July Fitness Challenge Recap Week 3

This is part of an on going series of reports for the month of July 2012. To read previous updates the links are provided, OVERVIEW, WEEK 1, WEEK 2. 

Honestly, juggling all four challenge's on top of my normal training and daily routines is starting to take its toll. I am glad that this upcoming week will see the end of two challenges. Lets get into the details. 

100 Day Burpee Challenge. Haven't missed a day yet during this challenge. The reps are not difficult to handle yet. What I have found myself doing is breaking the numbers up into sets of 15 or 20 at a time. This fits well into a continuous speed circuit I do of push ups, abs, burpees and air squats most mornings while I loosen up from a night of sleep. I am still not happy with my foot placement on the way back to the start position but doing the reps faster helps with more of a pop up than normal. 

1,000 Ab Rep Challenge. 300 daily reps this past week has not been as big an adjustment as I thought it would be. Like it has been in the past. By rearranging my sets to a more familiar rotation, mentioned above, I can easily get my numbers in. I have already noticed a bit more striated muscle around my ribs and diaphragm. If I could get to a two and half pack by the end of the challenge I would be happy. While that seems absolutely paltry, let it be known I have never had well defined abdominal walls even at single digit body fat training for contests. For the vast majority of  us average folk, noticeable abdominal muscle has very little to do with exercise and everything to do with genetics and long term nutritional considerations.  

10,000 push ups in July. I am on track to hit my total around the 26th or 27th of the month, way ahead of schedule. Last week I had not decided if I was going to continue with the daily quota all the way through the month and just keep running up the total or not. I probably will not. Instead of averaging almost 400 push ups a day I will probably go back to my standard 100-150 a day as part of my morning circuit. 

30 Day Run Challenge.As I predicted the run has been the hardest for me to keep going. There have just been so many days where fitting it in has been a burden or chore instead of something to look forward to. In fact the lack of rest I am giving my legs has caused me to cut back on my overall distance for the month. I believe the continuous fatigue from the burpees is playing into it. The good news is I haven't missed a day of running in three weeks. The bad news is my long runs have suffered significantly due to lack of proper recovery of my legs or my normal ability to remove certain exercise to prepare for longer runs.  I look forward to having to a run rest day on August 1.

Clockwise: Run Challenge, Burpee Challenge, Push Up Challenge, Ab Challenge

What has really frustrated me at the end of Week 3 is that my normal daily workouts suffered from staying on track with these four added challenges on top of it. I missed a couple of longer runs and performance drills so that I can recover my legs and shoulders. Especially hamstrings and calves. I do not normally do this many challenges concurrently. As I said, I do a circuit of pushups, abs and burpees almost every day but just not in this type of concentration. The completion of the push up challenge will be in a couple day during Week 4 and the culmination of the run challenge the beginning of Week 5. I think it has been good to push myself with all these events but the experiment finds me longing, especially for, longer runs.