Growing Pains: New Beginnings

It’s been a while since I wrote a new article. I know that, much like in academia, in a social media driven world it’s publish or die.

Sometimes you just don’t have the time to…

  • Run your ever growing business (I can’t say thank you enough, by the way!!!)
  • Run your training groups
  • Meet with people to extend your network so as to offer greater service to your clientele (Those things that will set you apart from every other “gym”)
  • Study for new certifications (Did I mention that I just started the Precision Nutrition Level 1 program?)
  • Make a new Youtube video of yourself or somebody else doing a front squat (you know, to add to the other 700,000 front squat videos on Youtube)
  • Get your own training in
  • Develop your website
  • Streamline your business
  • Work on your advertising plan (What the heck is that!?)
  • Order new equipment and maintain current equipment
  • Eat
  • Sleep
  • Do laundry
  • Make sure you answer that email you meant to respond to yesterday (10 days ago, sorry Haley! 🙁 )
  • Oh yeah, and make sure all your I’s are crossed and your T’s are dotted when moving into a larger more awesome facility (Yeah!!!! That is happening!)

CA_close

So writing a new blog fell off the back of the metaphorical truck. Chalk it up to growing pains though. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s a struggle, sometimes you just want to bang your head against the wall, but sometimes (ok, all the time) you want to high five the random person walking into Starbucks just because, well, it’s awesome out there.

That’s where tenacity comes in. If it were easy everybody would do it, right? Actually though, if it were EASY, nobody would be afraid to do it. This is true for training, for racing, and for losing weight.

Just remember that the simple things that are your habits will carry you through. Lift heavy, push your boundaries, run till your lungs hurt. It’s bumpy, and the hills are long, and the water is cold, and the weights like to stay on the ground, and the paperwork is endless. Encourage others to do the same, treasure the view, revel in the silence that creeps into your ears as uncomfortable exertion drowns out the noise, and just enjoy the ride you’re on.

Enjoy the growing pains, because if they are ever gone, then you are either dead or complacent, and that’s just boring.

Emily: Into the Mudder…

A brief preface:

I love a project and fortunately athletes love to bring me slightly unreal timelines for their impending greatness. Let me start by saying I too suck at time management. It is generally because I think I can do way more than I physically or mentally can do in a reasonable amount of time. Training goals can also operate like this. When emily came to me with her Tough Mudder goals, and timeline, I knew the happy go lucky conversation was going to shift drastically to something that sounds a bit like this.

“Well, I think what you have are great goals. Here is what it is going to take to get there and just so you know I am more than commited to helping you; but this is going to suck. A lot. I mean a whole lot. I want you to go home and really think about this because the next conversation we have might be a bit overwhelming.”

With that being said Emily came back a week later and we went to work. Sometimes we all just need to let it settle in that there is no quick fix, and that getting from point A to point B is gonna take serious mental fortitude (In Mudder language, that’s called Grit) – Bender

Mudd? No Big Deal. Electrocution… uh, can I skip that part?

Monday morning. Do I want to get out of bed? No. Do I want to get out of bed and go work out? Definitely not. Do I suck it up and realize that champions are not made by sleeping in? yes!
Over the course of 5 months I’ve become what some might call a “gym rat” I love the gym and if I’m not there I legitimately miss it. My teammates became my family. My trainer became my friend. My favorite place is Contemporary Athlete. But lets be clear, sometimes you just don’t want to get out of bed…let me rewind for a moment.

2014-01-08 16.07.48

My name is Emily, and I’m a Ninja. I started coming to Contemporary Athlete because I was sick of hiding my bad decisions in layers of sweatshirts. I wanted more. I wanted to have muscle definition without flexing. I wanted to eliminate the muffin top, but seriously who am I kidding – I was smuggling more than adorable muffins. From bad break ups to a serious car accident, I had stopped any physical activity and began to wallow in self pity and depression. Eating tasted good and its not like I was ever going to be skinny, it just wasn’t my “body type”. So when my friends decided that running a Tough Mudder race was a good idea, I surely didn’t want to be left out. It can’t be THAT hard, and there’s no time limit. I could do that. And then it hit me. “I can’t walk up a flight of stairs without getting winded” “I can’t lift more than 10 lbs” and “was college the last time I worked out?”
The competitor in me flared up and I started talking to Dave Bender about a SERIOUS plan to get in shape. I had barely 5 months to go from eating a box of doughnuts on the couch to running an 11 mile course full of obstacles and not die.

