Phase One

Today was the last day of the first phase of my bodyweight workouts. Next week will be a recovery week, though I'm not sure what that means for actual workouts. I'll probably do one of Craig Ballantyne's Bodyweight 250/350/500 workouts; they're a fun challenge and a break from what was becoming a less interesting routine.

Which is not to say I wasn't making progress. I definitely moved through each workout faster and faster each week, and through it wasn't easy to measure my progress there were some noticeable gains. The one that really stands out is the Elevated Wall Planks, where my feet press against a wall while I hold a pushup position. I was able to do that today for three sets of :60, :50 (bad hand position) and :60. Not exactly the Body Prop, but it's a start.

Not sure what I'll do in the next phase. In fact, I might extend this phase another week since I'm going out of town next week -- for GenCon, which is ComicCon's even nerdier cousin. But whenever it starts, the next phase will be more endurance work, and it will involve my shiny new manila climbing rope as much as possible.

Took a look at G4's latest videos, my first look at this year's American Ninja Warrior qualifying course. My first reaction was that the course seems much easier than last year. Sure there's still the Bridge of Blades and Warped Wall, but the Spider Walk's been replaced by the Jump Hang and the Rope Swing's replaced by the Log Grip. Of course, if the course is easier to complete than the trick will be to get through it as quickly as possible.

And I'm sure that plenty of those clowns trying out will wipe out on the first obstacle, the Quad Steps. I could mock the less serious contestants, but part of me thinks that they've got the right attitude, at least for Gameday. Keep loose, have fun, and don't take yourself too seriously. Obviously, since I'm blogging about my training, I have some work to do in that regard.

Interesting to hear that the Warped Wall is only 14 feet tall. Sure, that's 4 feet taller than the basketball hoop on which I have never dunked. But a 6-foot guy reaches to 8 feet just standing up, so if you can run four feet up the wall you just need to be able to jump 24 inches from a running start. Hey, if a fisherman can do it, so can I.

My Achilles Heel. Seriously.

For the past month I've had pain in both heels, which just last week the ortho diagnosed as plain ol' tendonitis. Could've been worse, but for some reason it's really been acting up this week, and today I had to beg off my track workout and run instead.

Turns out the problem could be related to me being inflexible in my ankles, so now I'm stretching like mad not just to get over this tendonitis but also to get flexible enough to do pistol squats down the road.

In good news, I'm down to 209 lbs., 9.5% body fat. Those are great results for three weeks of somewhat consistent dieting, but I'm still skeptical about the body fat scale. Some of that's just me; I can't accept success when it's this easy. But I do believe that I'm moving in the right direction, however far I've gone, so this is encouraging.

Plenty of Ninja Warrior stuff online as Sunday's 9 PM premiere approaches. The Washington Post has an article about two gyms in the DC area that cater to obstacle-course enthusiasts, one of which is holding a 3-hour seminar with ANW veteran Levi Meeuwenberg this Saturday. And G4 has posted three new videos, showcasing the new season's obstacles, submission videos, and the weirdest comeptitors.

Rope Trick

A busy weekend kept me away from the blog, but it didn't keep me from working out. It's Monday morning now, and the "recovery" week of running is over. But I'm still running only three days a week, so it's not like I'm in danger of burnout. I've consistently noticed that I run faster when RunKeeper isn't giving me pace updates, so I'll see how that goes through a week of "real" workouts. As of this morning's easy 3-miler, so far, so good.

The bodyweight workouts are getting easier, and less interesting. Guess I'm at a point where adaptation sets in after about three weeks. That squares with what I've read. For those who haven't read, adaptation is just that; your body adapts to the stress of the latest workout, meaning that your gains from that workout will taper, as will your interest in doing it again. Alternating workouts during the week definitely helps, but all the same I'm looking forward to changing it up in a couple of weeks. After this week I'll have a "recovery" week of lifting, when I'll do I'm not sure what. But I'm definitely looking forward to the next phase.

That's because of the rope climb I just installed.

Any fan of Ninja Warrior (which starts July 31, I remind you) could see that training has to involve rope climbing. Seems like at least a half-dozen obstacles every season involve climbing on or jumping to or from ropes, including of course the Final Stage. But unless you're in a middle-school gym class it's not easy to find a rope to climb in our workouts. On the Internet, however, there's a big subculture for old-school workouts like rope climbing and kettlebells, and naturally plenty of sites from which to buy everything you need.

