Maintenance Time

Not for the car, or house, but for myself...that's what I'm calling this phase from now till I start training for something again in February most likely, depending on what it is and when it is!! If I even train for something!! I am starting a new plan this week and am working on building excitement for it. This is a rebuild and weight loss phase that is going to take me through the end of the year. Every week I want to implement something new to contribute to my goals of 5-7 pounds of weight gone by new years and rebuild muscle that has been lost due to lack of strength training and rebuild running fun and endurance that has been lost a bit in the push to train and in running my last marathon. I need to find the fun again...

This weeks goal is to get back into Yoga which I haven’t done in so long. The main thing with this is to increase my flexibility and be able to keep injuries to a minimum. Not that I have really had any, but I want to get my IT band issue resolved once and for it, have it lengthened and strengthened and feeling good. I have two yoga DVDs and a couple of Pilates ones. One of the yoga DVDs has two 20 minutes sessions on it, I’m going to try to get up 20 minutes early 3 days this week and do yoga, two of the days the “strength” workout and one day the “flexibility” workout and on the weekend do the 1 hour yoga DVD that I have. I also want to try to get one day of doing my Pilates Core DVD and strengthen my long neglected abs and back. I’m also going to do shorter runs/cross training on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and incorporate 20-30 minutes of weight training into my workouts over lunch. The other days I’ll do runs and/or other cardio workouts, as I build miles back up into the 30-35 range for just maintenance over the winter. I’ve also been considering buying Advanced Marathoning as I know some people who had success with it. I have Daniels Running Formula, Competitive Runner’s Handbook, Nancy Clark's Sports Nutrition Hand Guide and ChiRunning that I have yet to read all of any of them…My goal before I buy the new one is to get finish at least ChiRunning and Daniels’, ChiRunning is a new way of running to prevent injury and Daniels’ just has a lot of stuff that is also covered in Advanced Marathoning and I think I might enjoy reading if I’d just get to it!! No more new books till I read some of the old. It might be time to organize my running stuff. I think I have enough books and magazines for them to have their own shelf…and I might need a larger book case!!

So far so good today. I managed to get up for the yoga, felt very tired from it, am definitely out of shape when it comes to that one. My flexibility is shot and my strength is lacking greatly. During lunch I ran a decent 3 miles on the treadmill and did 20 minutes of strength and am going to do ab work while I watch TV when I get home. Next week the focus is going to be nutrition!!