I won't be defeeted

When it comes to endurance pursuits and most adventures, it comes down to the condition of your feet. Wear a pair of ill fitting or inappropriate footwear and simple walking becomes a chore. Shod your feet correctly but wear the wrong socks, hot spots and blisters are assured. Yet even when you do it correctly, and have the right sock and shoe combination for the job, all you have left to think about is, "How tough are my feet?"

Wearing the perfect footwear, socks, even after market or corrective insoles still can't help our feet if they are not toughened up by repeated abuses. Wearing your perfect foot gear still doesn't address the actual foot in terms of abuse some events put on it with constant movement compounded with hours of being stuffed in wet, muddy, silty, hot constrictive devices.  

(scene from movie Die Hard)

So I am working on toughing my feet. The actual soles of my feet. Regardless of the fact that I am a lifelong hiker and spent a decade of my life in Combat Arms carrying heavy packs in standard issue boots, I am somewhat of a tenderfoot to be honest. I don't usually get blisters or hot spots from my longer runs or events and I am good at changing my socks and treating my feet but my bare feet are still in my opinion soft. I do not ever enjoy walking around outside in my bare feet. Every little pebble is a sharp rock, every twig a thorn. Sand is always too hot. Grass is always to prickly. I will continue to wear some sort of footwear where ever I go, thank you very much. Yes even in the hallways of a carpeted hotel on a lazy vacation. I feel that I have watched Die Hard far too many times. Okay, okay, I don't always were slippers or house shoes in my own home. 

(oh God, no. Creep me out)

This week instead of a WOD of run drills and conditioning, I decided to run a mile barefoot. Nothing fancy, nothing fast, nothing on my feet. I found the absolute greenest, most lush park area of grass in my neighborhood and took off all my clothes below the ankles. I felt naked and exposed. I would have rather ran nude in just my shoes rather than the reverse, which was what I was going to do. 

I can't say I was looking forward to this, by comparison, very short training session. Just run a mile. Slowly even. A 'sing a song ten minute pace'. As I left my shoes and socks in a pile, all alone in the grass, I felt as if I was leaving kids for a one year deployment overseas.

When I finished my mile, my feet were feeling surprisingly fine. I had not stumbled or been jabbed, stabbed, poked, itched, bite by ants or run into any snakes. (Its an irrational thought I know. Honestly and rationally there were no snakes I could have ever run into at the park but it was the same feeling and instinctive thoughts I get whenever I swim at the lake and think to myself, "There are no sharks in here."). I put my footwear back on and headed home. 

A little later, showered and walking around my own house the aching started. The hot spots I picked up but hadn't presented now started to affect me. Crap they started to hurt. It was a good lesson. It was a good workout in that my feet will learn to adapt. Distance be damned I am toughening my feet up. 

Juggling 4 Fitness Challenges

To hold myself accountable I will try to post each Monday where I stand in the four challenges I am attempting in July. These are above what my normal workout is for the day. Luckily, two will be completed by the end of the month which will make my daily regime feel less like a part time job going forward. Though it would be pretty cool to be paid to do this all the time. 

The first box is July 1, the last July 8. 

I took the family wall calender in the kitchen and divided each day into four blocks, one per challenge. Clockwise, is my Run for 31 days straight challenge, a 100 Days of Burpees adding one rep per day, 10,000 Push Ups in July averaging 325 per day and finally a Ten Week Ab Challenge doing 100 reps the first week and adding 100 reps each week.  I wrote a more thorough description earlier this month. 

So far so good. I haven't missed any days and on track for all to be done on time. The burpees have not been uncomfortable though if I go too fast my breathing is labored. The abs, which increase a hundred reps today to 200, are the easiest to complete. Push ups I know from experience become an accumulative strain on the upper body and the strategy becomes doing more sets rather than larger rep numbers. 

I still think that the run challenge is going to be the hardest of the to complete. The rest can be done anywhere, anytime, anyplace. Running at least a mile a day involves some planning. 

My normally scheduled training, be it a WOD, cycling, running, Death Race training or hiking is not listed on the calendar. As that never has an end date or need to be tracked for reps or streaks. 

Fitness Challenges in July

I have restructured my training for July by adding some challenges ON TOP of my normal workouts. I thought I would let you all take a peek and maybe find some inspiration for your own training or spark an idea to challenge yourself in a meaningful way. 