I've got an 11-foot ceiling in my garage, so I got from neptunebarbell.com a 12-foot climbing rope complete with a metal hanging loop on one end and a plastic "boot" on the other. I then got a specially designed "wood beam clamp" on Opentip.com. Found both to have the lowest prices thanks to Google Shopping. In all, though, they probably set me back close to $200. Times like this I wonder if I'm really saving any money by not joining a gym. But you can't find a climbing rope at Planet Fitness.

Setting up the rope took maybe a half-hour. I spent most of that half-hour, though, in my attic on the almost-hottest day of the year. Pretty simple to cut out the sheetrock in the ceiling, drill holes in the joist, and bolt the clamp at ceiling-height. Did I mention I had to buy a half-inch drill bit, too?

So the rope's up, but really I only have about three feet to climb from the highest point I can reach on the rope from standing. And so far the only use it's gotten is by my daughter and her friend, who immediately tied a knot at the end and used it as a swing. But in the next phase I hope to use the rope for most exercises. I figure that every exercise should incorporate core and grip work, and there should be plenty of rope exercises. I might have to invent some for my circumstances, but there are plenty of websites about rope climbing for fitness, which I'll link to in the sidebar.

The Hindu Pushup. Or Is It?

Another go at the "B" workout today. That means I was doing 3x15 of Hindu Pushups, as I'd done previously. Except I hadn't.

I thought that I'd been doing Hindu Pushups all this time. In fact, what I'd been doing are called Dive-Bomber Pushups. I could try to explain the difference, but a picture's worth a thousand words so here's a YouTube clip that shows the difference pretty clearly. The clip also shows, I think, how anyone could confuse the two.

What's less clear, however, is which is the better exercise. Folks online swear by the Hindu Pushup for reasons that are as passionately argued as they are vague. So having done Dive-Bombers for two weeks now, I tried Hindu Pushps today to see the difference for myself.

After one session, I have to say that the Dive Bombers seem a lot tougher than Hindu Pushups. That backward motion in the Dive Bomber Pushup, I feel, really makes them a more intense exercise for your shoulders and arms. Since that's what I'm looking for in that part of the workout, I think I'll stick with the Dive Bombers.

By this, of course, I mean no offense to the Hindu faith or its adherents.

A Cautionary Tale

Trolling the interwebs, I found a great writeup on Ninja Warrior's tragic hero, the Japanese Don Quixote or Percival, Katsumi Yamada. Read it here.

Every true Ninja Warrior fan roots for Yamada. But no one would want to be this haunted, tragic figure. In his struggle are lessons not just for every wannabe game-show contestant, but for every fortysomething guy who only has so many hours in the day to pursue what's worthwhile.

They're good lessons for any pudknockers like me who are just starting on the road to Midoriyama. Which, by the way, is a studio backlot and not some sacred mountain.

As Seen on TV

Found this article about the upcoming season of American Ninja Warrior, which starts July 31 at 9:00 pm on G4: Click here for the article.

I knew from the TV spots when the new season began, but credit's to American Ninja Warrior Quest (henceforth "ANWQ") for first mentioning the article.

Seeing the article there reminded me that I need to set up a Google News search for all things Ninja Warrior. So I've set one up, called All Things Ninja Warrior, and made it public. Of course, I'll comment on the news here, but now you can read up on it for yourself.

Free Running

Not a particularly significant workout today, but I think that I learned something important.

Just an easy four miles today, and the target pace was 8:47. This is from my computer-generated workout plan from runnersworld.com and the pace is based on my last 10K, which was a pedestrian 44:49. Usually I run with my iPhone app RunKeeper tracking my run and giving me updates each mile on my pace. But since I always surpass the prescribed pace for these runs, I decided to see what I'd run without knowing my average pace at any given moment. So I ran with RunKeeper on, but without any updates; the app would only tell me when I'd finished four miles.

The results? I averaged 7:54 for four miles. That's so fast that my first move is to doubt the credibility of the app. But I do know the route I ran, and at the very least the app can keep track of time, so the results do seem accurate.

