I don’t even know where to start with today. It had portions that were great, others that utterly sucked, but battling through them made me feel incredible. There were lifestyle changes, and also portions that resembled the lazy times. Also, new implementations that are awesome but need to be honed.
Here it goes:
I woke up at around 6 and heard my mom preparing to exercise, which made me feel great because she is actively pursuing her own physical goals, and had said she was going to do it before work. I slept for another 30 minutes and then got up and talked to her, had a glass of water and began preparing my breakfast. This is about an hour or so before I even wake up on regular days, but the first hours of my day are usually the most productive. Anyway, so I began my new breakfast routine, 2 scoops of meal replacement shake, and a blend of my home made cereal. I have a half cup of a mixture of the following: oatmeal, grape nuts, almonds, raisins, cranberries, coconut, flax seed, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and barley grass. I take the ½ cup and blend it with a coffee grinder and then add it to the meal replacement shake and have it all together. It tastes kind of weird at this point because I haven’t perfected the recipe, but I know that it has to be good for me.
After breakfast I began doing some stuff that had been put off the day before, cleaning up my room, sweeping, organizing a bit, and putting the information in my diet journal which can be reached here:
http://fitday.com/fitness/PublicJournals.html?Owner=nutritionfitnesshealth
I completed a few other projects and then it was around 10am and I was hungry again. That’s a plus and minus to hardcore training, you get to eat all the time, but the food isn’t always so awesome. I’m learning to love it because it makes me feel great, gives me incredible energy and keeps me healthy. After finishing a few more tasks, eating more and sitting around at times doing nothing but listening to music, I realized that I was really tired and it was only about 2. I was going to coach baseball at 4 and had track practice at 6:15, so I would certainly need some rest before taking both of those on. I began my first day of power napping, and tomorrow I’m waking up early so that I can do it again. If you haven’t noticed by now, I don’t spend a great deal of time working, it’s because I have so many projects going on that take little portions of my time, and I love it this way. It’s always changing and I can pretty much do what I want, I just need to keep working on my procrastination and be productive 75% of the time.
Anyway, so I took the power nap for about an hour, not wanting to wake up because it felt absolutely incredible. I finally rose and went and had some more food, knowing that I couldn’t eat for the next 5 hours, and the track practice was going to be difficult but nothing compared to what I would actually face.
So I biked a couple miles to baseball, did that and then biked over to the Stanford track to meet the team.
We started our warm up which consisted of about 2 miles jogging and then a bunch of exercises that were much more demanding than past practices. We probably did about 6 laps of exercises and jogging and then they really put it to us. Our next exercise was to steadily increase our pace during the 100 meter straightaway and then jog the round portion of the track. I haven’t mentioned that the entire practice my stomach was hurting really bad, and forced me to walk a few times during the warm up. My guess now is that it could be the barley grass doing weird but productive things to my body, because it’s way too natural. Anyway, we went on our task of running and for some reason that is not apparent, I decided to start almost sprinting on the first couple straightaway runs, thus leaving me exhausted as the exercises continued. We completed about 6 laps of this and it really tested my endurance and will power. I was really tired, my stomach was killing and I had no idea when the suffering would commence.
Finally we finished and did the core exercises that everybody was really excited about. After my ranting and raving about how I hated the core, I LOVE exercising them now because muscle has developed and is showing, and because of their importance in endurance events. When people took breaks I just continued doing the exercises, one in particular, the plank. I think it’s a lot of fun, and is a great test of will power; I used to do it all the time, sometimes up to 20-30, 45 minutes at a time. Not by personal choice, fraternities tend to push limits in physical exercise, at least mine did. It’s safe to say that I’m pretty well versed at that exercise.
We finished our workout, listened to one of the team members who has been free of cancer for over a year, and is now participating in one of the events. It was a great story, and certainly gives incentive to help fundraise for the cancer research that helped save her life and will continue helping anybody whom has unfortunately been afflicted.
Post exercise and being showered and almost fed again, this is one of the best workouts I’ve had in a long time. Pushing through the pain of some sort of stomach annoyance, and doing numerous exercises outside of my comfort zone are things that I don’t wish to experience often, but certainly put a satisfied feeling on my slate for tonight and until the soreness subsides. There’s a quote from the US Marine Corps, I’m not a military buff in the least, but it’s a good quote “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” Hopefully not too much pain, but if you can deal with some discomfort, you become that much stronger and makes the next time you attempt a similar experience easier.
This turned out to be longer than expected, hopefully it served and you gained something.
Have a great rest of the day, whenever you read it.
Again, if you’re interested in getting into the best shape of your life and willing to make some sacrifices in order to lose 20-50 pounds, or feel fit, sleep better, increase energy, concentration, stamina by Thanksgiving let me know, it might be the best decision you’ve made in years. Actually I can guarantee with 99.98% certainty.
Take it easy,
Ryan
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