Crossfit?

I've been swapping emails with my brother, he of the Panama City Beach Iron Man, and he's been recommending that I look into Crossfit as an alternative to the standard gym-based or private coaching. I know a little about it, and know that he (and my sis-in-law) have been working out with a guy who based his program on it, but that's about it. When I did some digging I discovered an affiliate about a half mile from my office and another about two miles from my house. Neither of those is far enough away to pose an obstacle and now I'm intrigued.

Anyone have any experience with Crossfit that they want to share?

Starting over from scratch

As the long silence might have indicated, I've been lax. Not just in writing, but in riding and just about everything that had been contributing to my physical well-being. Well, it caught up with me on Monday. I was moving and unpacking some not-all-that-heavy boxes and managed to tweak my back, leading to the last couple of days being spent in varying degrees of pain/discomfort and working from home.

This has been a wake up call for me, and come Monday (when I'm well enough to go back to work) one of my stops will be the gym to meet with the person in charge of their trainers. I need to find someone that I can see for both the minor rehab (mainly stretching) my back needs to get the last of the spasm under control, and then for moving forward. I need to focus on weight loss and flexibility, and hopefully there's someone there I can work with.

I hope I can be ready to go for the 100 miles of nowhere ride (post coming to discuss) and more importantly for the LiveStrong ride in July, but right now, I just don't know.

An interesting experiment

The last two or so weeks I've been very strictly monitoring my diet including keeping a food journal. I hate keeping a food journal. However, keeping that close of an eve on my intake has allowed me to drop back almost to where I was a few months ago (~25 lbs down) before I got lazy. During that time I have been very lax about exercising, having gotten in only one true ride, no runs, and a heap of yard work/activity of daily living stuff.

The next two weeks will be almost the polar opposite.

I have two weeks of travel coming up, most of it for work, and the nature of the trips will limit my ability to control my food choices. The first week I'll be in a fairly small town for a training and doubt that there will be much available, in addition I'm in a standard hotel (as opposed to an "extended stay" style one with a kitchen) which limits cooking options. The following week I'll be traveling to Honolulu for meetings, but won't have a car, which reduces me to joining my colleagues in their food choices or guiding them to mine. What I will be doing is bringing my running shoes (and for the first trip my bicycle) and planning to work out for ~60 min per day.

All in all, it will provide an interesting comparison - which is better for me when it comes to losing or at least maintaining weight: rigorous calorie counting/food choice limitation or exercising?

On hydration and being fat

Warning - I will be writing about proper hydration, and as any fitness person knows that means discussing what happens after proper hydration.

I've finally gotten back on track with watching my diet, and as such have seen my weight start heading back down. After a couple of days though I noticed something odd - my body fat % (measured by bio-electrical impedance) was climbing. Climbing at a rate of 1.0 to 1.5% a day. Keeping in mind that my scale reports in 0.5% increments this still seemed like a lot (not to mention odd) so I looked up the impact of hydration (lack of) on this sort of measurement. Short version, the worse your hydration is the higher your apparent body fat %, because it screws with the conductive properties of non-fat body mass.

Since I was already in "fun with Google" mode I decided to see what I could find about "proper" hydration. Sure, I've heard the old "8 x 8 oz glasses per day" thing, but it has always struck me as odd that my wee little friend Pest, who's maybe 5 feet tall in heels and weighs significantly less than I do, would need the same amount of liquid as me. The old stand-by is "clear and copious" urine and I knew I was failing that test, but the closest thing to a formula I found was to halve your body weight in pounds to get the number of oz of water you should drink. A little math gives us:

275/2 = 137.5

For comparison - 8 x 8 = 64

So, I need to be drinking not 8 8 oz glasses, but 17.

No wonder my body fat % has been climbing. I've made the effort for the last couple of days, managed to get close to 80 oz each day (and that was rough) and the body fat % has started reversing. Keeping up this level of drinking (water) is going to be tough.

I am stronger than pizza (tonight)

Tonight was my first bike commute in a long-ish time, probably a couple of months. It felt much longer than it was given that it took me the same time it always has (around an hour). There's one stretch where I always feel whooped and wish I had SAG support and for some reason when I hit that spot tonight (it was already full dark) I wanted pizza so bad I could almost taste it. Then, just a few blocks from home I passed a Little Caesar's and I still wanted pizza, even if it was pizza pizza.