What does this tell me? That when I'm not worried about pace and just focus on running at whatever's a comfortable pace, I run faster? can't draw too much from one workout. But from now on I'll skip the per-mile updates and just run. It'll be particularly interesting to see how that works on the tempo runs, when you're really picking up the pace for those middle miles.

What's Japanese for "Schadenfreude?"

I know, I know, what's English for "Schadenfreude?" It's a German word that basically means joy in the suffering of others. It's the inexhaustible fuel that drives most reality TV, but it's by no means something to be proud of. And I'm afraid that, as regards Ninja Warrior, I might have a case of it.

Last night I watched Paul Terek compete in Season 24. For those who don't know, Paul Terek is a former US Olympic decathlete and, whether he's still training for the Olympics, still looks the part. He's listed at 6'2" and somewhere north of 200 lbs., so as you might expect the guy looks like a man among boys out there on Mount Midoriyama.

I'll never forget the first time I saw him compete. On the Jump Hang, where you leap from a mini-trampoline to a cargo net and where most contestants hit the water instead, this guy not only reached the net but grabbed the topmost bar of the net and climbed over. Looked positively superhuman. Failed on the third stage at the Cliffhanger, as you'd expect, but still, he looked like if any whitey could win this thing, it'd be him.

And of course, the guy's more of an athlete than I'll ever be. I mean, other than in weight we're not even in the same neighborhood.

But then I watched him last night in Season 24. He's toying with the course until he gets to the Jump Slider, where you grab a bar and slide down the rungs until you must leap to a cargo net. Now this trips up a ton of contestants -- not that many of them make it this far -- but the trick is to use your momentum from the downhill slide to propel you across the gap to the cargo net. Pretty obvious once you see a few guys fall, and totally obvious once you see anyone succeed.

But not to Terek. He comes to a complete stop at the end of the slide rails and starts swinging his body, trying to recapture all the momentum he just wasted. But like on the end of the third stage, when you swing back on these slider-type exercises the bar goes back with you, and you end up farther away from your goal. And as Terek showed, once you've killed your momentum you can't regenerate enough to clear the obstacle, much less do it with time enough to complete the stage.

Sure enough, my man wasted ten seconds trying to swing himself enough, then jumped and didn't even reach the net. Splash.

Now I was cheering for this guy like this was the Olympics, even though I kind of knew he didn't advance. But ever since seeing him fall I can't stop thinking about how this world-class athlete couldn't navigate this one stupid obstacle. Is this schadenfreude? Am I gloating that the Olympian failed where fishermen and shoe salesmen have succeeded? It doesn't help that Terek went to Michigan State and I went to Notre Dame.

All I can do is try to learn from his mistake. I'm a little suspicious, because Terek's fall seems to confirm what I previously believed: (a) on the Jump Slider, you have to keep your momentum and go right into the leap; and (b) studying the course, like any couch potato can do, is of real value.

The danger is that I'll start believing (c), that watching the show on TV is a substitute for training.

Speaking of which, dragged my ass out for another round of the "A" workout. Little scary, going right into box jumps so soon after waking up. But the workout went well; I even extended my time in the Elevated Wall Plank to 40, 45, and 50 seconds respectively. I'm tempted to toughen this phase of the workouts, either with a weight vest or extra reps. Of course, I'm also tempted to sleep in or read in the mornings. Which means I should probably keep things as they are.

In other news, my new 12-foot climbing rope and ceiling beam mount came in the mail. That means that starting with the next 4-week phase I'll be literally climbing the walls. Plenty of web sites sing the praises of rope climbing as a workout, so we'll have lots of options for the next phase.

Lean Times

Recent evidence suggests that the fat-loss plan might be working.

Last night the Tanita told me I was 210.8 lbs. with 10.6% body fat. This is two weeks in, so I tend to give the results more credibility than I would last week's data. But if it's true, then I've lost 4.3 pounds of body fat and gained 2.1 pounds of muscle in two weeks. That'd be nice, but even I can't believe that two weeks of working out and cutting back slightly on carbs had that much effect.

There's a reason they tell you not to measure your body fat more than once a month. I couldn't stand the wait, but I completely buy that the results can only be reliably measured over several weeks and months.

Which is not to say that I'm doing the wrong thing. And this is the point: I may have ANW as a goal, but I'm trying to train so that whatever happens with the game show, I've got some health gains to show for it. So far so good, but it's really too early to tell.

