The goals of In Under 5 are simple:

1. Stay healthy, fit and uninjured.
2. Have Fun!
3. Develop the body to accomplish long distance runs through a healthy life style, diet and exercise .
4. The least important part of the plan is to finish a marathon in under 5 hours but is an outcome if items 1-3 are managed effectively.
5. My weight will be 185lbs by June 25th, the Seattle Marathon.

My plan is to train for the Seattle marathon on June 25^th and run it in under four hours. 

I am going to post my training plan, body stats, meal plans and other notes of importance  here for all to see and review. This will also be my chronological record leading up to the Seattle Marathon and the start of the 2011 InMotion Fit season.

I hope you enjoy my posts, benefit is some way and reach your running goals.

Black Bean Soup

5 cups black beans that have been soaked overnight, drained
1 large sweet onion – diced
1 green bell pepper – diced
2 celery stalks – diced
2 cloves garlic – smashed rough cut
2-3 Tablespoons of EVO
6 cup cold water
Salt and pepper to season
2-3 bay leaves
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 to 1/4 Cayanne Pepper – Your call to taste
(I bet ground chipolte would be good to try as well)
Sour Cream or Creame Fraiche – garnish
Fresh parsely, herbs or green onions – garnish
Toasted baguette or crusty french bread on the side

In a large dutch oven at medium heat add oil, onion, pepper and celery and sweat for about 5 minutes, salt and pepper to season. Add garlic, cumin, cayanne and bay leaves and cook 2 minutes. Add black beans, stir to mix, add 6 cups cold water, salt and pepper to season. Raise heat to medium high bring to a boil, cover and reduce heat to simmer for 50 minutes, stirring occasionally.

When the beans are soft, start to mash the beans and cook uncovered, raise heat to keep a slow boil going. Stirring and mashing continue to cook and reduce, about 30 minutes, salt and pepper to taste. When soup is desired consistency it is ready serve.

Ladle soup into bowl, top with a spoonful of sour cream or creame fraiche, top with chopped fresh parsley,  fresh herbs of choice or green onions. I think toasted crusty bread would be good as well on the side.

I love running out of my community, there is the smell of jamine in the air just beyound the gate, except on Tuesdays, it’s trash day and I was on my way out could not smell the jasmine and turn on my heel and headed to my car to find a new location for my run. I went down to the lake (Lake Miramar) and started my run, there were all the various people running walking and biking. I notice one man he must have been over 80. He was shuffling along his arms up and I thought to myself if you took a picture of him at just the right moment he would look like he was running.   at 80 maybe all I need to do is just look like I’m running. And I was rewarded with a beautiful sunset as I finished my run and thought that was a good run.

Now I am here in Cancun, in a beautiful resort, overlooking the Caribbean sea, perplexed that all my runs are destined to be out and backs!!! It will be tough but someone has to run it. On one of our outings my wife and I noticed that some of the hotels along the beach have these pens setup with what looked like little grave markers. We were amazed to find out that the hotels are engage in a conservation project to protect the sea turtles.

You see the sea turtles come up from the sea and lay their eggs buried on the beach. The problem is that humans and sea turtle egg sites don’t go well together. So employees from the hotel gather the eggs and relocate them further up the beach in a protected pen and mark each area with a sign, when the eggs were laid, how many and the expected hatching time.  Then they just leave them alone until the appointed time.

When the day arrives the hotel employees start to dig up the egg sites and start to pull out these very small baby sea turtles. Somehow they know which eggs need more time and which ones are not going to hatch. They collect the new hatchlings, bury the eggs that need more time and discard the rest.  They keep excellant statistics on all this collecting and hatching. They keep the baby turtles safe until evening, apparently the local birds find the new little turtles a tasty treat.

So in the evening at 7:30 my wife becomes a 5 year old, excited, curious and full of questions and along with a number of other guests of the hotel we go and release the baby turtles on the beach so they could make the trek to the sea undistrubed by the local birds and vacationing beach goers.

The baby sea turtles know that their time is at hand and are very active, their bodies in motion, let me be, to the sea, very cool indeed. We stand there in awe and watch as about 125 baby turtles make their way to the sea, that is their great adventure.