2014-04-09 22.39.52

(Scale is the same but the body is not…)

The first few weeks were brutal. I am not kidding. There was swearing. There was crying. There was whining and there were incredulous looks shot at Dave regarding what he thought I could accomplish. Initially I lost weight. 11 lbs by week 3 and 18 pounds by week 6. No one was really noticing, but I found I didn’t need them too. My pants would not stay up. My endurance slowly but surely improved and my favorite part was that I was getting stronger. Things I thought I could never do were starting to happen but OH MY GOD was it slow. My patience is heinous and I’ll be the first to admit I’m quick to quit if I don’t get immediate satisfaction. I began to do 2-a-days training, starting at 7am and then coming back at 5:30pm. People called me crazy. I loved it. I felt good. I felt like I could do anything. I would push through the exhaustion and I found this beautiful potential to go further than where I previously felt like I had to end. My mind had flipped from doing the least amount possible into how much can I do? The possibilities seemed endless.
Then the weights got heavier. the workouts got harder and there were days when I would get so frustrated not understanding how I could still be so out of shape when it had been 3 months of training. I wasn’t losing weight and that felt like such a failure. Those days Dave was able to quietly remind me of where I had started. I got lost in the desire for what I thought perfection was, and how far from an airbrushed model I was, it would pile up and it all started to get me down. I can’t even begin to count the amount of times I would try to articulate my poorly thought out and for all the wrong reasons desires to be skinny. I’m a firm believer that no matter how great the plan, you will always have bad days. I had plenty of them and I still do, but I get through them with the help that Contemporary Athlete provides. What I found to be the most important factor in my training was that I was never alone. Dave is the best trainer I’ve ever worked with and while he instructs and inspires, there is something more magical happening at Contemporary Athlete. Something I had never experienced before.

2014-04-04 08.04.46(Sometimes outside the box, sometimes on it, but always improving)

The Team:

Everyone and I mean EVERYONE is pulling for you. There has never been a group of more supportive, sincerely caring, and downright helpful people ever. Every single one of us had to start somewhere. Some have been athletes since pee wee soccer, and others might have stumbled into an athletic hobby, but I kid you not we were all beginners. I know, I know, you watch Jim do pull ups, and Ryan do push ups, and Lindsey do planks, and Leigh Ann do suicide drills and its easy to think Ok they are freakishly good at those things, but the way they got there is by doing them, over and over and over again. Next time you end up whimpering next to one of them, ask them how they do it. I did. I was floored at the fact that they HELPED. They shared tips and tricks to make the most effective work possible and what not to do to avoid injury. These people are NICE. The bonds get stronger, and the knowing laughs during things like turkish get ups, are what will keep you going. It’s what got me through 5 solid months of training. Team CA runs deep.

2014-06-05 12.55.02

(sometimes you just have to start somewhere)

This is not by any stretch of the term “easy”. But it was easy for me to understand that if I didn’t change anything about the way I was living, my life would not change. Food is no longer comfort. Food is fuel which your body needs to go beast mode the next day. I found that no matter how much I trained, if my eating reflected a scene from Animal House….my progress suffered. That being said, I quickly realized how awful I felt if I ate anything close to junk food and not because of disappointment in falling off my path, but because junk is junk. If I ate garbage I felt like garbage and it made training SO much harder when I didn’t have the proper fuel.

2013-12-12 20.16.04

(6 months of work, but these pull-ups happened)

There is a champion inside each of us ready to emerge victorious over a slothy lifestyle. So when I started, did I want to get out of bed and jump on the ski erg? no. no I did not. But I did it and you can too! I finished the Tough Mudder in the Poconos, got through every obstacle, and not only did I not die, I was back at CA training in less than 48 hours. Day by day its one more workout down, one more goal accomplished and its beyond amazing to look back on the progress you can make. The only thing standing between you and your health is your mind. So start now. Make the decision to be better, run faster, jump higher, and tackle life with the remarkable ability to keep going. It just comes down to that very first step. At Contemporary Athlete, we take that step together, and we go a lot further.

2014-04-19 15.03.46

(Running Tough Mudder in the Poconos)

More Info about Tough Mudder here:

https://toughmudder.com/

Endurance Athletes: is Metabolic Conditioning for ME?

In the health and fitness world, metabolic conditioning is a term used loosely and frequently. It is generally associated with Cross-Fit; intense workouts, derived from lifting heavy weights in great succession, racing against the clock, or against other athletes. Now in some cases this is true. I have also heard it used to describe a workout consisting of a series of time based work dictated by minimal rest. Another word I hear a lot is “Tabata.” Tabata consists of very quick bursts of work followed by very short amounts of rest, done cyclically, until exhaustion. Then, given a longer rest period to recover before beginning the next cycle. These are two very different workout styles, amongst many, within the metabolic conditioning realm. The truth is this current hip thing is really an old concept that has finally trickled down to the general public.