Sasuke Happens

Sunday was a return to the "B" bodyweight workout. Feeling stronger, though on the towel-grip pushups all I could manage was three sets of 12, 11, and 11. It might be tough to develop grip strength and back/lats simultaneously.

Today was just an easy 4-mile run. I'm in a recovery week in my road running, and decided not to monkey with that schedule to sync it with my lifting workouts.

Something struck me on that other blog I found the other day; the link's in the sidebar. The guy writes about his efforts at the latest ANW tryouts. He mentions that before his turn a sumo wrestler got up to try the course, predictably wiped out, and soaked the quadruple steps. This made the very first obstacle darn near impossible at least for the guys who immediately followed ol' Slim on the course. Our blogger slipped and fell, and all his months of parkour training went town the drain.

Or did it? What can we learn from this?

First, you can't account for all the variables. Stuff happens. Stuff you probably can't specifically train for, and probably shouldn't waste your time training for even if you could.

Second, given that the unpredictable will occur, the best way to be prepared for it is to be generally ready for anything. In this training, that means not focusing on training for the specific obstacles you've seen on past seasons of Ninja Warrior. Instead, you should focus on getting your fitness and strength levels high enough that you can handle whatever the course throws at you.

The more you watch, the more sense this makes. How many of these guys who train on replica obstacles really benefit from it? How well would they do if they trained broadly to develop strength in a variety of ways? More importantly, how much better off would they be outside of this game show if they focused more on overall fitness?

Third, the right attitude is critical. This guy could've gone off in his blog about how unfair it was for them to not dry off the obstacles, how G4 made a sham of the whole event by letting this overweight clown on the course in the first place, and so on. He did none of that. He chalked it up to bad luck, went home, and resumed training. That tells me not only that he's a good sport, but that he's enjoying his training enough to continue without attaining his goal. It's like the Whos down in Whoville celebrating Christmas even though their presents are gone: you've got to remember what's important.

In other news, I intend to put some more general-interest ANW stuff on this page, because my personal training diary can't be that interesting to people. With the new season starting next week on G4, there should be plenty of material online. Details to follow.

We Are Not Alone

Ten-mile run this morning. Averaged 8:30 a mile, not a bad pace for me. I'm trying to train for a big local 10K September 18 while I start my training for ANW, and for the next few months they should complement each other. And by the time I start strength training in the fall and winter I'm no longer running competitively, so I won't have to deal with the challenge of trying to add muscle while shedding weight on the roads.

I've added to the links on the blog, and among my finds was American Ninja Warrior Quest, a blog by a guy who's almost exactly one year ahead of me on this whole fortysomething-midlife-crisis-fitness-challenge trajectory. I prefer how my page looks, but no doubt I'll be scanning his archives in search of tips on how to run my blog and my training.

At first, I was disappointed that I wasn't the first to come up with this little brainstorm. But of course, there must be hundreds of other guys out there who've tried blogging about their attempts to get on Ninja Warrior or other fitness goals. Just by the percentage of my Facebook friends who can't stop sharing their triathlon training, this is probably a pretty popular combination. And why not? If I know I have to blog about my training, I'm much more likely to be diligent about both training and blogging.

And know that I know there are others out there doing this, I get to see what it'll take to do it better than the rest.

Feelin' It

Missed a day of blogging, though not of working out. This is what happens when you diverge from routine and don't lift at 5:30 a.m. A small matter, but a reminder that there's not a lot of room for error in this training schedule.

Thursday was the third day of the bodyweight workouts, back to the "A" workout. Couldn't believe how sore I still was from Tuesday's "B" workout. Not sure whether it was the depth jumps or single-leg deadlifts that made my glutes really sore. Nor am I sure why I'm blogging about sore glutes. But that's neither here nor there.

The workout felt much better than it did on Sunday. Part of it was knowing what's coming, some of it was a little bit of actual strength, I hope. And part of it was I modified some of the exercises. I wasn't even going to try the inverted rows with my feet on a Swiss Ball again; the workout was tough enough on my arms with my feet stable on the bench. Felt much better at the Elevated Wall Pushups, but the EW Plank had to be modified. I'd been doing a minute on my elbows, but I suffered road rash on my forearms trying this on Sunday. So today I switched to pushup position for thirty seconds, which I think is impressive given that my feet are still up a wall.

