Author Archives: simon

250 pushups – the starting point

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100 push-ups

Shame its not 3 months to 250 pushups, but its a great start

Today I started the training for doing 250 push-ups, with smaller milestones of 100, 150 and 200 push-ups to keep me going.  As with the starting point for the 5 minute mile, the first point of action was to see where I am now.

So I just do some push-ups and I managed 20, wow only another 230 to go, no worries :-|

That’s now two of my goals started, I plan to think of some smaller swimming based goals to start working on this week too.  This area will be one of the toughest for me as I cant really swim and I cant tread water (which gives me a fear of water I cant stand up in).

To help me train for doing 250 push-ups I bought a copy of 7 Weeks to 100 Push-ups

5 min mile – the starting point.

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One of my larger goals is to run a 5 minute mile, sure there are probably a ton of teenagers who can do this no problems, but I cant and its going to be hard to get there!

All runs I have done to date have been slow plods, I don’t do fast running because it hurts and I suck at it.  Which is why this is one of the first goals I am going to tackle, conquer the fear :)

I am not 100% sure of the best way to train for this goal at the moment, I think the starting point will be to spend a few weeks doing lots of short fast runs and then create an plan based on the findings from those few weeks.

Well actually the starting point is to find out where I am now, which was what I did last night.  I went for a 1 mile run and I went for it, I mean I really went for it, and I was shocked!

I did the run in 7.05 minutes, which is OK, still a very very long way to go, but that’s OK too.  What really shocked me was how much it hurt and how long it took me to recover!  When I was training for the marathon I could do a 2 hour plod and recover in a few minutes.  This was a 7 minute run and it took me about 35 minutes to recover.  My chest was heaving / burning, I couldn’t breathe or talk properly.  This is going to be an interesting goal for sure.

Building the base

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Because I have never been very sporty I have very little base fitness, I don’t want to mislead the readers of this blog so let me clarify.

I have obviously have some very basic level of fitness in the last few months, as I was able to train for and finish a marathon 2 months ago.  However I found it very tough going and finished in a very average time.  What I mean by very little base fitness is that I was never sporty as a child or much as an adult.  So my base level of fitness when not training for an event is more or less nothing.  I know when everyone stops training their fitness levels drop, however it takes me a long time to get them back up again.

Part of the reason behind this blog was if I have a goal to train for, I have more motivation to find the time to train.  No goal = little or no training of any kind.

Having said that I don’t want to just train for big events /goals right away, so the plan for the next few months is to move the focus away from events and instead  get my base level of fitness and general well being up.  This will give me a solid platform to train for some marathons, triathlons and form the basis for my first quadrathlon.

Along the way I hope to knock off some of the smaller goals, such as doing 100 push-ups, although to be honest that feels like a big goal as I type this.

From couch potato to athlete?

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couch-potato

Before :-)

I have never been very active, I was not sporty as a child and other than doing Karate for a while I was never very sporty as an adult either.  I have tried a few times, I have trained and completed 2 1/2 marathons and 2 full marathons.  However they were all completed in very average times and they hurt a lot! Despite the promises made to myself at the time, I never kept up that level of fitness.

Like many people I am a creature of habit, I do what I am in the habit of doing (be that good or good).  If I am in the habit of drinking lots of coke, I drink lots of coke until I make a conscious effort to stop, if I am in the habit of doing a 6 mile run every Sunday at 8am then I get up and go for that run without thinking (stops me procrastinating).

The problem comes about that when my goal is achieved e.g I have run the marathon, I no longer have anything to aim for.  So I take some time off from training, I am now in the habit of not training and I stay there for a few years until I decided I have had enough of being overweight and unfit.  I then set about to train for another event (promising myself that I will keep it up this time).  This has been going on for about 12 years now on and off.

I am happy to say that today is the last day of this pattern, I am setting myself some huge goals which will take many years to acomplish, and lots of mini goals to keep me going during lighter periods of training (after all we need to have some form of rest to stop burn out).

So…. this blog will document my journey from being an unfit mid 30′s couch potato to a fully fledged athlete :-) hopefully it will inspire others to get up and get out because trust me when I say if I can do this, so can you.