Switch it Out

Two things crossed my path this week, both promoting the ever-increasing acknowledgement that Different is More: one was an article in the July 2007 issue of Harper's Bazaar about a one-month makeover; the other was a post to a blog my friend Stacie sent me about fat marathoners (see top left of this blogsite for the reason we started Ti90).

The article was by a writer who had taken an assignment from HB to do a month of training with one of Madonna's trainers, using an idea that's familiar to anyone bouncing around in the P90X world: be consistent, but switch it out. The writer's training called for a new routine every 10 sessions. By the end of the month she'd dropped four dress sizes and 10 lbs. (I'd like to hear about her in six months to see if she maintained.)

The blog post is by a fabulous fitness fanatic girl geek who calls herself Skwigg. She analyzes the paradox of running distances and gaining weight. She describes some of the theories that abound on the subject, but concludes with the one that got me here in the first place: muscles have memory; train them using only one method and they will plateau. (Her "If they'd just...throw up a lung for 20 minutes" comment is priceless, and right on point.)

Yeahbut.

These cosmic pings all happened during the same week I decided to mess with Phase Two of Doubles. Instead of three weeks of crazy upper body and pounding cardio, I'm doing four weeks so that my "rest" week falls immediately before the San Francisco Half Marathon. Yeah, it went through my mind: I'm defeating the purpose of the "muscle confusion" plan. But if I had stayed on track...well, here's the complicated algorithm: 6 solid days of lower body stress + 13.1 miles = Cranky Bitch at Finish Line.

Conclusion: Switch it out, but don't bitch it out.