of 360 calories. One thing I thought was pretty cool was that I burned a total of 10,000 calories using Active 2. Most of them came from the 9 week challenge but I would not have gotten that far had I not done a few of the upper body workouts I created. I had a good weigh in this morning and was down another 1.5 lbs, so now I am at a total of 94 lbs lost since the start of the year, I finished my WiiFit 5 lbs goal almost a week early, I only have 6 more pounds to lose to get to the 100 pound mark I wanted to get to and at the end of my next WiiFit 5 lbs goal I will be in the normal BMI according to WiiFit. As good as I feel about getting this done and losing all the weight that I have lost in the time that I lost it now I am starting to enter the part of this I have been dreading since I started to realize I could rally do this. What is that part you ask, the part of staying healthy. I have done somethings this time around to help me stay in shape, rather than just dieting and exercising I have come to terms with a new life style to help me keep this weight off and I look forward to staying with it so I don't have to buy all new clothes again when I out grow all the new clothing I am going to have to buy now. I have been thinking more about the Race for the Cure team at work and I think I am going to sign up for it. I will make the final decision when the company has a lunch and learn about the event and the team they created. Until then for the time being I think I am going to use the time I have been putting into EA Active and use it to start training for that 5 k. I know I have been saying that a lot and have not really done it but now that the EA Active stuff has come to an end for now (May start it back up in a little bit) I am going to have more time to do it. As much as waking up before 5 AM is no fun I feel pretty awake and ready for the day when I am done exercising each morning and want to keep that up. What better way to do that than to actually start running. I think that starting Monday the focus of the blog may switch to talk about how the training is going and how long I am able to run before having to stop for a walk each time I go out. Wish me luck on the next endeavor.

Only one more to go

Well I had to work both jobs yesterday which put means that I got a bit after 11 o'clock last night then I had to spend some time trying to wind down so that I could fall asleep so it was pretty close to midnight when I went out. Needless to say that made getting up at 4:30 this morning pretty hard. When the alarm went off the first thought in my head was to set it to go off again in an hour and go back to sleep. Then I started to think, my 9 week challenge ends tomorrow and if I were to skip a workout then I would not have a chance to make it up before it ended and I would be pretty mad at myself when tomorrow came and it turned out that after all the hard work I didn't finish all 36 workouts on time. Once I got going on the workout I was glad that I did. It was still just about an hour like all the others but the calories burned was a little lower, I ended up burning only 285 or so, which is still a bit more than what was projected. It was not the 300 calories I shoot for but the workout felt good and I am a little tired from it. One thing I did learn is that while you are waking up in the morning you don't seem to be as strong. One of the first exercises was straight arm planks and I thought they were going to fall off when I was doing them since I was still tired. One thing that started to get on my nerves a little this morning was the heart rate monitor decided to not be accurate today, which you can see from the graph I posted. When I was finished with skipping and stride jumps and my heart felt like it was beating out of my chest again the monitor was showing me at rest. I am thinking that if it was accurate I might have made it to 300 calories today but hey just getting  the workout done is an accomplishment. I did not weigh myself yesterday since I didn't workout and I jumped right into the shower but I did today and I was down another 1.1 pounds which put me in the 172 range which means that I am at a total of 93 pounds lost and only have 7 more to go to get to the 100 pounds lost mark by the end of the month. I guess I will have to wait and see how the next few days go. I am on a project today and tomorrow which means I will have to eat out for lunch and there are not a lot of health choices in the downtown Nashville area, and with fathers day weekend I am sure I will let myself go a little. Lets just hope it isn't so much that I regret it or miss my goal by the end of the month.

Only two workouts left!