100 Day Burpee Challenge. This actually started on June 25 and concludes on Oct 3. Began on Day 1 by doing the most amount of burpees you could comfortably do without stopping. Normally on this challenge you start at 1 repetition. Then for the next 99 days add one burpee per day. I suppose I was lucky enough to establish my base number at the very end of a three training rotation where I did 15 hours of hard exercise. My body was pretty hammered, ready to collapse and did 18 burpees. The simple way to think of this challenge is that I will do 118 on the last day. In reality the number of reps doesn't matter at the end, its the action of doing 'one more' burpee every day consistently for 100 straight days. There may be some people who do not know what a burpee is or confused on how to do them. Here is a blog I wrote on the burpee and a video I like to use as a visual. 

1,000 Ab Challenge. This is a ten week challenge starting the first Monday of the month. For the first week do 100 total repetitions of abdominal exercises every day. How they are done, in what order and how many reps per exercise is completely up to the individual as long as 100 reps are met every day. Do 100 crunches or 100 flutter kicks, do 10 reps of 10 different ab exercises, its the reps that matter not a prescribed doctrine to follow. On the following Monday and for the next nine weeks add 100 repetitions each week to the routine until the last week you are performing 1,000 abdominal exercises per day.  

10,000 Push Up Challenge. This is a one month challenge to do a total of 10,000 push ups in the calendar month. If spread evenly the number of reps would be 323 per day. If a day is missed it could be spread out over the rest of the month or 323 x 2 push ups the next day. Or do 1,000 a day and get the challenge done in ten days. The calendar is the frame, the effort is the individual.

1 Mile Run Every Day Challenge. This is a one month challenge to run every day a minimum of one mile. While this seems incredibly simple, it is so hard to string together consecutive days of running. All the other challenges can be done almost anywhere over a 24 hour day. Running requires some planning that can easily be derailed. I have gone longer with the challenge in the past but feel this one may be the hardest to complete. 

To keep all these straight I write my daily totals on a wall calendar in the kitchen. Each daily box is divided into quarters, one for each challenge, that are filled in daily with my totals. However you decide to spend your month or your entire summer the most important thing is to challenge yourself with habits that are fun. 

The yard work workout

Let me just remove any possible comment of pretentiousness, because I am not that. This project which I call a workout, is what some very hard working people do for a living, day in and day out, with much more efficiency than I have. 

A few months ago we hired a company to remove some tall palm trees from out backyard that provided no shade and managed to dump everything right into our pool. It only cost $100 per tree to remove except for the stumps which were cut to as flush to the ground as possible. To remove them would cost $300 a piece because they would have to do by hand. No way to get equipment through the gate. We declined. 

Here is the start.

One stump, the closest to our pool was on a raised pile of ground about a foot high, surrounded by rock. I decided to let the grass grow over it and create a little hill. Which it did. The problem became how to mow this mound of rock and stump with without bottoming out the blade on the incline. Couldn't be done. So I decided to take out the stump myself using an eight pound maul and a shovel and using the project as an excuse to work on my ax swinging skills.



I roughed out the work area with help from the former tree's decorative brick border as a guideline. The project dimensions are six feet long, and four feet at the widest. This alone took several hours of maul strikes and shovel work due to the fact that unlike a normal tree stump, a palm tree stump is made up of thousands of fibrous roots. This made work slow going to say the least but provided hours upon hours of swinging away with the eight pound maul just trying to shatter the root system.

(good visual of a palm tree root system)

A decent side view of the stump with a better visual of how high this was off the ground. I had to chop out sections by chopping length wise, then width wise. Then because the fibers snaked all over it wouldn't just pop out. I had to chop at the bottom to get each piece to release it. Somewhere in this horizontal chopping I strained my rib a bit. You can see how the root system just snakes around the center. I suppose a roto tiller would have made this work easier. But where is the workout in that?

(Finally making progress)

At the beginning of Day 4 the end was in sight. Over the first three days I had spent approximately 17 hours chopping and digging. Certainly had I paid the professionals to do it, it would have been significantly faster, probably to better results, but the exercise was incredibly rewarding. The entire stump above ground and four inches below ground has been removed. I also tilled the ground approximately four inches deeper the old fashioned way, hundreds of maul swings to remove more root fibers and break up the ground.

I realized too late that I had removed too much soil, so I had to add top soil to bring up the ground level and level the area out. This involved several five gallon buckets of top soil that I had left over from another project. Bucket carries only added to the final workout. The end result was laying all of two pieces of sod. So much effort for such a small piece of ground. But I am now almost twenty hours of non stop exercise into my week.

