Images from my new favorite webcomic, toothpaste for dinner.  I know they have nothing to do with workouts, but laughing is good for the abs, so that’s my story about why they’re up today and I’m sticking to it.

So, just to recap, this was my planned workout schedule for the month of October:

Day 1, 3, 5: 20 minutes running intervals, full body strength session

Day 2, 4: 40 minutes Dance Dance Revolution, 15-20 yoga session

How did I do?  Actually, pretty well.  The first and third weeks, I actually did the workouts just as planned, which is pretty much a huge accomplishment for me.  The second and fourth weeks I ended up doing 4 day workout weeks (skipping the last interval day), and I skipped one yoga session last week because, frankly, I was having a bad day and was throwing a little temper tantrum in my head the entire time I was doing the DDR, so I did 3 extra songs to make up for the calories I’d burn doing yoga and called it a day.

Overall, it was a great month in workout-land.  Things calmed down to a moderate chaos from the frantic chaos which was September, so I wasn’t getting 5 hours of sleep to fuel my 2 hour workouts planned and then entertaining family and then melting into a puddle on the ground because I was so physically and mentally exhausted.  Most workouts I went into with a good attitude and left with a better one.  I rekindled my love for interval running, which is great – because I’m warmed up, cooled down, and had my hiney worked off in 30 minutes or less.  I got to play with a bunch more weight machines, which was good too.  Wrist curls, you look so innocent and easy, but you are teh devil!  Also, I got to up my DDR/yoga days to 2 again, which was <3.

There were some things I didn’t like though.  I missed my long runs and am actually kind of frightened I’ll have to work my way back up to 4 miles since the furthest I went last month was 2.7 miles (though considering it was in 30 minutes, with 7 minutes walking…I’m going to be soooo fast!  wheeee!!!).  Every day at the gym was HARD.  Sure, I had 2 easy days at home, but the gym sort of got a stigma as the killer workout that I sometimes dreaded.  I don’t want to be dreading the gym. I also skipped my 5th day twice, which tells me that maybe 3 days of balls-to-the-wall interval running was a little too much in one week.

Body-impact-wise (yes, I love dashes), it was bittersweet.  While I thought I might be making progress when I hit 165.0 in the middle of the month, it’s the lowest I’ve gotten and I’ve been bouncing around 165-169 since.  However, all is not lost.  I’m not even measuring myself and I can tell I’ve lost inches.  My stomach, the most problematic and tragic part of my body, is actually starting to cooperate.  On a good day, I can walk around in a sports bra and think “hey, not so bad”.  This bodes well for bikini wearing on the cruise, however, not for high school prom dress.  I think my shoulder muscles got bigger instead of smaller, so I did have to bite the bullet and get a new dress or 2 this weekend (more about that, I’m sure, this week).  I’m starting to get the “what the hell do you need to lose any more weight for” comments from the peanut gallery so I guess I’m not doing too badly.

Specific, but probably boring to everyone but me, progress I’d like to track:

Intervals – went from running 5.0 rest – 7.0-8.0 intervals for 20 mins to running 5.0 rest – 7.2 – 8.1 intervals for 23 minutes (got slightly faster, and added an extra interval – which sounds like no big deal but believe me, it is huge).

Pushups – back to pushups, and I don’t think I will ever stop doing these bad boys again.  I went from 3×20 being so hard I wanted to die to considering upping to 3×22 this week because I got through them ok last week.  Considering this summer I was rocking week 5 of the pushup challenge – this sucks!

Pullups/dips – went from 4×5 on setting 17 to 3×12 on setting 15/4×10 on 17 to 3×15 on 15 (the lower the setting the less assistance), I also did one pullup on setting 5.  My goal is by the end of the year to do one without help…

So what’s on tap for this month?  Stay tuned for the next post for details!