Friday was my "rest" day, which means a half-hour or so biking through the neighborhood. I was really looking forward to this non-workout. It's only been six days, for Pete's sake, but there's definitely a mental component to consistent training. It's like the first mile of a 10K; it wasn't so bad, but now you realize how much farther you have to go.

Fahsto Stagee

Running workout today. I do need to post these on the calendar, but today was a "tempo run." That means your first and last miles are easy jogs, while the middle miles, however many, are run hard. It's great for road racing, which is what my cardio workouts are still nominally oriented toward. I imagine that after Thanksgiving I'll do cardio more targeted at Ninja Warrior. Soon as I figure out what that might be.

Caught another episode of Ninja Warrior on G4 last night. I DVR them, so I've no idea when this aired, and it's obviously from like six or seven years ago. But it reminded me of an odd phenomenon you can observe throughout the series: the pervasiveness of English.

Sasuke started as a Japanese show, for a Japanese audience. The contestants, and the spectators, still are almost all Japanese, and the announcer gives his running commentary in Japansese. Yet throughout the show you see and hear English. First off, the show's logo is "Sasuke" in big letters. If they have the Japanese word for Sasuke anywhere I wouldn't recognize it, but it's sure not as prominent as the English translation. And the names for the obstacles are all in English! And bad English, or "Engrish," at that. I don't understand a word of Japanese, but I can hear them call the stages of Sasuke "Fahsto Stagee," "Secondo Stagee," and so on. Then there's the "Rowwing Rog," "Spidu WRaku," "Jumm-Pingu Bah," and so on. Even the contestants' clothes, which aren't uniforms by any sense but do have corporate logos all over them like NASCAR drivers, are in English.

Why would the Japanese use so much English in their own game show? Could it be that the Japanese are so comfortable in English that they sprinkle it in everyday life that casually? I've never been to Japan, but I'd be astounded if English were so ubiquitous as to have penetrated Japanese culture that much. What does it say about Anglo-American culture that even in Japan they're using at least a pidgin English even on their game shows? It's kind of a compliment, I guess.

It's easy to look at Ninja Warrior and say that it's a competition for stereotypically slight, skinny Asians. But when you see how much they've assimilated American culture, it gives a big gaijin like me hope that I'm not ontologically precluded from competition -- or victory.

Diet Trying

One of my goals in this first 12-week phase is to lose some body fat. I've lost weight before, but never seriously tried to reduce my body fat percentage. Probably because I've never cared about my body fat. I looked good enough in the mirror and was running plenty fast, so I just assumed that I was lean enough.

But the guys who advance on Ninja Warrior aren't the strongest, but they are the leanest. It certainly seems that the guys who have less to carry enjoy a definite advantage over the stronger, heavier contestants. And it's not just Japanese competitors who are so darn skinny. The only white guy I've ever seen make it to the fourth stage, Bulgarian gymnast Jordan Jovchev, was as lean as anyone else to make it that far.

So where do I need to be, and how far away am I? The consensus among Internet sources suggests that anywhere below 8% is elite athlete body fat, so we'll take that as a goal. Now it's time to finally learn how to properly measure my body fat.

For years I've had a Tanita body fat scale, but I've never measure body fat the way I know they recommend: At a regular time, when you're properly hydrated, and therefore not in the morning. So I'm doing it every Monday night at 10:00 pm, at least two hours after eating anything.

Last Monday 7/5/11 I took the first measurement: 213.o lbs., 12.5% body fat. Sounds like a good place to start.

Then I began a week of a weight-loss diet. That means eating 500 calories a day less than what's needed to maintain my weight, with a diet loaded with protein. For the calorie limit I relied on LoseIt!, the calorie-counting app I got for my iPhone. It also lets me log my meals and track calories, protein, and other good stuff.

But how much protein to eat? The RDA is like 0.5 grams per pound, so for me that'd be 106.5 grams. But the Internet consensus is that to build muscle and burn fat you need 0.7-0.9 grams per pound of body mass. That'd put me at roughly 170 grams of protein per day. And that is darn near impossible to reach.

