Hello!

Hi.  This blog is the continuation of the blog I started to document my journey through the Insanity workout.  That can be found here.

I guess I'll start out with a little background.  All through junior high and high school I was a member of our cross country team so I ran quite a bit.  I never was very good at it but it did keep me in decent shape.  Once I got to college I could not find time to keep running regularly because of all the time I spent studying and partying.  Eventually the large amounts of food and alcohol and a sedentary lifestyle caused me to start packing on the pounds.  This trend continued after college when I started a career that required me to work the swing shift and spend much of it sitting on my butt.  In 2010 I was required to do a biometric screen for my health insurance and was pretty shocked when I found out that I had broke the 200 pound mark.  Weighing in at 210 and having a very high blood pressure and cholesterol for someone in their 20s was a real wake up call and I decided to be responsible and try to get healthy again.  I started out by using a rowing machine every day after work which I eventually replaced with a stationary bike.  As I started getting in better shape the exercise equipment wasn't really cutting it anymore so I decided to take up running again.  That wasn't fun, as anybody who has ever started running can remember but I was determined and a little stubborn.  My running kept improving and my diet got healthier resulting in me losing most of the weight I needed to.

Having reached my weight loss goal, I needed something else to keep me motivated.  My ability to run further and further made the choice to try to run a half marathon pretty obvious.  I ran my first one in Seattle in November of 2012 and it was a great experience.  Now I want more so I have my eyes set on running a full one this summer.

The first part of my marathon training started a week after I finished the half marathon.  I needed a break from running but not working out.  I did a lot of searching and settled on doing the Insanity workout program whose infomercials you see when you wake up at 3 am on the couch.  I figured it would be great to help me with my goals because it has a huge cardio focus and I figured it could help me lose the last of the fat I've been struggling to lose.

Insanity was great.  It helped me get in the best shape of my life and now that I'm done with the program, it is time for me to ease back into running.  I would hate to lose the results that I worked so hard to achieve with Insanity, so I am attempting to do create a training program that works in Insanity workouts and running.  I have the program on paper up until my next half marathon in April of 2013.  It might be too intense but it is a work in progress.  You'll just have to follow my updates to find out!