So it has been a while since I have posted anything but school is starting back up and work had gotten very busy out of nowhere but I have finally found a moment. I did two of the last four workouts of my 9 week challenge this week and although they were kinda hard they did not kill me which was nice. Each of the workouts are starting to take over an hour to finish so I am having to wake up even sooner to make sure I have time to get them done along with the other things I try and do each morning. Yesterday's workout was the longest to date, the EASA time was 46 minutes which turned out to be a little over an hour but I did burn almost 350 calories by the time I was done with it. Trust me that came at the cost of covering just about every inch of me in sweat but I felt good when it was done. I found out that my job has a race for the cure team that will be running this year so I am thinking that I may join that team. At the very least I should get a cool T-Shirt and motivation to finally start training to run a 5K like I keep talking about. I have still been losing weight but it seems that the closer I come to getting to my goal the slower it tends to come off. Not all surprised about that since I am very close to having a normal BMI and am in much better shape than I once was so naturally it takes more work to get the last little bit off. I guess it is true what they say, "The last 10 pounds are the hardest". As of yesterday I was at 92 pounds lost so I only have 8 more to go and today is only the 15th so as long as I continue to work hard I think I can get there before the end of the month. I was joking with my wife that I want to celebrate losing 100 pounds by going to a buffet. If I have the time I will let everyone know how the next to last workout goes and if I decided to sign up with the KraftCPAs race for the cure team.

Jello's new product

In case you have not heard Jello has a new product it is called.... my legs. For the first time in a few weeks I woke up and did my Friday workout on the scheduled day. It was pretty bad but it could have been worse. One thing that was nice is it was the most calories that I have burned in any workout to day. I burned just under 340 calories, so I am thinking there is a good chance that I will have at least one workout in my final week that will burn more than 400 calories. Lord knows when that one comes I will be pretty happy I had the great a workout but I bet my legs will be screaming for mercy. Today when I started the workout it said it would take about 45 minutes, which as always turned out to be just about an hour of real time, and that I would burn 335 calories. The break down had 45% of the workout being cardio with very little legs and arms and a little bit of core. What I found out today is that a workout with 45% cardio means you will in fact be using your legs much more than you would think. I did end up doing two mountain biking exercises and a mountain boarding, 3 or 4 sets of skipping, three sets of stride jumps, and two sets of mountain climbers. Today is the first time that it is not so much my legs that are hurting but more my shins. I look pretty silly walking around since my shins are so tight and sore. Looks like either tomorrow or Sunday will be another day of getting some WiiFit yoga in to try and get lose again otherwise I think Monday will be more difficult than it needs to be. As a matter of fact I might do the yoga both days this weekend and skip my custom upper body workout so I can get as limber as possible going into the last week. I guess how my weight does this weekend will decide that for me. I am off to a good start for my next WiiFit weight loss goal this morning when I weighed myself I was down .9 lbs putting me at 175 total, for all of you keeping track that gets me to 90 lbs lost and only 10 to go before I get to my final goal of 100 lbs and I can start trying to tone up and get fit. I am trying to reach that 10 lbs before the end of the month and since that is in 3 weeks from yesterday and between yesterday and today I lost just under a lb and had a pretty intense workout this morning I think I should have no problem getting there as long as I stick with the diet and don't fall off the wagon like I did last weekend. If you count that my net weight loss for the week was 1 pound. I think it is safe to say a few weeks like that and I won't be reaching 100 lbs lost before the end of the month.

FAIL

Ok well today was the end of my 5 lbs per two weeks WiiFit goal that I always set and I was not able to make it this time around. Not all the bad since I have only missed the goal twice since starting to do this. This time around I have to credit the failure to the 2.some lbs I gained last weekend going to a picnic and eating way more than I needed to. Again not a big deal. I weighed in this morning and was down another .2 lbs so I was less than 1 lb away from getting to that goal and I know I will make the next one no problem. I am not going to lie I spend most of the day yesterday dreading my workout thinking that it was going to be stupid hard due to the last few that I have done but as it turned out it was not all that bad at all. I didn't break the 300 calorie mark today but did spend an hour working out and felt pretty good when it was done. I have a feeling that I am going to have a little weight gain today as we are going out to dinner and the folks I am joining are having pizza. Guess that means I will have to work extra hard tomorrow if that is what we end up doing. I am down to my last 5 workouts and am looking forward to completing them so that I can move on to the next big thing (once I figure it out that is). I'm thinking I am going to go with the running it seems most people I know enjoy doing it and it is supposed to be quite the stress reliever. (Lord knows I need that, my plate has runith full for the last 9 months or so. One thing I forgot to mention is I am only 11 lbs from my 100 goal so I am feeling pretty good that I can do that in the next three week. I guess we will just wait and see.

