I probably should have started blogging about this from day 1, but for the last three weeks I’ve been taking a boot camp in piedmont park. It’s a program run by “Operation Boot Camp“, and is an hour-long strenuous workout in the park. Admission to boot camp was my birthday gift from Katy and Ona – the real gift here wasn’t so much the cost of the camp, but Katy volunteering to be a single parent during night time for a month (I should also note that during this time, Ona switched to a “big girl bed”, which makes Katy even more of a champion super awesome partner).
Prior to starting camp, I always jokingly called it “fat camp”, and errr, yeah, that was wrong. There are about a dozen of us campers and I’m “sorta chubby, if viewed at the right angle” and am in the top tier of fatty and out-of-shape. Yikes.
I’ve updated my progress a little bit on facebook (at start, at least), so it’s probably easiest to start this post off by copying my updates from there…
Feb 6: Just got my intro email from fat camp. It starts on Monday. Yikes.
Feb 10: Update on fat camp: it’s hard. Really freakin’ hard. Day 1, I barfed. Yep, I’m the guy who barfed at boot camp in the park. Whoo! Day 2, no barfing, but plenty of pain. Lots and lots of running (which I loathe) and squats, lunges, push-ups, dips, etc, etc. Last night was better in the sense that it was more of what I was expecting (from it and myself), but 5 days a week of this is going to be brutal.
Now my facebook peeps got all hella cool and threw tons of encouragement my way, prompting this update:
Feb 10: thanks for all the encouragement with fat camp, peeps. finished day 4 an hour or so ago, and it’s gotten MUCH better. i actually *enjoyed* tonight’s workout. weird. it’s still hard as freakin’ hell, but there are less “maybe i’ll get lucky and fall over dead” moments.
And now, the tables started to turn. In a comment on that update, I said:
Feb 11: I guess I’m into it now… just got an email that it’s canceled due to snow and am sad. plenty i can do at the house to make up for it, though.
Then a week later…
Feb 19: Week 2 of boot camp is over, still really hard but I’m holding up better now. This coming Thursday is “bring friends” day – for every friend I bring my name is thrown in a hat and the name plucked out gets next month free. So, if you wanna have a great workout (Tichelaar, Troy – I’m looking at you) or hear me whine for another month, come on out.
Nobody did come out, though. Punks! (OK, in their defense, it was in the low 30’s that night, Josh was sick and it was his daughter’s birthday, and Matty had some physical ailments). Still, I was the only boot camper without friends there. Yay, loser!
So, OK, now here we are at the end of three weeks, and I’m totally loving fat camp. The workouts are still hard, but it does feel really rewarding. I am in so much better shape than I was before I started, and feel great. My energy level is through the roof (though, it’s made my body not want tons of sleep, and I love sleep, so that’s almost sad… if it wasn’t so awesome).
There are definitely still days that are brutal (actually, Thursday night, the “friends night” was probably my worst – I had really bad leg pains and it seemed my allergies went haywire so I was limping and unable to breathe… good times), but the feeling afterward is now always “hell yeah, that rocked”
As for future sustainability…. yesterday, Troy and I went and tried a Krav Maga class. And loved it. And signed up for a year. It’s a great workout, and you actually learn really great self defense techniques (it’s more “totally disable the attacker” than “look like a cool gynmast”, which I think is awesome).
Oh, and just to see what fat camp ends up doing, here are some metrics from day 1:
- Weight: 162.2 lbs
- 1 mile run: 9 minutes, 4 seconds
- Push-ups in a minute: 28
- Sit-ups in a minute: 24 (this seems sucky, my abs are weak)
- Dips in a minute: I barfed before doing any.
- *Body fat %: 37%
*We have a scale that measures this, but I don’t know the accuracy, I’d assume it’s something like +/- 7%, but I just pulled that out of thin air.
I’ll check back in after Thursday night’s workout where I will do the same exercises listed above