Try it. You'll be eating meat and eggs three meals a day and protein shakes in-between. Seems like the Atkins Diet, from what I've heard. But I gave it a shot for a week. And while I approached those protein goals most days, what I couldn't do was keep the carbohydrates out of my diet. The Men's Health Big Book of Exercises had a good section on fat-loss diets, and they recommended something like no more than 75 grams of carbs a day. Keeping your carbs that low means no pasta, fruit, or even milk. Now maybe I could adopt that Spartan lifestyle if I were a single guy in law school again. But with a wife and daughter who love their pasta as much as I do, am I supposed to make a separate meal for me?

Well, I tried for a week. And when I measured myself last night, what did I find? 210.2 lbs., 12.6% body fat. If that's anything like accurate, then in the first week of my fat-loss diet I lost  about 2.5 pounds of muscle and 0.5 pounds fat -- and my body fat went up a hair.

This is probably why the instructions that came with the scale say not to measure body fat more than once a month. Think I'll follow that; I don't want any more bad news for a few weeks.

Why Me?

Second "workout" day today. Started off with the run and stretching as on Sunday, but did the "B" workout instead:

--Depth Jumps
--Single-Leg Deadlifts
--Swiss Ball Pushups
--Towel-Grip Pullups
--Hindu Pushups
--Swiss Ball Russian Twists

Problem was I set these all to do three sets of 15 reps for each exercise. Like I could even do that. Had to crap out on the last set of Depth Jumps, chiefly because my lower back did not appreciate dropping from height onto concrete and then immediately jumping to the ceiling. And if you can do three sets of 15 pullups with towel grips, then just book your flight to Japan right now; I did three sets of AMAP ("As Many As Possible") and felt good enough about myself.

Caught the latest rerun of Ninja Warrior on G4 last night. I watched some Olympic gymnast from Poland DQ on the second obstacle, the Curtain Slide, where you grab an industrial strength shower curtain and...slide. Sounds easy, right? How does an Olympic gymnast (Leszek Blanik who took home gold at Beijing) fail so epically? And if an Olympian can't make it, then how could an over-the-hill suburban dad stand a chance?

Look at the guys who do well. The guys who make it all the way. Only three guys in 26 seasons: two fishermen and a shoe salesman. Anything in those backgrounds particularly qualify someone to run an obstacle course? Hardly. Now, I'm sure these guys trained like crazy. Which is the point. Most sports don't translate too well to this game show. So you can come from any background, if you're willing to train long enough and smart enough.

Thirty-six weeks should be long enough. Am I training smart enough? Not sure, but I'm willing to change as I learn.

First Workout(s)

Sunday 7/10 was the official start of my Ninja Warrior training. It wasn't pretty.

This was the first workout of the first four-week part of my endurance/fat loss phase. I tried to build a workout that would hit all the major muscle groups in ways that at least remotely related to the obstacles I might face. And as any book on weight training will tell you, we develop endurance and burn fat by doing sets of 12-15 reps with about a minute rest.

But what exercises to do? First, I looked at the actual obstacles from the entire 26-season run of Sasuke. Fortunately, Wikipedia had a great entry on the obstacles, so I cut-and-pasted their list and description into a database for further analysis. That sounds really nerdy because it is, but a database (I use Bento) is really just a spreadsheet with a customizeable interface and more tools for sorting and filtering the data. Putting the obstacles into a database made it easier to review each and identify the skills and strengths each requires.

What did I find? Pretty much what you'd expect if you watch one episode. You need the grip strength of a chimpanzee, the bounding ability of a kangaroo, the vertical jump of Blake Griffith, and the core strength of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Next step was to find exercises in these areas that I could do in my garage gym. For that I relied on The Men's Health Big Book of Exercises. There's plenty of free resources on the Internet listing exercises for every muscle group, and I did draw from one of my favorites, unique-bodyweight-exercise.com. But Men's Health does a good job of compiling every possible variety of exercise, sorting them by particular muscle groups ("glutes and hamstrings" vs. "Quads and Butt"?) and offering a variety of workouts for different objectives that make pretty clear how you could build your own program. Plus, their programs run 8-12 weeks, so I got a sense of long-term development.

So here's my program for the next four weeks. I'll life Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, alternating between the A and B workouts:


WARMUP

5-minute run. Nothing better for fat loss, so I run as much as I can. Barely a jog, but it's a great way to wake up for a workout.

