Reed Me : New Year's Resolutions

PFT 1: Me 0 (belated January 2009 Update)

reedme — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 05:17:22 GMT

My fitness duel with Steve is ongoing, but I’m saddened by my progress to date. Nonetheless, the January-ish test (actually done on 2/2/2009) of my progress has hardened my resolve. I did manage to drop ~15# in January, but since I’ve still got another ~50# to drop in order to hit my goal weight by the marathon in June. (Wow, that seems like a long way to go and not very much time...)

I just want to say one thing: the elliptical machine lies!! I thought I was making awesome six-mile progress (it probably helped my cardio some and saved further knee damage), but there’s no way that it compares at all with running on the street. Ouch. Have to start taking more Advil pre-workout and running on the street exclusively to keep abreast of my current, actual running progress.

We did agree along the way (I have email to prove it!) to increase the challenge by adding pushups to the duel using the abdominal crunch column in the Marine PFT matrix to compute points, same 120-second time limit. Also, our three-mile run time in June will be computed as 1/4 of our half-marathon time. *cringe*

My beloved, blushing bride of nearly 17 years witnessed my attempt at the PFT (and mocked me as I richly deserved). At least after this many years, I still have somebody to go to the gym with and hold my ankles as I struggle through the ab crunches, despite my sweatiness. (I love you, Samia!) Any discrepancies between my age 18 record below and what DODMERB may have on file can be attributed to my middle-aged dementia.

	Me (age 18)	December 2008	January 2009	January 2009 Point Total
BMI	22.59	34.21	31.87	Lower than Steve’s – I win!!!
Dead-hang Pull-ups	11	0 (fail)	2**	0
Abdominal Crunches in 120-seconds	75	50	57	57
Pushups in 120-seconds	62	27	36**	0
3-Mile Run	18:35	42:11	34:43**	0

** Almost, but still FAIL. *sigh*

Since we added an “event” to the challenge, and my performance is substandard compared with the Marine Corps PFT matrix in three out of four, I’ve got a whopping 57 of 400 possible points.

Doh!

Back to the gym... Will register for the marathon tomorrow to get the early entrance fee.

Live Mesh to the, uh, rescue?

reedme — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:50:38 GMT

One of my alleged New Year’s resolutions was to clean out the blogging back log. I have a bad habit of highlighting something on a web page, whacking the Live Toolbar button for “blog this” and letting my witty repartee rot in a folder somewhere in Documents. No more! I will have the “now habit” from henceforth… Mostly. It’s the end of January and I’m just now getting around to it.

Live Mesh is helping me by giving me a central place to keep everything, so I can blog whenever I’ve got a spare moment:

between meetings on the tablet (if my boss is reading this, I never do this during meetings – honest!)
lounging @ home watching some poor excuse for a TV show that the TiVo knew that I’d watch anyway (in all fairness I haven’t watched the show yet, but Kurtz was actually funny yesterday, so I linked it)
waiting for my teammates to rescue me after zombies had their way with my corpse in Left 4 Dead (my Xbox 360 game backlog is just as bad as blogging backlog, but I’m working on that, too!)
sitting in the garage on my motorcycle and wishing there was enough global warming to melt all this “unusual for the Pacific Northwest” snow and let me ride!

I really wish I’d meshed up my Windows Mobile phone two weeks ago… so that I wouldn’t’ve lost those notes and pictures when a keyboard malfunction (while entering the PIN) plus draconian security policy erased them all. Doh.

Live Mesh means that all my PCs have my blog post drafts from the past several years that never made it past The Censors™. Heh. Also, I can never claim to have lost a favorite link, either, now that they’re all meshed up.

Game on! Steve's going down...

reedme — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 08:17:32 GMT

My buddy, one of the Steves, has gotten nostalgic for his girlish figure of yore... for reasons inexplicable to me. Round is a shape, right? He's very much in shape now! Come to think of it, so am I. *sigh*

But, because he likes to lose at contests, he has challenged me to a fitness duel:

Seriously, I used to be in Shape. (bigfatbeep.blogspot.com)

All right, Walrus-boy. You're on. Heh.

One way or another, Steve's going down. He might lose weight in 2009, but I'll smoke him at the run and at the Marine Corps fitness test... and I can already touch my toes. Ongoing martial arts training gives me an edge. Hee-hee. Oh, wait a second... How far is half a marathon? Can't we race motorcycles or something?

I'll even up the ante: the man with the biggest reduction in BMI (without surgery) wins. As I calculate it now, mine's... No, really? 34.21? Almost Class 2 obesity. Doh. Round indeed.

FotR, I hate New Year's resolutions.