Had another good workout today

Well I am down to only six more workouts to go to finish the nine week challenge. According the the little summary at the beginning of each workout today was the 30th workout of the challenge. Just like yesterday I thought that I was going to be in a world of hurt once I saw what I was in for. The summary before the workout showed that it was going to be 40% lower body, a little bit of core and upper body, and the rest filled in with cardio. When I went to the exercise list it said that the workout was going to take 45 minutes and burn 343 calories, both of which are the highest numbers in those categories since starting the nine week challenge. It ended up taking me about 47 EASA minutes to finish the workout which translates into just about an hour of time and I burned 353 calories. That was my highest calorie burn since starting as well. With the exception of the mountain biking and the reverse lunge jumps the workout was not all that bad. There is some stiffness in my legs today, but that has been there since the workout I did on Saturday I have just been adding to it by the four days of workouts in a row that I have done. I lost another 1.3 lbs today when I got on the scale giving me until Thursday morning to lose another 1.1 to get to the 5 lbs WiiFit goal. As of this morning I was down from 265 lbs to 176 lbs which is a total weight loss of 89 lbs and only 11 lbs from my ultimate goal. If I can stick to the diet and not go crazy on the weekends like I have been doing there is an outside shot that I can get to that number by the time  I finish the 9 week challenge. If that does not happen I will get there by the end of the month I am sure. I am still thinking about what I want to do next after I finish the 9 week challenge but I don't know yet. I was thinking perhaps going to the 3 week cario kick start on medium or hard or perhaps doing the 30 day challenge on the original EA Active again since that is where I started. Then go through the entire program again EA Active, NFL Training Camp, and EASA 2, all on harder levels. My only concern with that is that I might get board with all the jumps and lunges getting through it again. I am almost getting that way now but seeing the continued weight loss keeps me motivated to get up and do it again each morning. Tomorrow is a rest day but I have been feeling all kinds of energy lately and I want to get that last 1.1 lbs off before Thursday so I am thinking that I am going to do my upper body workout in the morning and if I have time perhaps a little yoga or other stretching to see if I can't get my legs to recover before the next 9 week challenge workout on Thursday. Please comment on any workout programs you are using that I might want to try when I finish this 9 week. 

Losing a foot does not hurt all that bad.

No I didn't get into some kind of accident or have surgery to have mine removed the foot I have lost is the 12 inches off my waist line since the beginning of the year. Yes when I started all this back on January 3rd I was wearing a size 46 pant and I went shopping this weekend to get some clothing that fit since the stuff I grew out of that I was wearing are now too big as well. I tried on some jeans and pants and it turns out that for the work pants  I ended up needing to by a size 34 and for shirts I had to buy a 16 and a 1/2 which is also down from the 17 and a 1/2's I was wearing a few months ago. It is nice to go into work not looking like a 10 year old trying to wear his dad's clothing. I woke up this morning and did my workout like I was scheduled to and that way the third one in a row that I have done and I have one more tomorrow. I did do my upper body workout that I created yesterday since I had a little weight gain between Saturday and Sunday due to eating too much at a picnic I went to. When I weighed myself this morning I had lost the weight that  I gained this weekend and am back at a total weight loss of 88 lbs with only 2 lbs to go to get to the WiiFit goal and only 12 lbs to go to get to my final goal weight. I am down to the last 7 workouts of the nine week challenge and after tomorrow I will be halfway through phase three and have only six to go. The workouts are getting longer, today's was 45 minutes long (which turns out to be an hour or so after load times etc.) but the calories burned are going up each time. Today when I look at the summary of the workout and saw that is was going to take 43 minutes and that it was going to burn 313 calories, AND was 47% lower body, I thought for sure it was going to be even worse than the phase 3 workout I did on Saturday. That ended up not being the case, it was a good workout but there was a lot of running and other cardio activities, when I was finished I felt good and had burned 320 calories for the workout. I am looking forward to seeing what tomorrow brings but since the soreness of my legs is starting to kick in again I would be lying if I didn't say that I am hoping that most of the workout will be focused on the upper body or I might just find myself in a world of hurt by the end of it tomorrow. Here is the graph from today's workout and I will let everyone know how the weight loss is tomorrow and how the workout goes and if I am ready to die when it is over.