5 minutes of jumping jacks and stretching. I picked stretches that would target Ninja Warrior and my weaknesses in flexibility:
--Jumping Jacks
--Low side-to-side lunge
--Over/under shoulder stretch
--Bent-over Reach to Sky
--Groiners
Got all these crazy exercises from Men's Health. But basically I'm trying to get flexible for the Spider Jump/Spider Climb, where you have to push yourself up and through a channel between two walls with nothing below you but the dreaded swamps of Mount Midoriyama.

Then came the A workout. I did the sets in alternating pairs, to cut down on the rest between sets:

1A: Box jumps, 3 sets of 15 reps
1B: Swiss-Ball Hip Raise & Curl, 3 sets of 15 reps

2A: Elevated Wall Pushups
2B: Swiss Ball Towel Inverted Rows

3A: Inverted Shoulder Press
3B: Elevated Wall Plank

"Elevated Wall" means that my feet were pressing against a wall about a foot or so above the floor while I did the pushups or planks. I threw that challenge in to hit my core; it's a baby step on the way to the old Ninja Warrior obstacle Body Prop.

So how did it go? The first pair were a cake walk. I ditched my planned minute rest between sets, they were so easy. The other four, however, were another story. The rows are in theory a great exercise, with the towels forcing me to work my grip and the Swiss Ball challenging my core while the rows themselves hit the upper back. But I was just not strong enough to keep it all steady, and while I completed the first two sets and got 10 on the last, I looked foolish enough doing them that I should've been on Tosh.0. Next time I'll probably just put my feet up on a bench. And ending the workout with planks was sheer torture.

This morning, just to catch up, I followed with my "easy day" run, two miles around the neighborhood. Felt much faster than the 9-minutes a mile my app said I ran. I chalk the slow time up to having completed the Sunday workout in the evening. I really need 24 hours between workouts. FYI, my GPS-running app is RunKeeper on my iPhone, and I highly recommend it.

A Journey of A Thousand Miles...

...begins with today's workout.

The goal is to get onto American Ninja Warrior, and you do that by trying out. Tryouts this year were in the middle of May in Venice Beach, CA, and you got to run the tryout course either by camping out on line and being lucky, or by submitting an audition video that made the producers want to give you a guaranteed spot. Mind you, this was just to try out; far as I know, no one was guaranteed to survive tryouts.

So I figure I've got 'til March 2012 to get in shape enough to make a tryout video or show up in Venice to take my shot at the course. From today to the week of March 11, 2012 is 36 weeks. So I give myself that long to get ready to compete one way or the other.

Which is perfect for me. I've been a garage-gym weightlifter and summertime road-racer for years, but lately it's been hard to get excited about another pre-dawn pullups workout or another running of the same ol' Memorial Day 5K. Now I've got a goal, however unrealistic, that I can pursue for over six months.

But what to do over those six months? How do you train for this unique game show, one where the obstacles can change from season to season and even guys who (if you believe what you see on G4) devote their lives to training for this competition come up short? Well, in any creative endeavor -- and devising this training schedule is a major exercise in creative writing -- it helps to have restrictions. And I've got mine.

--no more than an hour a day of training. I just can't get up any earlier before I have to get myself and my daughter out the door in the morning.

--no more than six days a week of training. I've always taken Fridays off, since my races are usually on Saturdays. But now I've come to enjoy starting the weekend a little early by not having to work out Friday morning. So we'll keep that schedule.

--No exercises I can't do on the roads, the track, or in my garage. That means I won't be building my own Spider Climb, and if you don't know what that is then you're not wasting enough time watching reruns of Ninja Warrior. I also won't be joining a gym. There's plenty to choose from around here, from CrossFit to Gold's Gym to Planet Fitness, but I just don't have the time to drive anywhere to work out.

--No equipment I don't already have or can't afford. And I can't afford to spend much on this "hobby." RIght now I've got a pullup bar hanging from the ceiling, a bench that I use mostly for plyometrics, a Swiss Ball, a weighted vest, and some ropes and towels for hanging on the pullup bar. And that's about all I'll ever have. I just bought a climbing rope to hang in the gym, and I'm still figuring out how to break that to the missus.

