travis’s brain dump

So,  I guess I succesfully went a whole month without a single post. That NEVER happens. (lol)

Not a whole lot to report. Sure I’ve had my ideas of rants, but not time to put them down. They finally assigned some help to me at work so hopefully I’ll see some of the workload balancing out sometime in the near future. I certainly hope so as much more of this and I’m liable to lose my mind and “off myself” as James so delicately puts it when describing his bad days, lol. At least I have 4 more days off work to look forward to. Maybe I can find something constructive to do other than sit around playing video games the whole time.

On that note, working out has been going well. Amanda and I just started actually doing some really good recording at the beginning of August and I’m actually seeing much better results in both of us. It renews the goals and keeps us focused. When we started recording at the beginning of August I was at about 25% bodyfat. EEEK! However, within a matter of a few weeks I’m already down to 22% and steadily dropping. If the trend keeps up I should be somewhere closer to 20% this weekend when we take our measurments. We’re still keeping up with the P90X routine with some other stuff tossed in along with it. I took up running again, except this time I got a bit more serious with it. My long runs are about 3.5 miles and my short runs are 1.8 miles. I typically put in a long run Mon-Wed-Friday and short ones on Tues-Thurs-Sat. Typically Saturdays over the summer were skipped due to push mowing a 1/3 acre slot of grass but with winter approaching I’ll probably start throwing that in as well. All in all it feels really good to run, the only thing keeping me from increasing the distance on my long runs is really time. 40 minutes is about all I want to take out of my day in the evenings for “working out” due to my daily schedule. Up at 430, workout til 530, shower, head to park and ride at 6, work by 645, home at 5, run til 6, dinner, shower, hour to relax/read/whatever, then sleep… rinse repeat. LOL

All in all I can’t complain. Despite being extremely busy this last month has been a pretty decent one. At the beginning of August we piled into the Highlander and headed up to Bear Lake in Utah for a famliy reunion on my mother-in-law’s side. It was definitely a trip with it’s ups and downs, lol. It was however, good to see Amanda’s family and participate in some activities out there like seeing the Minnetonka Caves. Arwen had a blast of course playing with all her bazillion cousins and being spoiled by Amanda’s parents. We also had the chance to go to Chase’s wedding in Logan, Utah. Talk about timing, the guy got married the day after we arrived and only 30 minutes away. Chase of course jokes that he planned it that way… crazy guy. It was definitely good to see him again and meet his new wife, Shelly. Congrats again to you both!  

Arwen is just growing in leaps and bounds. She lost her first tooth (pictures will be uploaded after this post) a couple of weeks ago and she started first grade just a couple days later. It amazes me to actually think about it since it seems like just yesterday she was born. Travis Jr, is growing like crazy too. The lil guy has officially figured out that ‘ ma ma ‘ gets his mother’s attention and has proceeded to use it whenever he wants her. It’s cute and annoying at the same time. Despite the fact he’s been saying ‘ da da ‘ for a couple months this is the first sign of him actually “using a word” so the win goes to Amanda for him saying “mama” first. The lil guy is also crawling around now… not proficiently but none the less he is mobile and dangerous. I also suspect it won’t be long (few months) before he’s trying to take his first steps as he is able to hold pretty steady on those legs. Considering how quickly he went from sitting assisted to sitting up on his own, I think we’re in for it for sure.

Ok, well if I’m going to upload some photos before going for a run, I’d better end here. Perhaps September will hold more time for me to get back to blogging.

Having a baby. Dead serious. If you ever need time to fly by and lose track of the days that have past, having a newborn in the house will do it. I seriously can’t believe my son will be 3 weeks old tomorrow. It feels like yesterday. It’s probably due to the lack of good sleep and the holes in the memory that causes but wow.

I’m starting to have flashbacks of when my daughter was first born. I can honestly say I can’t account for the first 6 months of her life. I remember next to nothing about anything from that period of time. Pretty scary.

Anyway, having the new kiddo around is kinda fun. I feel sorry for poor Amanda though who has the worst sleeping schedule out of all of us. She’s been doing really good with though, I’m really impressed.

On another note. Started the second round of P90X this morning. This should be interesting since I’m switching up the workout times to early morning instead of after work. It’s just easier on my schedule and my body. When I get home in the evening, the last thing I want to do is work out after a day of dealing with my usual day of tasks and being gone from home for almost 12 hours. Early morning though seems to be the trick. I’ve got a friend of mine, Adam, who is joining in. I think he was successfully destroyed this morning, lol. Still, 4:30 am wakeups… *shudder*.

We’ll see how this goes.

Well that’s it in a nutshell.

Ok, so I forget what week I’m actually on. I think this technically qualifies as week 9 or 10… I’ll keep the count right from here out (since it’s important). So far most of the changes are remaining visual which is kind of interesting. Muscle definition improvement, endurance improvement, flexibility, etc… It’s just funny watching the scale dip 5 lbs then come right back up but still have your clothes fit loose, exception my shirts… the more it gets loose in the belly, the tighter it gets on my shoulders.

So here I am. The home stretch of this workout plan as it looks on paper. It’s nothing but toss up after toss up here keeping my body all confused and unable to plateau out. To add to the mix and confuse myself even more I’ve adopted a military style early morning pt routine to really get things moving. Nothing like waking up at 5am to blast yourself with everything from jumping jacks to pushups then head out for that 2 mile run.

It’s nice though, it actually seems to help me have more energy during the day altho I feel like I could eat an entire cow all day long. We should see how well this works out in a few weeks. I should be coming to the close of this last phase in the next 4-5 weeks upon which I will rest for a week and probably start this routine all over again. (what… i like it ok? )

So, i’m hoping by the end of this I’ll have at least hit my goals of 3″+ off the waist and 20 lbs stable. Honestly, if I stopped building so much muscle up from this blasted thing I’d probably have hit my weight goal easily by now, lol. 3″+ is still the solid goal for waist line though and it doesn’t appear I will have to worry too much about that… I may actually end up exceeding it if this toss up in the final 5 weeks does what I think it will.

We shall see.

So I got lazy on posting last week and didn’t get a report up – at least I wasn’t lazy on the workout plan though. Everything has been going pretty smoothly. I’ve really been enjoying this second phase with the exception of the Yoga… That too however I believe is starting to grow on me. I might actually make it through the entire 1 1/2 hours eventually. LOL

I’m scheduled for another cool-down week after this week which actually saddens me. I’ve really been enjoying this phase. It’s been nice to see much of the fat being changed over to muscle. Weight hasn’t really been a dropping factor but body fat percentages, appearance and waist size is definitely changing so it’s nice to still see some results in some form or fashion. I assumed most of the weight drop would occur once I get more towards the end of it and I’ve balanced out the muscle gain from restoration of lost muscle mass.

So far so good though. I just need to make sure this time around when faced with a cool-down week I don’t completely blow it like I did last time. I definitely don’t want to suffer like that again.