Fitness Goals

I'm in the "if you want to run fast, run slow more" camp.   Aerobic base is everything, and really the base is what lets you do workouts without breaking important things (as I found out last fall with a torn calf from doing stupid things very fast).   Weight loss is huge - 15lbs will get you almost 30sec or more off a mile - that's free speed.  I'd tell you to run at least 4 days a week and get up to at least 20-25mi a week before starting to introduce any kind of speedwork.   The thing is, people try to introduce speedwork too quickly, or even worse they don't do enough work at the right paces to make the workout worth while.   Consider, if you do a bunch of 400 repeats with a 200 recovery, you can easily blow past 3mi on the workout itself and not include the warm/cooldown miles.  Add everything up and you're closer to 6mi, that's quite a jump for someone that only runs a 5k occasionally.

An example week could be:   Mon - OFF, Tue - EZ3, Wed - Fartlek 4 (30/20/10), Thu - OFF, Fri - EZ4, Sat - Xtrain, Sun - 7LSR     

The Fartlek workout (30/20/10) is time based, so run a mile or so to get warmed up, then for 30sec slowly speed up, 20sec hold that fast speed, and then 10 sprint.   At the end jog out until you're comfortable and repeat this until you're ready to cool down or hit 4mi and then cool down.

Pretty damn impressive to qualify for Boston, NXP! Now be ready to feel even better about yourself...

So, I'm a couple of weeks into my "get into BUD/s" workout. It's actually not as much of a horror show as I thought it might be. The pushups and situps are just a pyramid program, I generally get them knocked out in 10 minutes or so. I could go quicker, but no need to as long as I'm getting in all my reps. My running plan is coming together, I intend to do one 'long run' of 2-3 miles at my regular slow ass pace, and then two runs (that totals me running each of my 3 days on-duty in a work period) doing some kind of interval work. My first two interval workouts were as follows (all are done on a treadmill with the incline set at 2%):

1st day

5 minute walk at 3.5
10 minute run at 6.0
10 minutes of intervals at 7.0/6.0 (one minute each)
5 minute walk

3rd day

5 minute walk at 3.5
5 minute run at 6.5
10 minutes of intervals at 7.5/6.5 (one minute each)
5 minute walk

Heart rate is in the high 150's after the above workouts, and I can tell I'm working, but it isn't killing me. For now, the plan is to basically follow the same pattern, increasing in 0.5 increments until I reach my 'race pace' (8.5 on the treadmill), then lengthening the fast intervals and decreasing the recovery intervals to try and get the 1.5 mile time down.

At any rate, it's nice to have a goal to work towards, and my body can frankly use the rest from weights for awhile. Just doing the situps/pushups/pullups is saving some wear and tear on my old joints.

Dannnus - that doesn't make me feel better about myself, but it does make me think you're awesome for jumping back on. Keep at it!

Lowkey - Slow to run fast is nice because it doesn't beat you up near as bad as HIIT. HIIT works, explosive power is always best trained through plyo. The hard part is keeping that going for 1.5mi. 400m? Sure. 800m? eh... 1600m? Somethings going to hurt bad. To give you an idea of one of my workouts last weekend, it was a 16x400m @ 5:45min/mi pace, 200m recovery at 8:00min/mi. That workout's a beast, and really started to grind after the 12th rep but it's doable because of the base. Build it and it will go fast.

Good job, Dannus. Keep at it, I know it's hard for you to stay on track with the smells of firehouse cooking wafting past your nose.

On my end, I'm down to 183 pounds so roughly 8 pounds to go and I should be between 17% and 20% body fat, which is where I want to be.
These last 10-15 pounds have not come off as quickly as the weight did at the start of this. Still, I'm getting a chuckle out the fact that I'm loosing it on a steady diet of almonds, beef jerky, bean-less chilli, and buffalo wings. And a multi-vitamin. Can't forget the multi-vitamin. Cholesterol levels are good as of 2 weeks ago when I had my yearly physical. Typhoid booster sucked as usual.
Surgery is healing nicely, but I'm still banned from anything that strains the abdomen for another 3 months. After that it's me and iron, 5x5, and some sort of cardio.

Essentially, yes, but I'm too lazy to make any of the fancy meals they describe so I just stick with really basic meat based meals and stay away from carbs.  The main trick with this type of diet is going into ketosis (not  ketoacidosis, thats a different critter entirely) where your body starts to draw its calories exclusively from fats.
You have to keep your carb intake very low at the start, no more than 40 grams and no less than 20 (the brain needs those, it doesn't like ketones).    When you get close to where you want your weight to be you slowly start adding cabs back into your diet, bumping it up 5 or 10 grams a week until you see yourself starting to gain weight again, then back it off to the previous amount. That's where you'll  stay at a stable weight assuming you keep to the same level of physical exertion, ect.