High intensity interval training, also known as (HIIT) is all the rage, but it is something all athletes have done, and probably done a lot of. It is generally best to balance the rush with the gush, and leave a little room to siphon off some of the workout steam generated -which is where athletes can really gather speed when not working on their aerobic capacity.

I would like to try to decipher this. A metabolic conditioning workout should be based on a desired outcome dictated by the level of fitness and ability of the individual doing such a workout this has been researched in depth by The Journal of Strength and Conditioning. The human body has several different methods of getting energy. In order to tap into those different energy systems, different ratios of work to rest must be implemented in order to cause adaptations in the body for a desired performance goal.

A desired goal to maximize efficiency of a particular energy system is usually the response one is looking for from the body; so the way the patterning of work and rest are structured makes that exercise “circuit” metabolic conditioning. For example, a person looking to “bulk up” should have a different amount of rest in relationship to work, than a person looking to become leaner or run farther. Structuring a workout where timing is disregarded and getting through it as quickly as possible is not nearly as effective for performance goals as a planned attack, with regimented work to rest ratios.

0410_12943

Here are the basics of Exercise Metabolism:

Everything we eat must be broken down into smaller things in order for the body to use them. This means of creating energy is known as metabolizing, and in layman’s terms is known as the metabolic system. There are three pathways that are primary to making this happen and each has their own place and purpose. By tapping into them correctly for performance or physical goals should be the idea behind writing the training circuit.

The Immediate System: (ATP-CP)

Think of this as explosive energy your Olympic lifting, sprinting, and jumping. Any exercise that takes less than 10 seconds to accomplish is utilizing this system. What is important is how long the work to rest ratio is. The exercise is so physically taxing that it can take roughly three to five minutes to fully recover.

The Intermediate System: (Anaerobic system)

It is used for shorter duration high intensity work such as your middle distance running (400-800 m) or swimming (100-200m) and your middle range weight lifting. This could be any exercise that takes anywhere from one to four minutes to complete. Depending on the ability of the athlete recovery time can take anywhere from one to three minutes.

The Long-Duration System: (Aerobic system)

This is your marathon running or century bike riding or 1500m swimmers or triathletes. The work is low to moderate in intensity and can go on forever as long as the athlete does not run out of energy (fat). The recovery for this kind of work is a mere seconds.

Now with those hard guidelines for energy usage detailed in the human body there is always crossover and interplay. No one energy system operates all by itself within exercise. The ratios at which they are called upon generally work in one primary system or another.

saratoga meet

Developing the appropriate Met-Con Circuit:

The idea is to create efficiency for a specific energy system, one that will allow performance enhancement or physique. Also thanks to great amounts of research done by the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, this system creates increased EPOC. So the metabolism runs higher after a Met-Con session for a few hours.

Now once you figure out what it is that you are training for then you can really tailor your training program. The key factor for making this all work is your rest periods. Not enough rest you risk taking your anaerobic training session and turning it into an aerobic one. Too much rest and you leave your ATP-AC phase and create an anaerobic or even an aerobic workout. In order to make this really effective use large non-isolated actions. Start with bodyweight activity and remember when lifting weights to use proper form at all times and self regulate. If it doesn’t seem safe don’t do it, or find a facility or trainer that can help you learn those actions correctly and safely. Getting hurt training will not only ruin race day, it will put a huge chink in the armor of invincibility you once had.  To remain competitive, it’s usually best to stay out of the ranks of the walking wounded. After all, health trumps strength any day! So stay healthy, and stay strong, with smart workouts!

Spartan?

Part I:

“Over time, grit is what separates fruitful lives from aimlessness.” – John Ortberg

Intense

In life there comes a point when you just want to know. Or maybe I just want to know. Am I to old? Broken? Battered? Strong enough? Fast enough? Courageous enough? Crazy enough? Or is the ultimate glory of the challenge enough?

So, here is the story. I decided I wanted to do something great: to create a community where exceptional is the standard and not because of the resumes or backgrounds of the people within it, but because of the goals and desires of those people. These are the lions amongst lions. These people separate themselves from the everyday prey. They are the hunters of greatness and, for any number of reasons, they found themselves in the CA. I proudly call them friends, and this is why I do this.

