Thanks for WOWY-ing!

Thanks to everyone who WOWYed during my birthday challenge. The stats showed that we had three times our normal numbers. Now that you're doing it, keep it up! WOWY is about you anyway. My challenge was just an excuse to get your in there. My sister, who was logging my progress reports throughout the day, won $500 (of course, she's not eligible so that will go back into the pot). Anyway, the point is that you can get paid to workout, so why wouldn't you do it?

Here's my challenge report. For best results, you might want to watch The Eiger Sanction first:

Birthday Challenge 2007

above photo: the crew sporting some serious 70s style. "a wild turkey on the rocks for my good friend the doctor."

Here's To All My Friends!

Thanks everyone for you well wishes! It all begins in a few hours and I'd better get some sleep. For the details:

http://steveedwardschallenge2007.blogspot.com/

You can WOWY anytime beginning at midnight today. C'mon! Why not? As I was telling a friend today, everyone stands to benefit more from WOWY-ing than I do.

http://www.milliondollarbody.com/wowy/wowy_jump.htm

Gotta go try and get a few hours of shuteye...

Live you life!
Steve

Monday Morning Inspiration Video

So I didn’t manage to catch up on sleep but I did renew my enthusiasm, in part due to this little video.



The vid’s not that great but the music is and it’s always fun to watch people work things that you’ll never do. Anyway, I’ve got heaps on today’s agenda so I’d better get at it. I’ll be in WOWY this afternoon when my work is finished.

Don’t give up…

Tired

When I say each day I mean some days or, perhaps, each day I feel like writing. I do have actual work that comes first. I only get to the blog when I have time or find a news tidbit that I want to post right away. I did see something today about environmental conditions in China that was rather alarming but that's too depressing, so I'll yammer on a bit about training. And, as I'm very tired tonight, it will be a wee bit.

A three week training cycle is mainly a fine-tune cycle. You can't create any real body composition changes in such a short time. You can train one energy system to exhaustion but that won't get you ready for a competition. So a three week cycle to prepare for competition consists of two weeks of hard training and one week of tapering.

And, converse to how you normally train, your highest volume training should be early so that you have plenty of time to recover. My first week consisted on long climbing sessions that were often coupled with bike rides or easy runs, and on the other days generally long hard rides with easy runs. These are also tests to see where you body is at so you can pick which areas that need to most fine tuning.

During week two the volume decreases. It takes your fastest-twitch muscle fibers about 2 weeks to fully recover. So while you can't totally rest them because you need to ready your body and mind for the rigors of the upcoming event, you can consider this and not go too deep or too intense. How to actually do this is tricky; everything in such a short cycle with a peak at the end is a compromise. You kind of take each day and evaluate how you feel and base your training solely on this. You can't just plug in a workout program and do whatever you think you should. This is asking for trouble because this close to event one bad day can do irreversable harm. One skin flapper, major overtraining session, or getting dehydrated can set your perform back to where you won't fully recover in time. So it's always better to slightly under do it than to even barely do too much.

With a week to go I'm on the verge of the latter, however this may have to do with my friend's party last night as well. Whatever the cause, I need to catch up on some rest, which will be difficult because I've got a very busy week ahead. At least I don't have any more high volume training days. Well, tomorrow may be slightly high volume. After which it's less and less til Sat.

Oh, and I always forget to WOWY on Sat. This is my biggest volume day each week. Two weeks ago I did 21 long routes outside, which took about 9 hours. The next two I went climbng all day. I guess because I left early I forgot to log on. My calendar my not be Xed off but, I assure you, I was training.

Training For My Birthday Challenge

Okay, so I've been logging my training in WOWY for all to see and just found out that there's no way to let you see it. So it's going to be here from now on. Since I only announced the challenge two weeks ago it's not like there was some big scientific process. I put the challenge out there, hope I have the requisite base training, and have since concentrated on building up the necessary skin thickness, eating habits, engram patterns, and strategy to see me through.

Three weeks isn't long enough to truly train for something. All you can do is fine tune what you've got. For a 24 hour endeavor, this leaves no shortage of things you can do to improve your performance at the last minute. My challenge is chronicled on this page:

2007 Birthday Challenge "My blood must be fully replaced every year"


I realize, however, that the banter over there may be a bit more esoteric than a wide audience can tolerate. Therefore, I'm going to use this blog for MDB members as we, too, can talk in a unique language about such things as WOWY, the X, bringin' it, and so forth.

To recap, here is what I have planned, thought there still can be a bit of juggling, adding rules, etc.

In 24 hours, on or around November 24th, I'll attempt to:

On sight 47 rock climbs
On sight 47 miles of "advanced" single track on my single speed
Ride 47 miles on my fixie
Run 47 kilometers (about 30 miles) on trails

And

Get 470 people to WOWY with me during the challenge!

