My parents were in town this week helping out with my daughter. It was a very welcome bit of help. On Saturday, my father and I decided to head up to the Wilson Aquatic Center here in DC to get some swimming in. Little did we know, however, that 1.5 inches of snow was enough to debilitate DC to the point of closing the pool early. Alas, we left dejected and w/o a workout. I’ll have to make up for it this week.
There was recently a study done showing the use of the Wii Balance Board for the purposes of rehabilitating stroke patients. Apparently, very expensive “force platforms” are usually used to detect foot position while a stroke victim is relearning how to stand, walk and run. The study looked at the use of the Wii Balance board instead. The researchers found that the Wii Balance Board was comparable to the much more expensive “force platforms” in their effectiveness.
While this news doesn’t effect triathlon users directly. Its good to see that there are some actual medical benefits to the Wii Fit idea. This gives even more credence to the idea that the Wii Fit Plus
for increasing your balance doesn’t just have anecdotal evidence to back it up. I plan to use Wii Fit Plus in my training to up my core strength, and improve both my balance and flexibility.
Related posts
- Wii Fit + Swimming
- Goals for the First Half of 2010
It’s near the new year, and that means one thing… New Years resolutions. We start the clock over, we make promises to do things and not do things for the new year. I get it. I think it is kind of dumb, but I get it.
I happen to be at the point where I need to get my body moving again in order to get my butt in shape for the upcoming year. I’m pretty worthless when it comes to training for the sake of training. Unless I have a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal (BHAG) I’ll end up not doing much of anything.
Luckily for me right now (and unluckily for me about 3 months back), I hurt myself before my first Triathlon, so i have a very basic goal. I want to finish a Sprint Triathlon in 2010. In fact, I can narrow this down a bit more. My Dad has invited myself and my brother to do a triathlon with him on his 60th birthday. So, specifically, I am going to race and complete the Average Joe Triathlon on June 26, 2010. This gives me approximately 5 months to get my body in shape to do this again, and more precisely, to survive the swim, which is not my strong suit.
What beyond that? Well, my early goal is going to be to finish an Olympic Triathlon by the end of the year, but at this point, there is enough other stuff going on that I’m going to put off officially setting that goal.
Look for a new post coming soon about how I’m actually going to achieve said goals.
A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in on the experience.
— Elbert Hubbard
Hey you…. it’s been awhile. Too long.
I missed you.
No seriously. I missed you.
I owe you an explanation. In fact, my last post kind of explains what happened. On November 16, I had a beautiful little girl, and she threw a big old baby sized wrench into my workout plans. For awhile, I was able to keep working out a bit, and then the holidays happened. As I eluded to in that post, I plan to get this started up again.
First a recap…
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Today was a day of new stuff for me. I have scheduled twice weekly strength workouts. I’ve mostly given up doing work at the gym in favor of at home stuff. The inner geek in me says that most of the workouts I do there, could easily be done with the Wii Fit. In fact, with the new version of Wii Fit Plus, you can set up routines, and have yourself a good set that you’ll do whenever you feel like it. For those wii fit people out there, this means that you can do a routine without having to click through all of the menus between every exercise, though you can’t really change on the way through. The good news? I was able to do a pretty substantial workout rather quickly (40 minutes). The bad news? I probably overdid it given how I felt later when I went swimming. I’m going to be fine tuning my routine, but at some point in the future, I will be sharing it. I did the Wii Fit in the morning, and then I went swimming at about 4pm. This felt good at first, and I even did 100m again w/o the pull buoy. However, I must say that my arms completely gave out at 500m. I think I overdid the wii fit, so it really didn’t matter that I made it to the pool since I wasn’t able to do anything at all.
If you’ve been following my twitter updates you’ll know by now that I had to drop out of the triathlon I planned to do this year. If you haven’t been following my twitter updates, I’m kinda of curious how you found me since that is pretty much my sole means of advertising for the blog. On the other hand, just go and follow me now. I always like followers.
As you may or may not have realized, I finally got an appointment with someone to look at my foot who also takes my insurance. He played the, “if I push here does it make you want to scream like a little girl” game for awhile, and found the exact spot that I’d been having problems with, though it was a stress fracture and decided to run an x-ray to make sure. X-ray turned out negative, but he stuck with his diagnosis and told me no running for 4-6 weeks. This ruled out my triathlon definitively. I could have gone up and competed in a couple of relays, but honestly, the few hundred dollars of savings in not paying for rental cars, hotels, etc sounded better to me at the time, so I called up my Dad and called it.
As you can guess, I was fairly sad about the whole ordeal. You don’t train for something for 4 months that consistently and not feel sad when you don’t get to show off what you were aiming for. It was going to be rough, but I was going to finish (through force of will alone if necessary). Oh well.
Right now the team is in down time for recovery from the triathlon I didn’t get to do. I’m taking it as a time to just relax a tad, let my foot heal up and actually let my body heal up because I got sick over the weekend. More on that in another post.
Back doing the one thing I can do, which is swim. I picked up my wetsuit today (even though I’m mostly resigned to the fact I won’t be able to run), and uses it during swim practice. Holy crap, I must say that I flew with the wetsuit on. They actually moved me up 2 lanes, and I was still running into people, which was a problem so new to me that I had no idea how to stop myself from doing it. I finally figured out that i could watch for the bubbles from his wake so that i could watch for overrunning him.
The good news was that I was able to keep up, for the most part. I can’t remember specificaly how many yards I did, but I think it was about 2000, which means this actually beats my last time out in ore yardage. My arms are screaming, and I know that my performance was enhanced by the wetsuit, but it still felt damn good. Not good enough to make up for losing my triathlon, but pretty good.
When I told my coach about the injury, he said, “swim, bike, then beer.”. These are words of wisdom my friends.