Now as to why you felt crappy.....happens to everyone that goes on this type of diet. Your body really prefers running on sugar, the cheap energy source, rather than fats/ketones which it views as it's savings account for hard times. 
As you deplete the sugars in your bloodstream and the ATP in your tissues you get all the classic symptoms of low blood sugar.  Some people get them more severely, some less, but you get them because....surprise...you have low blood sugar.  It takes 3 to 4 days for your body to give up hope of getting any carbs and to make the switch to primarily burning fat.  Sadly, all it takes is one slip and ingesting more than 40 grams of carbs in one day to knock you out of ketosis and then you'll have to do it all over again. Which sucks.   And it can also put weigh to fast, like a fat kid at Chuck-E_Cheese.  Another thing to keep in mind, this is a "slow" energy....think aerobic not anabolic.   Hiking=Good.  Sprinting=Bad.  Seriously. I read a portion of a study where they tried this with mountain climbers....the climbers did better on a diet of fat then on a more carb based diet.    Slow, steady work not busts of frantic activity.   I mean, you'll still be able to sprint to catch the Good Humor truck (to buy it for the kids dummy, you can't have any!) , but don't expect to be doing grass drills and not feel like your ass is dragging so far behind that it's in the next time zone.

So while on the diet, no more than 40 grams of carbs a day. Period. No cheat days.
Also, don't go overboard on the protein either. That's a mistake some people make because their afraid of eating fat.  
Ketosis burns fat, not protein, so if most of your calories aren't coming from fat you body will do some black magic shit and break down proteins into sugars/ATP.
This is why you need those 20 grams of carbs for your brain...if the gray prune in your skull doesn't get what it likes your body will break down muscle to make it what it wants, and bam! You're out of ketosis again.  Ideally you should be gettng about 60% of your calories from fat at a minimum. Go for the well marbled T-bone and DON'T trim the fat off.    Seriously, I think the biggest mistake I see people making when they try this type of diet is by attempting to avoid fat.  Not only does that not help in any way, if your protein intake is too high it can do bad things to your kidneys.  

Yet another point...do not go more than 6 waking hours without eating something.   This apparently has something to do with avoiding triggering a starvation response in your metabolism. Don't ask me how or why, I just work here.   A handful of almonds and/or some beef jerky do fine.


Now here is where I go off script, and nothing I say hereafter is endorsed by any medical authority...not even anyone who stayed at a Holiday in last night. It's just my off the cuff, half-assed theorizing as to why this works visa a vi why the hell does human metabolism do this bizzare crap.

1- Carbs that are edible by human beings are not readily available in nature in great quantity.  Prior to the advent of agriculture you didn't find wheat fields. fields of potatoes, fields of rice, or even a lot of ripe fruit.   Mono-culture crops are mostly human caused thing, not how it plays out in nature. Also you would have been competing  with just about every other organism for those carbs, from viruses and fungi to small birds and mammals, to larger herbivores.   Also, fruit wasn't ripe all year long.  You had brief windows where a certain type would be ripe, and once that time had passed you had to wait another year.   So the default setting for our metabolism isn't really for a carb based diet.
2- The time of year when carbs did become more plentiful was late summer and early fall.  If we tend to get fat on a carb heavy diet, wouldn't it make sense that we evolved that trait to fatten up just before food became scarce?  


My suspicion is that we're really supposed to live on a much lower level of carb intake than is normal in modern society.  Atkins found correlation, using death records amongst other things, between when  refined carbs (white four and sugar) became relatively cheap and readily available and the increase in obesity and heart disease.   I think he may have very well been onto something. 

There's more of my mad pondering on this, but I'm feeling like crap with some sort of bizzare crud which I'll probably ask you folks to puzzle out for me in another post, then I'll crash.

It's not that bad for me, but I wasn't a big bread/pasta eater before hand.   I will admit sometimes I catch myself longing for a sandwich and realize I'm thinking more about the bread than the filling.   It's a fleeting thing, though.

The thing is you don't have to avoid carbs forever, just while you're dropping the weight. After that you just have to determine how many carbs you can have without starting to gain weight. 

Given a choice between being fat or not super-sizing my fries I'll skip the fries any day of the week.