Over the last two weeks my training sessions have been between 1 and 9 hours, with 3-4 being about average. In P90X, we talk about how you can't really train efficiently for over about an hour. This is true. However, I'm not training for general conditioning but to attempt to complete 24 straight hours of exercise. In this case, longer training is essential.

That's all for today. Each day I'll write a bit more about the what and why on training for endurance vs training for general body conditioning.

Until next time, keep pushing play and WOWY!

Friday Inspirational Video

This route is just beautiful. Wish it were closer to home. I love aretes. They are, by far, my favorite rock feature to both look at and climb. Feel free to email me with your list of favorite aretes.

Workout With Me

I've updated my training blog for my upcoming challenge. Now you can virtually train with me using our WOWY feature at MDB. Since most of you probably aren't in need of a virtual training partner the only motivator I've got is cash. MDB gives money away randomly to anyone that logs on (it's free).

Check the blog for more details:

http://steveedwardschallenge2007.blogspot.com/

It's A Fat World After All

Disneyland has closed down some rides to retro them for our fatter society. Scroll down for the article:

http://www.miceage.com/allutz/al100907c.htm

Like those who deny that global warming is occuring even though glaciers are disappearing world wide, there are those who believe that the obesity epidemic is nothing but some sort of political sounding board so we can keep good American food corporations from maximizing their profits. Maybe they'll wake up when they can't bring their tub o' popcorn and 64 ounce soda on their oh-so American jungle ride.

"Quite simply, the boats weren't designed to handle multiple adults weighing more than 200 pounds, and they now routinely bottom out in the shallow flume and get stuck. The Imagineers who designed the unique flume ride system for the World's Fair assumed that adult men would average 175 pounds, and adult women would average 135 pounds. Needless to say, those 1960's statistics are hopelessly out of date in today's world. This same issue creates similar problems on the drops at Pirates of the Caribbean, or even on the older dark rides like Pinocchio or Alice In Wonderland as the more heavily loaded cars try to keep up their pace throughout the ride. But at it's a small world, the weight related problems happen more frequently."

Birthday Challenge 2007

My new birthday challenge blog is up:

Challenge Blog

As usual, I have no idea if I can do it. In fact, if I tried tomorrow I couldn't. I also only have two weeks of hard training to get ready. As Jack Burton always says, it's going to take cracker jack timing. That and a lot of luck.

How Bad Is Sugar?

"Just think," said my friend Ben last night. "This is how normal people feel all of the time."

We were in a comatose state of a sugar crash that came of the heels of one of my more unhealthy weeks, which has led me to make a little anecdotal statement about eating excessive sugar.

I’ve been traveling every weekend to climb and, with a birthday challenge in the forecast, decided that this week I should rest and recover before my final cycle of training leading up to the big event. Instead of doing an actual recovery phase of training, I opted to do nothing while catching up on my social life. Given this week is Halloween; there’s been no shortage of weird sugary treats to indulge in. So I partook regularly, will the knowledge that my hard training during the ensuing weeks would easily counteract it.

So yesterday I go climbing. After my second warm-up climb, where I’d accumulated a fair amount of lactic acid build-up, I felt awful. At first I thought I was hung over because I’d been out the night before. But I’d only had two drinks. Next I thought that, perhaps, I was getting sick. I took a short nap and then finished off my climbing workout tentatively, wondering why I was feeling so bad.

I had dinner with my climbing partner, Ben, and his family. It was healthy and I began to feel better. Then we hit the leftover bowl of Halloween candy. Almost immediately, I returned to my prior state. As we sat there feeling worse and worse Ben made the above comment.

As I struggled to drive home I recounted my diet for the week. It had included more pure sugar candy than I’d had all year. From gummy worms to Wonka taffy to Haribo burgers, I’d been munching on the type of stuff some people eat on a regular basis. After all, as one of the packages informed me, these were “no fat” treats. How bad for you could they be?

Well let me tell you:

I’m pretty healthy but I don’t always eat ultra healthy. In fact, when I’m participating in endurance sports I often eat a lot of sugar in order to quickly re-charge my glycogen stores. So I should be used to eating sugar, right? Not exactly.

Dense calories, like sugar, are vital when you’re burning more calories than you can possibly eat. However, when you’re not doing excessive exercise—and most people never do any—eating dense sugary foods is friggin’ horrible for you. Last night I dreamt of lettuce as a junkie probably does crack. Give me some fiber and low density stuff to soak up all this crap, my body seemed to be saying. I’ve never been a big fan of salad for breakfast but that’s what I’m going to have. I have no idea how some people live in the state of being all the time. Especially when you know that you don’t have to.

Happy… cough…Halloween.