These restrictions actually make it easier to plan a workout program. Obviously, I'll be doing a lot of bodyweight work, with some endurance and sprinting work out on the roads and the local high school track. So I don't have to worry about whether I'm doing bench press or DB flys. But I still need some structure.

A little Internet research pulls up the basic concepts of periodization training. Basically, you spend the time furthest from "the season" focusing on endurance, fat loss, and anatomical adaptation, the first step in developing sport-specific skills. The next phase is for strength development, adding muscle. The last phase before the season focuses on developing power and sport-specific skills.

I've got 36 weeks, so I'll just do three twelve-week phases. I also figure I'll go light every fourth week, and change up the routines every four weeks. I got the idea for a light week from the computer-generated running workouts I've used for years at Runner's World's website. And the consensus in fitness and weight training resources appears to be that every four weeks you need to change things up to avoid plateaus in development. Basically, in about that time your body adapts to the stresses of the current workouts, and your progress planes off. This common-sense principle seems to be at the heart of P90X's "muscle confusion" philosophy, though I know nothing more about P90X than I've seen on the infomercial.

That means that the first four-week period in the first phase started today. I've posted on the sidebar a link to my training calendar, which I'll add to and update as I go. I'll only get the first four-week plan up at first, but I expect that I'll comment here about my progress in each workout.

I'd intended to debrief on today's first workout, but if I don't get seven hours sleep I'm a mess the next day, so this will have to be it for me now. Suffice it to say my body has not yet adapted to this stress.

What Is He Thinking?

I am going to compete on American Ninja Warrior in 2012.

There are plenty of reasons to think that statement is utter nonsense.

First off, ANW is a game show on the American TV channel G4, and you can't be confident that the show or even the network will be around next year. It's a network for guys obsessed with video games, and those living in Mom's basement are hardly the most desired demographic.

Second, ANW is an incredibly difficult show to get on. For those who haven't seen it (and if you haven't, what brought you to this blog?) ANW is an obstacle course show that has held auditions once a year for the past three years. Each year, the auditions have drawn hundreds of aspirants eager to take on the course. Of these wannabes, only a dozen or so have made it onto the show each year. So in terms of sheer numbers, getting on ANW is about as difficult as getting into Harvard.

Thirdly, the obstacles on ANW are ridiculously difficult. ANW really is just a competition to get to represent the Red, White, and Blue on Sasuke, the Japanese obstacle-course game show known in America as Ninja Warrior. The obstacles on ANW come from Sasuke, and they're so difficult that in the twenty-six seasons of Sasuke, only three guys out of a hundred contestants each season have ever completed all four stages of the course. Don't know what it says about the Japanese that they pride themselves on an obstacle course that, most of the time, nobody can even finish. But the point is that even if you get a shot to run the course on ANW, you have very little chance of surviving it.

Fourth, the guys who do make it from ANW onto Sasuke are impressive. Some are parkour pros, for whom jumping across balconies and clinging to underpasses are as easy as jumping jacks. Some are gymnasts, who've been training in about the perfect sport to transition to the Sasuke obstacles. And some are obsessives who have recreated the actual Sasuke obstacles to train in their backyards -- and yes, they're all over YouTube. And all of them appear to be at least ten years younger than my forty years and about 30-50 pounds lighter than my svelte 213.

So why am I doing this? I'm not entirely sure, and you probably don't care. Either you're a fan of the show, and don't need anyone to explain to you the desire to tackle the course, or you've never seen the show, in which case I doubt I could convince you that this is anything more than an over-the-hill ex-athlete tilting at windmills. But I'll probably get introspective at some point and offer some explanation. And in any event, no one's hear for my self-psychoanalysis.

The point of this blog is to record my training, over the next six months or so, to prepare for next year's auditions, whenever they might be. As I devise my training regimen and try to follow it, I'l share every step of it right here. I'll also share the links and books that I find to be of the most help in transforming myself into a world-class game-show contestant. And together we'll figure out just what it takes to reach the level of fitness to literally hang with the guys at Sasuke.

I've already spent a few weeks researching diet and training issues, and I expect to start my training Monday, July 10. That means I've got a lot to plan this weekend, which of course I'll also share. And along the way, hopefully you'll find something that you can use in your own workouts. And of course, you can comment on anything I post, and I look forward to benefitting from the wisdom of others.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to plough through a daunting Honey-Do list before I plot the first phase of my journey.