Miracles....

I bet you thought Insanity Punx blog was gone for good, huh? WELL SURPRISE! This shit is about to be unearthed. What better day for a resurrection then Halloween?

A little background: Kettner has completed the entire sixty day Insanity cycle twice and I (Lacy!) have completed it once. We both have fallen out of the groove of consistently joining our friend Shaun T. to get insane and so we decided to get back to basics and start the program over together, this time followed by the Insanity follow up program, Asylum. This means that we are committing to 90 days of prioritizing the set calendars, returning to shorter more basic month one workouts at first, the familiarity of MAX month next, and then a whole new journey with embarking on Asylum. We are collectively both stoked and scared, and ready for whatevs. Truth is, we both spend a lot of time wearing berets & striped shirts, getting sensitive, and feeling feelings in our respective MFA programs and we need a venue to jock out. Additionally, if Kettner starts to lose that ab definition our relationship might quickly crescendo and turn into a thing of the past. Incentive! (Just kidding, just kidding!)

I want to talk a little about my experience going through Insanity the first time through. I come from a background of fairly excessive and compulsive cardiovascular exercise and have had a pretty long journey of trying to figure out what an appropriate and nourishing amount of exercise might look like and how I can implement that into my life. I had ellipticized, spin cycled, and ran myself to death and the result was a thin, weak, and completely non muscular body. I had tons of cardiovascular strength, was excellent at recovering quickly from intense sprints, but couldn’t do a push up to save my life. I was totally depleted from all the cardio and really wanted to work strength building into my fitness priority list more and calorie burning into it less. Fact of the matter is, I needed to fundamentally change my attitude toward exercise and seeing my friends get both ripped and stoked via Insanity inspired me to do the same.

It took huge leaps of faith for me to accept the first months shorter stints of exercise as being adequate. I had become so used to exercising hard for one hour every day, without ever doing any more or any less, and when I saw that month one’s work outs were closer to thirty or forty minutes a part of my brain quickly put them into the “not enough” category. Each morning as I finished my routine I had to talk myself out of that malarkey and just put trust in Shaun T.’s modes of operation. Look at Tania’s ripped bod! You think she got those crazy quads from a “not enough” exercise program? I think not.

After careful and calculated brain recalibration I engaged with Insanity with tenacity. Like I said, when I started I couldn’t do one single push up. When I first power jumped I thought I had been sprung straight into the realms of hell. Switch kicks were a slow and gentle back and forth rocking that were accompanied by deep groans of pain that may as well have come from the geriatric. For all my exercising, I was decidedly unstrong. I found myself getting extremely frustrated, simply because I wasn't even strong enough to do half the moves in Insanity. The already-shorter-than-my-usual month one Insanity work outs were tough for me mostly because I couldn't even DO most of them. The only Insanity work out I really liked was the cardio circuit, and that's because I was used to such workouts. I felt like a champ for that one, but a complete wiener on all the others.

Despite my deep annoyance I persisted, and I got stronger. When push ups started to become easier my mind was fucking blown. My legs have always been pretty ripped due to some good genes and being a bike commuter but when my baby arms started to look a little less baby like and a tiny shadow of an abdominal muscle appeared I nearly wept with glee. Watching myself become strong was weird as hell, especially when I was used to exercise needlessly wrecking me without results aside from maintaining a number on a scale.

I made some mistakes my first time around with Insanity. I never ever took days off (as the calendar suggests doing each Sunday) and I didn't take the recovery week between month one and month two. Bad form! MAX month made my body stronger then its ever been in my entire life but this time around I'm going to do it the straight up Shaun T. way (breaks and all) and trust that my body can get even more buff with the help of giving my muscles a chance to take a weekly breather. My ultimate goal is to be able to bench press Kettner while casually doing leg lifts and eating a sandwich. We'll see what we can do.

Today's fit test results:

Switch kicks: 89
Power jacks: 49
Power knees: 90
Power jumps: 32
Globe jumps: 8 (although I am not gonna lie, my form got a little sloppy on these)
Suicide jumps: 20
Push up Jacks: 23 (A true fucking feat! The first time I tried this I did eleven)
Low plank obliques: 59

Ok guys, I guess we're back to basics,

I've gone through the 60 days a couple of times and when I first got to San Francisco, Lacy was JUST starting month 2, after a summer which was very active (though not quite on the insanity calendar) I jumped into max month with her, and pushed through september, It was really fun, however, by the time October rolled around , grad school was getting REAL ( like F'real f'real ) and I was making time for Shaun T less and less. Well this past saturday Lacy and I endeavored to do the MAX interval circuit, and while she powered through, I had to sit out a whole set in the 3rd interval, it was pretty humbling after having done these work outs so much. I hadn't worked out at all in 16 days, and the intense laptop marathon seshes of grad school had robbed me of strength and flexibility.

We HAD been really stoked when we downloaded the ASYLUM workouts, but I now realized there was no way in hell I could jump into that. So, we are back to square one, back to the calendar, INCLUDING fit tests. We recorded our numbers yesterday,and ...woah. So crazy to do a fit test after so long. I don't think my numbers were so bad (not near my all time highs, but decent) the effect of pushing hard through the whole workout though, woof! I was a puddle on the floor.

but here's the numbers

Switch Kicks: 120

Power Jacks: 46

Power Knees: 85

Power Jumps: 54

Globe Jumps: 9

Suicide Jumps: 20

Push Up Jacks: 36

Low Plank Obliques: 61

So after so long apart, Lacy and Me are back with Shaun T ....it's like some kind of

INSANE MIRACLE