Not as lean, still a Marine

I used to be in the Marines - 7 years including two as a USMC Drill Instructor. At one point I was at 170 lbs, running 20+ miles a week at a 7-min mile pace, benching 225 for reps and leg pressing over 1,000 lbs. I had a 32-in waist and a 46-in  chest. In other words, I was a pretty prototypical Marine.

Then I got a sedentary job, and got old, and a bunch of other issues. So now I look about what I looked like in high school, which is not really what I'm looking for.

Two things have come up that have caused me to rethink things. The first is a challenge from a bunch of my jarhead buddies to run as close as possible to a perfect physical fitness test by our 40th birthdays. I'm already 40 so I'm using one of theirs, in August 2011. A perfect score for when we were in requires 20 pullups in a single go, 80 situps (or I may sub the current 100 crunches) in 2 min, and a 3-mile run in under 18 min.

The second was an epiphany I had recently the details I won't go into here. But suffice that I intend to apply my will, my discipline, and my spare time to radically rearchitecting myself physically. And since I respond well to tracking and to stimulus, both positive and negative, I intend to do this in a very public way.

So.

My workouts will include some or all of the following:

• I have a treadmill and have converted it into a working desk. I typically walk at 2 mph at 2-4% incline and can do that for hours at a stretch. 
• I will also power-walk and run on the treadmill before/after working hours. 
• I have free weights and will be doing very basic workouts - bench press, triceps/biceps curl, shoulder presses, lunges
• I have jump ropes, both normal and weighted
• I taught, and will return to, the USMC "Daily 7" including the world-famous "X-count bodybuilders". For an example of this see http://www.military.com/military-fitness/workouts/8-count-body-builder-pushup---pullup-pyramid. 

At least every day I will publish what I did and where I am. I will do these posts at night before I go to bed so I'm consistent and so my workouts are done for the day. I will also try to post pics, as regrettable as they may be at the start of this process. I have a number of goals for this project but one in particular stands out - I wanna see if I can get fit enough to fit in my dress blues as they were tailored the day I got out of the Marines in 1996.

This is an extraordinarily personal blog, so even though it is connected through the magic of Blogger/Google to my professional accounts, I don't intend to do professional stuff here. Anything you, the reader, choose to read into this or into my professional account through this is up to you.