Protect the head in style

I've been pretty open about the fact that I have had a lot of head injuries and a few of those have been extremely violent, which may not be the perfect adjective but it is apt. Recent theories suggest that the more concussions a person receives the more susceptible they become to receiving them in the future, maybe as much as 3x the greater than a non Traumatic Brain Injury person. Thus I have been very conscious of wearing head protection. 

Now look, I am not some rabid helmet advocate that demands a law in every state that a motorcyclist wear a helmet or every time a toddler gets on their trike to ride around the cul-de-sac that they need to have a helmet on. For me personally, I always wear a helmet when I am cycling or mountain biking for fitness or recreation. I also wear a helmet when I horseback ride, ATV, 4 Wheel, paintball, airsoft, an occassional attempt to water ski, when I boulder, rappel or encounter Class 3+ hiking trails. (If you enjoy any type of hiking, read that link for some good information) Even when I am on a ladder putting up Christmas lights or changing a light bulb in our house. That last one might seem a bit over the top but, considering I got my last concussion hitting my head against a wall in my house while I checked the tire pressure on my bike tire. True Story. 

For years I have worn a Pro Tech skating helmet (right) and it has done a great job of protecting me from random bumps and knocks. I've got a few scuffs to prove it. Last Christmas I got a GoPro Camera to capture my adventuring and endurance pursuits in glorious 5mb/1080 HD frames. Because lets face it in the digital age, "No pictures, didn't happen.".  The provided helmet/headband strap has worked well, bounces a little, so I went looking for a way to mate the GoPro to my helmet and kill two birds with one stone. Maybe that is the wrong analogy to use. 

I found that Pro Tec has started marketing a line of military helmets. It would be a great way to platform a helmet camera with mounted lighting options, a requisite American Flag velcro patch slapped on plus protect my head from whatever I, someone else or gravity, decides to throw at it. I think I will pick one up in the near future. It would really come in great during my NightOp training sessions.

 For those looking for general head protection for yourself or your child without looking out of place in a multi-colored cycling helmet for you or some embarrassing brightly colored kid show sponsored brain bucket for them look into a multi sport/purpose helmet. And if its tactical or even tacikewl, it works for me. 

Classic Overreach

A couple days ago I went for a run during the hottest part of the day. Not generally the smartest way to do things but I had to workout, had to get out of the house and clear my head, and had to continue my acclimatization for the forthcoming and inevitable summer heat.

As I left for the run, the air temp was 108. I was including push ups and burpees every mile so I also took a ground temp (using a Thermapen) and got a reading of 135 degrees. At those temps, using gloves becomes a requirement.

My run, an out and back had a turnaround at a park that I discovered had a dozen exercise stations. So I ran there doing burpees and ab exercises every mile then completed the stations and ran back doing the same. I'll also chip in that my return route completed an errand to pick up medication for my son at the pharmacy, so I saved gas too.

Its a couple days later and my legs are still fairly zapped. I know its the result of heat acclimatizing and it being my farthest run in a few months by 3 miles. Classic over train. I'll overcome this today by working on my flexibility, some treadmill work and consistent, smooth exercises that keep my HR up and steady rather than ballistic or anaerobic.

building steam

Good gravy this year has tested my patience. Its May and since New Years all I have done is take care of sick and injured family members or be sick myself. Today is the first time in a few weeks where no one is home sick or me in bed sick. So I am going to keep this short and sweet so I can go out for a run and build my base back up. Unlike some people I do not lose weight when I stop working out or when I am sick so I am about 10 pounds over my fighting weight. 

The last event I completed was GORUCK back in February. Which I did with the Flu and a virus infection. Even with no real base, last weekend I signed up last minute for a local 5k charity run for the troops, so I could pace a friend of mine rehabbing his knee. In true goruck style I carried a GR1 with a case of beer in it. The course was not marked well and we ended up doing an extra loop around a pond and our 5k became 6.5k. We still had a respectable time of under 40 minutes (<10 min mile pace). It was nice to feel that kind of sensation again; me, outside surrounded by like minded motivated people, sweating.   

Here are photos of my ruck and race contents plus a photo of a 8' tall American Flag made out of Lego's that was at the finish line. I just thought the colors where vivid and amazing and surprised this iPhone photo did it some justice.

In any regard, the flywheel of my fitness is no longer sitting still, it is slowly rotating again. It will take time to build steam enough to move on its own and build unlimited energy and abundance. Exercise is only the momentum, nutrition is the lubricant that keeps the wheel moving smoothly. Both are required for a healthy motor. Keep that in mind as you go about your day.