Run the Ridge
Run the Ridge, Team CA

The hunt for greatness lies within all of us. Mine has been clawing out of me for a long time. I just didn’t know how or when it would happen. I started to consider this adventure I call the “Ultra” back in May of this year. I put together my training plan after a winter of getting the gym going, and got to work. I didn’t know if I would get the opportunity to race but figured I damn well be on the pointy end of the spear if the opportunity presented itself.

The “Spartan Ultra Beast” (which is a ridiculously cheesy name, but I’m just a participant), it is a race of unlisted distance somewhere over a marathon, which includes obstacles and happens on a mountain, in this case at Killington Ski Resort. If you have ever been to Killington to ski, you know it is no joke, and running anything past 26 miles is well…intense. So, throw in some obstacles and: well now, apparently we have a challenge. Getting acceptance into the “Ultra” took a full athletic resume and a follow up survey. So either they are limiting their pool of athletes, or they are worried about the pool of athletes surviving to tell the tale.

Tough Mudder BW Start
My brother and me before running the Mt Snow Tough Mudder

(I think there is a moment in every persons life when you just kind of go, hmmm this is a bad idea… I’m in!)

From the Ultra, Application site:

For 2013, we will have two new rules:

1. Each racer may only compete in the Beast, or the Ultra Beast, but not both. It will not be possible to win both events in 2013. You must choose: Beast or Ultra Beast.

2. If you cannot complete all 26+ miles, you will be considered a DNF. You will NOT be considered a Beast Finisher if you’re only able to complete 13+ miles. It’s all or nothing.

If you’re not sure if you’re ready, or you spend more than one hour per year at Bed, Bath and Beyond, please only register for the Beast. The Ultra Beast will be too much for you.

Every Spartan Race is a baptism.
The Ultra Beast is considered an exorcism.

So let’s fast forward a bit. I got accepted to the race via email. Which in my head I went, “HOLY {explicative, explicative, explicative,} I GOT IN!!!!”  Then I went…“HOLY {explicative, explicative, explicative,} I GOT INTO WHAT?!!” I got accepted to run with the “Elites” which either means I am above the average applicant they accept or they were trying to bait an old man who still thinks he’s young to die on the side of a very steep mountain. Either way, I said what all crazy people say… “I’m in!” then smiled, took a deep breath and doubled all of my previously planned mileage I was supposed to do in training for this race.

529189_371398452977139_640541006_n
Setting a new 1RM PR in 2012. I have since tagged on 150lbs more)

(Excerpt from my acceptance email)

Hi David,

Congratulations! You are among the fifth group of approved racers selected to race the 2013 Spartan Ultra Beast! Based on your recent responses to our Ultra Beast Application process, you have been approved and are eligible for an Open Wave Registration or an Elite Ultra Beast registration. If you think that you’re competitive enough to run with the Elites, this is your chance to prove it.

Apparently, on September 22nd of this year, I will get to stand at the base of a mountain with a group of elites athletes and find out if I really am all that I try to instill in the amazing people I work for.

Post 13.1 Timetrial
Post 13.1 training day time trial. 7:05’s on repeat. Cue the Darth Vader music in my head

Even as I sit here and write this, September is closing in quickly. My fear is turning to fire, and my anticipation is sometimes overwhelming. I care how I do and I am not “just there to finish”, because honestly, sometimes when I hear people say that, it makes my soul throw up a little. You can either do just enough to finish or you can go on the attack.

I choose to attack. If you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, then teach that dog to do those old tricks better. I find myself frequently running with less in my head: empty in thought, just breathing. I’m listening to my steps, counting them, looking deeply into the trails, and looking for the clearest path to fast. Lungs burning, throat on fire. Smiling widely, on the hunt.

Tough Mudder Finish BW
Kid bro and I post running Mudder. Honestly, all I wanted was Gatorade. Not beer.

My training partners are sometimes young and invincible, sometimes they are family, sometimes future Olympians. All of them, though are awesome and just crazy enough to join me even just for a snippet of this quest. It keeps me hungry and leaves me with clear vision. There is never enough to say about great training partners.

You feed their desires and support them and in return you get their support. You only need to ask once and they are in. It is an unspoken agreement that can and will take you further than either party ever thought possible. If they truly have your back they will grind you into dust when you need it, and when necessary, they will pick you up too.

2013-04-21 15.56.30
The crew that decided to run up Buck Mountain with me in May. All smiles too.

Live loud, smile often, cry frequently, and occasionally do something great. I’m working on the great part. Say a few quiet words for me that I don’t die on the side of a mountain, and I can write the part two of this.

Commitment