Buzz buzz buzz

Three hours after my workout today, I still felt the adrenaline rush. I can't say I've felt that way in a long time. So here's the run down:

Three sets of squats with a 35 pound dumbbell in each had. 21 reps, then 15, then 9.

Followed with three sets of squat jumps, also at 21/15/9.

Doing a weight bearing version of an exercise followed by the explosive equivalent is supposed to do wonders for power. I just read about this on the amazing site rosstraining.com. I highly recommend the site if you want to learn about no nonsense training. I've been using lots of ideas from there lately.

After the squats, I was feeling pretty good, and I thought I could use some more work to finish off the session. My legs were feeling a bit tired from the running and some other squat work that I did yesterday, so I decided to work my upper body a bit too.

So, I decided to do an intense series of dumbbell snatches with the 35 pound dumbbell. Gym Jones are the guys who trained the actors for the film 300. They've got the concept of a breathing ladder. What you do is any compound exercise in a set of one, then take one breath. Follow this up with a set of two, then two breaths, etc. This forces you to be very conscious of your breathing. You can't pant like a dog and expect to finish. I went from 1 to 10 and the back down to 1. That adds up to 100 reps. My friend Flynn calls this "The Jedi Mind Trick"

I got to my first set of 9 and thought to myself that there was no way I was going to finish the ladder today. But afterwards, I just did my prescribed breathing and kept going. My legs were shaking through out the back half of the series. When I finished, I was a heap on the floor, but a happy heap.

I showered and got back to my desk and for the next three hours, I felt like I could wrestle a water buffalo. It's nice feeling badassed.

Competitive?

So, here's the update to the Advicepig/Nervda 1391 challenge. You can see our progress at this link. You can see all of my runs downloaded off of my GPS watch at nervda.motionbased.com.

I am currently ahead by 4.11 miles. It's really gotten me running much more regularly. I know there have been times that I've rousted myself out of bed early and grabbed the dog for a run just to have the satisfaction of retaking the lead from the AP.

All of this running leads up to one of my other goals for this summer/fall. I intend to run the BAA Half Marathon in under 2 hours. I've run this race every year since 2003. I ran it in 2:03:28 in 2004. I just registered for this year's edition of the race this morning.