Need to do some laundry today

Why is that you ask, well because there might be a shoe print stain on the back of my shorts once EASA 2 kicked my butt this morning. I knew that is was going to be a hard one when I saw that is was going to take 40 minutes for me to finish, it had me burning more than 300 calories, and the lower body percentage was 40%. Just to give you an idea, I ended up doing 34 total workouts four of them were warm up and four of them were cool down, three of them were mountain climbers and SIX yes SIX of them were stride jumps (totaled about 550 stride jumps) If that were not enough I got to do a new exercise, the alternating spilt squat jumps, two sets of them with 24 each. I also got to do two mountain boarding and a mountain biking. Not to mention the two sumo squats and the one pivot squats. So if you take the warm ups and cool downs out I did 26 exercises of those 17 of them were with my legs (not counting the running I did) if you add that everything but he last 3 exercises were legs. Needless to say my legs are killing me, but once all that was done I ended up mowing the lawn so I know I got some great workouts in which is good since ate more than I should at dinner tonight and expect my weight to go up a little tomorrow. I won't be too upset about it since when I weighed in this morning I was down 2.6 lbs or so putting me only 2.2 lbs away from the next WiiFit 5 lb goal for Thursday and 2 lbs away from losing 90 total. I am going to be doing some kind of stretching workout tomorrow or I don't think I am going to get through the workout on Monday due to soreness. I will keep  everyone posted. Today I made the picture a little bigger so you can see all the ridiculous leg exercises I ended up doing today.

Well I did it again

Yet another Friday has come along and yet another Friday I don't wake up and workout. The alarm went off this morning and I was half way out of bed but then I started to think. I am taking another certification exam this morning and thought it would be better to sleep and get the extra hour of rest so that I would be sharp when taking the exam. I will make the workout up tomorrow. I have only nine workouts left before I am done with the this nine week challenge so  I need to start thinking about what I need to do next as I don't think an EA Active 3 is planning on being released before I finish. I still have not totally gotten back down to the weight I was at last Saturday but I am less than half a lb away. I have lost about two lbs since Tuesday so I am ok with that, as long as I stay at that pace I should be good to get to my final weight goal and put all this behind me. If anyone has any suggestions on what to do next I am happy to hear them. Yesterday's workout was not quite as bad as the one on Tuesday but it still was a little hard. It was one of those workouts with a lot of stride jumps, skipping, and mountain climbers. The total calories burned in the workout was about 250 but it sure did feel like a lot more than that. School is winding down this week and the first day of next week then I am taking a smaller class load so it won't be as bad to get up and workout in the mornings. Now all I have to do is figure out what working out I want to be doing. Here is the graph from Thursday's workout.

Alot happened over the weekend

Ok, so as of today I am back up to 186 which puts me one pound over my end of May goal and 16 lbs away from my final goal of losing 100 lbs. I think that I should be able to do that with not issues by the end of the month but rest assured that I will be letting everyone know how it is going along the way. I am not all that concerned about the 1 lb weight gain for a few reasons. First, I did a ton of working out and exercising on Saturday as you can tell by reading the last post. Second, I ate like a champ these last few days. Saturday I went to a Mexican restaurant and had a big ole' burrito, Sunday morning I had a doughnut for breakfast, a hotdog with potato chips for lunch and three slices of Papa John's pizza for dinner. I don't quite remember what I had to eat on Monday and yesterday I ate more calories than I normally would. Like I said I am not all that concerned about it since the soreness in my legs went away which means that the muscle that was growing has come in adding a little bit of weight, and if I can eat like that and only gain l pound then I can live with it. The worst thing that is going to come of it is I may not hit my 5 lbs every two weeks WiiFit goal that I shoot for. I have completed two workouts in phase three of EASA 2, when I finished the first one I thought to myself that it was not all that bad and I should be able to finish the 60 day challenge no problem. Then I did the second phase three workout yesterday and didn't think that quite as much. The second workout was pretty hard but I did break the 300 calories mark and I know that I am building more and more muscle. None of my belts fit anymore and people are telling me I look like I have lost another 20 lbs since the last time they say me. This is telling me that tone is starting to come in, I can see the difference in my arms and legs and can even feel the muscles in my stomach firm up much more when I flex them, but I don't expect to ever actually see those muscles due to the amounts of weight I have gained in the past. It is getting to the point in my journey where I need to worry less about what the weight on the scale says and more on measuring my waist, arms and legs to see how my muscles are growing. I am also starting to feel more definition in my back so I am starting to believe for sure that the time for fat burning is just about done and the muscle toning is starting to take over. I will let everyone know if tomorrows workout is as hard as yesterday's was.