I guess my point is that every run can be an adventure if you just keep you eyes open and look into the world around you. Tonight I stop and ask myself “How Do YOU FEEL? I got to tell you, no lie, BETTER THAN EVER!!!

So I got to asking myself, If I eat less and run more, certainly I’ll probably lose some weight, but what could I do to really accelerate weight loss and do it safely?  One answer was to strengthen my core strength. Most of you know how to strengthen your core and I think I’ll save some thoughts on that for a later time.

The big answer I came to was manage my sugar intake. I’ve told you all before what a sweet tooth I have, my motto is never let a good cookie go to waste. So I have spent some time this week looking into sugar, checking labels, reading some articles, basically seeing what there is to be said about sugar. Holy Cow! (that’s not what I really said)

Like salt, food manufacturers add large amounts of sugar to processed foods for flavor, start reading the labels of the foods you are buying, yogurt blew me away, some of those “healthy” breakfast bars are loaded with sugar. really want to blow your mind check out the sugar content in some of the fast foods you might be eating.

Nancy Clark, author of Sports Nutrition Guidebook, says that glucose is the fuel of the muscles and that sugar is converted into glucose, but into varying degrees. Table sugar and honey convert partially into glucose,  Corn syrup, like that found in soft drinks and food is NOT converted into glcose. All FRESH fruits and vegetables convert 100% to glucose. I repeat glucose is the fuel of the muscles. Something to keep in mind when choosing a pre-training snake, fresh fruit or the sports energy bar?

Jorge Cruise author of many books, including the Fat Belly Cure, is currenty describing the terrible effects of sugar on the body if consumed in high amounts. Lets face it with all the processed foods we buy, it seems to me we are eating sugar in large amounts, unconsciously. Bottom line on his comments is that belly fat is caused by eating the wrong amounts of sugar and carbohydrates and it’s belly fat combined with to much sugar that is causing a lot of the health risks faced by men and women today. Mr. Cruise has some interesting comments back by the latest research and is readily available to you in his books and on the Internet.

So what does this mean for me? I like things simple, I like to take the guess work out of it. So to add that extra umph to losing weight I am going to limit my sugar intake to 15 grams a day and simply track it on a piece or paper. Now I have to have some rules around that, given that Fruits and Vegetables are loaded with sugar as well. 15 grams of sugar will be from processed foods and other foods I may eat daily, and given the high sugar in fruits like apples, oranges and bananas, I will save those for my pre-training foods and count the grams only for food diary purposes only. With 4-5 training days a week, I think my muscles will enjoy the glucose, and any effect of the extra grams of sugar will be negated.  Beside I hope to replace cookies with fresh fruit to satisfy my sweet tooth.  jeez I crack myself up sometimes…

Now that I have been following recipes for a while and have masters different tecniques, I can now create in the kitchen, no longer just thinking stuff up and seeing if it tastes good but really combining flavors and creating art on a plate.  It’s a good thing too, because I believe everyone should have an outlet for their creative side, something completely different from what you do for a living and since I can’t paint with the exception of the occational wall and the Department of Water and Power has asked me to not sing in the shower, it looks like the stove will be my canvas.

Technique:
I came across a technique for cooking rice that has produce extremely great results. I’m sure you all know that to cook rice you start off with 1 cup rice and 2 cups water (3 cups cooked) double as needed.  Rinse the rice in cool clean water at least 3 times and strain off the excess starch at each rinse. Add rice to pot, sprinkle with salt, bring to a boil. Onc at the boil, cover and reduce heat to low, cook for 15 minutes. Don’t peak turn stove off and let rice steam for at least 5 minutes. Your rice will be fluffy and your guests will wonder how you did it.

I love this post by Ozzie, it reminds me of why I started running marathons.  We as coaches can train and prepare you to run a marathon but you will do the real work, we may be there at the begining middle or end of the training run, but each running goal met is truly your own success, but still shared by all of us. Each run can and should bring some new insight about yourself, your family or what you are up to in life. As your endurance steadily grows so will your capacities to deal with what life may throw at you.  Some problem that just a run ago confused or bugged you is no longer an problem, just a another challenge met and conquered. 

Welcome to the Marathon, I see athletes everyone.

This is a little video I put together for the 2009 season of InMotion Fit. Enjoy and utilize to meet your goal of completing a marathon.