C25K / P90 - two programs at the SAME TIME (151.8)

Now there's a good lot of acronyms, eh?

Let's start with the C25K. I did week 3 day 1 yesterday at mid-day in full sun and blistering heat. Week three consists of five minute warm-up walk, then two intervals of 90 second run / 90s walk / 3 minute run / 3m walk, then another five minute cool-down walk. There's only nine total minutes of running, which is exactly the same as last week, which had six intervals of 90 second runs / 90 second walks. The only difference is that the break goes away between a couple of the intervals, and alas, that's a hell of a difference. I'm not sure if it was the heat or what, but I had a hard time with both of the long (hah, three minutes = long) runs. I finished the whole thing without stopping at all, but I was dragging pretty good by the end of the last run. Hopefully I get more used to it by the end of the week - otherwise I might repeat week three instead of moving on to week four next week.

Beginning P90 review:

P90 is set of workout DVDs put out by the same people who do the more popular (and much more difficult) P90x. I decided I wanted something that I could do at home while Noah's at work, so I obtained this program and a set of weights and started it on Monday. My plan is to do the weights portion on the days that I do C25K and the cardio/abs portion in between, with Sunday as a rest day from both. So far, it's hard but doable. I was pretty pleased with myself for managing to do everything in the weights portion yesterday. Okay, I only used 5lb weights, but I need to take it slow, right? Right. The last circuit was kind of a challenge because Jim decided his nap was over, so I wound up rocking his bouncy chair with one foot while doing tricep kickbacks with my arms and balancing on the other foot. I'm WAY more coordinated than I thought I was.

I am definitely sore today, but I still went ahead and did the cardio/abs bit. The cardio...eh. The power yoga bit was really hard, and it was made significantly harder by Bruce the Cat deciding that planks were made for walking under me and rubbing cat hair all over my sweaty bits. In any case, I followed along as best I could but couldn't do everything right, which was frustrating. The stepping and kicking bits were doable but hard, and the punching bit was actually kind of fun. The ab part was alright - I much prefer this approach of ten reps each of ten exercises to the normal approach of six million crunches, but it was still abs (by which I mean "It sucked."). Tony Horton, the instructor dude, was embarrassingly cheesy, but I found his lines mostly amusing. I'm sure they'll get old in a week, though, and I'll probably want to murder him in 90 days, but I suppose that's the down side of any recorded program that you do repeatedly. Anyway, I like it so far and I think I should have decent results.