Diving In: Two New Goals

I know that I tend to talk about Flywheel a lot, but I do have another favorite boutique fitness studio in Dallas: Tread. (Hmm, maybe I should write a full review since I love it so much.) It’s half weight-lifting, half-treadmill running, but the treadmill part is intense. You are constantly changing your incline and speed to spike your heart rate in awesome intervals, and it kicks my butt like nothing else. (Hint: if you don’t think that you are going to throw up at least once during the workout, you’re doing it wrong.)

One of my favorite things that we do in class is what instructor Scott calls “dives.” You turn the treadmill up to a pretty insane sprint (for me, that’s 11mph plus a 2% incline), and then you jump onto the treadmill for ten seconds of work, then jump to the rails for ten seconds of rest. Ten seconds probably doesn’t sound all that hard, but when you are doing those intervals for three or four minutes, it’s intense! However, as much as you might not want to jump back onto the moving belt when your rest time is up, I’ve learned that ten seconds is short enough that you have to just do it as soon as Scott says go. If you don’t start immediately, you’ve already missed half the interval. And when that interval is up and I get to jump back to the rails, I usually think how glad I am that I went for it, because it wasn’t quite as bad as I thought. (I’ve also been amazed at the speeds I get up to in that class – I never knew I could be so speedy!)

So applying that metaphor to other things in life…

I’ve decided on a couple big fitness-related goals lately, and thanks to the diving in concept, have decided that there’s no time like the present to make them happen. The first is that I’m getting back to marathon running. I haven’t run a marathon in almost six months at this point, which for me is kind of crazy. So I signed up for the Colfax Marathon on May 18, which I already ran a few years ago. This time, a bunch of my friends are doing it (or one of the various distances they offer), so I think it will be fun for us all to go out for brunch after the race.

However, having not run a marathon in so long, I actually need to train (somewhat) for this one. With only three weeks before the race, there isn’t all that much I can do, but I think it’s a good idea for me to at least get a few long runs under my belt before tackling 26.2. So, I ran 13.1 miles last weekend, planned for 16 this weekend, 19 next weekend, and 21-22 the week before the race. (Note: I would not recommend this plan for anyone else other than crazy me, as it does come with a high risk of injury since it’s so sudden.) Yesterday, I was totally wiped out after not getting enough sleep lately, so I pushed it till today, but I told myself that I’m only allowed to push these long runs back if I can still get them in. If I hadn’t had some free time this morning (okay, a lot of free time is needed for running 16 miles at altitude), I would have sucked it up and gone yesterday. Today was really slow, but I’m so glad I did it, and I’m feeling really great about my weekend having gotten that long run under my belt.

For my marathon goal, effort matters a lot more than results. I don’t care what time I finish the Colfax Marathon in, and I don’t care how slow my long runs are. (Good things, since today was really freaking slow.) But for my other big fitness-related goal, it’s all about the result rather than the effort. I’ve decided to sign up for DietBetter, a site that lets you put your money where your mouth is(n’t going to be) – so you bet on whether you can lose weight. Since I can be frugal, I do not want to waste the $25 I put down, which means that every time I think about eating something I shouldn’t, or skipping a workout, I’m going to think about how it would cost me $25 to do that.

My DietBet game is going to kick off on May 7 and end on June 3, which means we’ll all probably get a little boost in our starting weights from Cinco de Mayo fun 🙂 The terms of the bet are that you try to lose 4% of your body weight (not body fat) in four weeks, and whoever reaches that goal gets to split the pot. The DietBetter team has some pretty stringent rules about weigh ins (you take pictures of you on your scale with a word-of-the-day on them so they know you aren’t cheating the system), but no one else can see your actual weight; just your percentage lost. I am honestly not sure if I can hit the 4% number in four weeks, since I think that’s going to require absolutely zero slip ups at all, but along the lines of “diving in”, I think I’m going to go for it and see how close I can get. Who knows – maybe I’ll surprise myself and be more capable than I thought!

Anyone want to join me? Click here to enter my DietBet.