But no, I'll be good and heat up my stew.

Wednesday weigh-in: Week 15

In addition to the update on my weight (still going down, slower than I'd like) I want to talk about weather. In this case, the difference between cycling and running weather.

I really like to ride. It's one the of the most enjoyable activities I do. What I don't especially like is riding when it's chilly. Not cold, mind you, just chilly. Weather right now in the Bay Area is mid 50s and 60s which isn't bad for riding but for some reason I just can't get myself to ride in this sort of weather.

Running on the other hand...

I love running in this weather - the colder (down to 20s) the better. I head out in my shorts and sweatshirt and pound for an hour or so and I'm happy as can be. So why not with riding?

(and yes, that parenthetical in the first line is the weight update for this week)

Wednesday weigh-in: Week 14

Okay, so it's not Wednesday and I've been slipping more often than not on the "weekly" part. After a great week of working out I've had a week and a half of bad. Basically, I missed most of last week, was gone over the weekend (did a lot of hiking but no true workouts), and have been feeling a little meh this week. I will be back in the gym today to get back on the horse, but have a lot of ground to make up.As you can see from the graph I'm still trending down, although with some deviations. As I get back into working out regularly I hope to get that trend a little more solid.

I have registered for the Turkey Tri at Bonnelli Park in the LA area, the Sunday following Thanksgiving, so if any of you are in the are come by and laugh.

Wednesday weigh-in: Week 12

I am a giant ball of muscle pain.

Monday I started a new workout routine, pinched from an old issue of Outside (I don't know which, except that it was in 2008). I had pulled the article out, probably because it's a triathlon-specific program, and stuck it in a pile of papers. I found it again about a week ago and decided to jump in. It's a 12-week program, with swim/bike/run and gym workouts. I'm two days into it and ... ow.

I'll add the screen-cap from Active Body (where I track my workouts) in a week or so, when there are enough of them to make sense of the pattern. For now, the weight loss graph.

1 - Last 30 days

The good news is that the weight keeps going down, and I seem to be getting back up to speed. I'm now down 32 pounds, and have cracked the 25-pound barrier with the Physics Diet calculated average.

2 - Total progress

A funny/sad side note on my fitness. I've been tracking both my weight and body fat % with Physics Diet, and while my body fat % hasn't changed much (which should shift with the workout routine being added) my BMI just seemed off. I knew I was fat, but I was coming in with a BMI of ~ 57, which as I understand it is essentially "Why Aren't You Dead?" level. Then I took another look at my profile and realized that I had listed myself as 5'0" instead of 5'10", oops. Added the "1" in and my BMI plummeted to 37, not a bad change in less than thirty seconds.

Wednesday weigh-in: Week 11

Catching up again. I missed the last couple of weeks because we were activated to support a team that went to American Samoa to provide assistance after the recent earthquake and tsunami. That meant a week + of straight 12 hour days, staring with a 17 hour day. Needless to say, I didn't get much exercise in.

The chart:

This is for the whole length of the weight loss, and the key thing I am seeing here is that I've crossed the 25 pound line. My "average" weight as calculated by Physics Diet is now 266.01, and I started at 292.2 just under three months ago. That's the good news.

The bad news is that next week is the last week of the first round of the program, and looking back at my initial goal I hoped to be done at this point. Instead I'm only a little over 1/3 of the way there. I should have been losing about 5 pounds a week, I've been losing about half that. The main culprit is that I haven't worked out, almost at all. Work is the easiest excuse, but that's all it is, an excuse.

I have put some money out for the gym, I go rarely. I've now dropped some additional money for a trainer, which will get me over there at least one day a week, and the rest will be up to me. I've shifted my goal to New Year's and should be able to make it. At my current rate of ~2.5 pounds a week I should lose another 25+ pounds by then, which would put me at about 230 and I should have a better idea if my original goal of 225 was accurate (as in, do I still look fat at that weight) or if I've got more to go.

Wednesday weigh-in: Week 8

I've broken through a wall that has been a problem for a while now - I'm dropped below 270 and held it for a couple of days. I've also made it back below the "best fit line" on the overall Physics Diet graph (red circle below).This is more significant that it might seem initially. What little graphing I remember from my time in math courses tells me that the "BFL" the is straight line that runs through or closest to most of your data points. If you look at the early days on the diet, my actual weight (green dots at the bottom of the graph, hanging down like stalactites) and the average weight calculated by the algorithm were far below the BFL, which indicates that I was losing weight rapidly enough to "confuse" the graph a bit. They we get to the last few weeks where it flips, and I'm above the BFL because I had pretty much stopped losing weight, excluding some daily fluctuations, and the BFL caught up with me. Now, it looks like I'm moving forward again and will hopefully start dropping like I was before.This second graph is only for September, and you can see the slight decline in the BFL, with the more significant drop in the green measured weight over the last couple of days.

Breaking 270 is significant for me, because that has been my floor of weight loss over the last few years, so getting past that is a great thing personally.

Wednesday weigh-in: Week 6

I'm traveling again, so the weigh-in this week will be mostly historical data. First, the graph.


My biggest issue is the grand flatness that is emerging. I've plateaued pretty badly, and it's my own fault. I've been lax with following the fast - basically I've had a number of days where I didn't have the correct number of supplements leading to extreme hunger at the end of the day, leading to me eating. I also haven't been at all diligent with exercising, so the excess intake from eating actual food isn't offset by increased burning.

All that being said, I've gotten back into the swing of the fast, before I left for my trip I got rid of the last remaining food components (things like peanut butter), and have some definite plans for exercising. The downside is that this week and next week involve a lot of travel, so my hope to begin biking to/from work a few days a week will be disrupted. On the upside, the hotel I'm in now has a nice gym and since I don't have to worry about getting dinner I'll have plenty of time tonight to "enjoy" it.

Wednesday weigh-in: Week 5

This is just a quick note, and the full post will be up later today. I'm out of town for work today, and neglected to bring my little sheet with all my weigh-ins. Last week I had a last-minute trip to Seattle that messed up my timing.

The short version of the news is that things have slowed down. I'm at just over 20 pounds total loss, but haven't lost much in the last couple of weeks. My crazy work schedule has prevented me from working out, although I have plans for that.

Look for a full update tonight.

Wednesday weigh-in: Week 3

Another week down, this one not quite as good.

Don't get me wrong, it's still going in the right direction, but I was hoping I'd be able to get into the gym more this week and get the pace to pick up a bit. I did see the training last Thursday, but the Friday was working and driving up to northern CA to see a friend. Saturday was spent at a county fair (so lots of walking but not too strenuous), a couple of hours hiking Sunday before the drive home (oh, and couch moving once I got home) and the first few days this week had no real activity.

My work load has gone through the roof, and will stay there for the next week or so. Hopefully I'll be able to get some things organized and spread the tasks to other people, but until then I'll be pulling 12 hours days to get it all done.

Wednesday weigh-in: Week 2

A little late getting it up, but today is still Wednesday...

I was a little concerned about what the trip to the group was going to show. I'll be quite honest here and say that I haven't stuck to the fast as rigorously as I should, as in I've had real food a couple of times, and my exercise hasn't kicked in full-bore yet. Also, I had no clue what the difference between my scale and the program scale was.

All that lead up, and it was good news. I'm down 11.8 pounds total (2 weeks) which is slightly above the average of 5lbs/week. I also learned (by checking) that my scale is within a few tenths of the program scale, so no more worries there. Once I get into a regular exercise schedule I should see the weight start falling more rapidly, but at this rate (5.9 lbs/week) I'll hit my goal in 11 more weeks, right in line with the 14-16 I thought it would take. I rode earlier in the week, and have an appointment with the trainer tomorrow afternoon. Next week I'll be starting a couple of classes at the gym, which will get me over there regularly (and whoop my @$$), which I need if I want to speed up the loss.

There's still a difference of a couple of pounds (about 3) between my scale weight and what the PhysicsDiet graph is coming up with. My guess is that this is because my loss isn't all that great compared to my total weight, and that the longer I keep up the same rate of loss the closer their average will get to my actual weight. This time around it's also a lot easier to see the benefit of the smoothing that the rolling average of their system puts into place. I didn't go above the average (all green points) but the spike where I was out of town and not weighing or exercising didn't really impact the overall trend. I also have a feeling that I pulled a Homer Simpson ("Dad, towel rack") on 9 Aug, there's really no good reason why I would have dropped two pounds and then have it show right back up and begin tracking slowly down from there. Had it been an up-tick it would make more sense. Oh well, it all comes out in the wash.