Ben Benner’s Blog

For those of you that have not yet heard, my darling wife is starting a new job, very soon, this Monday actually. She had her last day in the Austin office last Friday. This week she has been in Longview. She will be starting her new job at the Humane Society of Williamson County as their “Rescue and Animal Care Supervisor”.

As part of her adventure, I have as I usually do, pushed her to write about it, I set her up a blog and choose a theme that I thought she would like. You can read about her adventures at ShelterStartup.com, I will be pushing her to blog regularly and if she doesn’t, then I might just use my journalism talents to blog on her behalf.

Gina has already volunteered (it was only half a day, but it counts) at the Humane Society and based upon what she told me, I have not doubt she will do a fantastic job there.

There are a few other things that are changing, but that will have to wait until the official announcements are sent out, I would love to scoop the story, but I’d rather not. I’ll post a follow-up in a few days.

However, I can say that work has been going well, one of my main focuses has been to expand my team. We found a great hire, Roger Le, he started with us last Thursday and has been picking up on how we do things pretty well. He has a lot to learn, but thus far I believe he will do just fine.

I continue to enjoy my Camp Gladiator workouts, though I do need to get back to a more consistent schedule, but thus far I have managed to get in two sessions a week. In the two and a half months of doing Camp Gladiator I have lost about 10 lbs, which on it’s face value isn’t great, but I have been adding some muscle, so it is all evens out. My clothes are fitting better and I find that all of the manual labor (yard work, demolition, etc) I have been doing in the last month has been easier to do.

I can jog about a quarter mile without stopping these day, my goal is to be able to go a full mile at a decent jog pace. I bought a heart monitor watch, to help me understand what my maximum heart rate is and it has the added benefit of telling me approximately how many calories I burn during my workouts.

In between this Camp Gladiator and the previous one, we had a week off. During that week I did three sessions of jogging at a soccer field near the house. I didn’t burn nearly as many calories as I do during one session of Camp Gladiator, but I do believe that I managed to increase my jogging stamina, I really want to start getting at least a thirty minute session in after (or before) work in addition to Camp Gladiator, just need to work it into my routine.

Well, I best get back to the grind, my late lunch hour is about five minutes from being done and I need to finish putting lunch stuff away.

Laterz

bdbenner exercise, gina, work bootcamp, camp gladiator, change, gina, work

(figured I would follow-up the Time Lord post with a similar sounding title)

So let me first start off by saying, I managed to get myself over to the soccer field for Camp Gladiator #7 about 10 minutes later than I had wanted. Honestly though, from the looks of it the folks in charge there I think must have started a little bit before 6:10, because everyone was already doing some serious exercises. That our I mistook the warm-ups for part of the serious workout.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I think it was on Wednesday, one of my coworkers, Eryn Chandler, was mentioning that she went to high school with a friend who’s cousin won the last American Gladiator contest, or something like that. Regardless, of the six-degrees of gladiator separation, I have signed up for Cam Gladiator (#7).

Eryn was talking about how she was thinking about signing up. I heard her asking Kevin if he would do it and he sounded interested at the time. The next day there was much chatter in the office about Camp Gladiator. There was chatter about referrals and how much money you can get for referring someone, I remember hearing Daniel mention that he was going. That is when right about the same time they asked me if I would do it. I had looked the site over the previous day and thought to myself that I didn’t think I was physically fit enough to get $160 worth of exercise (4 weeks of sessions, as many sessions as I want to attend).

Then came the Camp Gladiator Groupon, this is a new thing to me, but Groupon is this sort of weird group coupon system (Group + Coupon = Groupon). I like to think of it as Woot! + Local Business. There is one special a day and they eventually run out of Groupons. The Groupon lowered the price to $70. So that combined with the fact that Kevin said that Jeremy was thinking about doing it, I succumbed to the peer pressure of exercise.

I stated that I would do the camp if Jeremy would. However, Kevin managed to finish talking me into it, not that he was hard selling me on it, but at this point Eryn, Kevin, and Daniel were all signed up. So I figured, heck I will sign-up. I am not saying that Jeremy signed up because I did, but I did sign-up before he did.

The first session (for us) was last night, 6:10p - 7:10p, out at a soccer field near the intersection of Braker and Mopac.

It was chilly when we started and proceeded to get COLD. I will definitely need to wear a sweatshirt next time around.

We did sprints, push-ups, jumping jacks, ’sexy spiders’, ‘crab walks’, ‘crab shuffles’ (think that was the name), ’super-mans’, ‘bananas’, and some sort of weird V-shaped sit-up thing. It was very intense.

As previously posted, I am trying to get into better shape. I can honestly say that if I had not been doing a bit of the Wii Fit every night, then I would most likely have not been able to do as many of the exercises that everyone was doing at Camp Gladiator last night. I mean don’t get me wrong, I got winded very early-on and had to slow down my pace, but every time I felt that I was recovered, I ‘kicked the intensity back up’ as to try and get the most out of my $70.

I am not sure if I will do another Camp Gladiator or not. I think I will need to see how I am feeling by the end of these four weeks. One personal goal that I have for week three and week four, is to do three sessions a week. These first two weeks I think are going to really kick my ass.

I am going to try and alternate the Wii Fit with the Camp Gladiator nights. I have the Camp Gladiator session in my Google Calendar, thus allowing them show-up on my iPhone. Mondays and Wednesday nights. I think I am going to try and hit up a Friday session on weeks three and four.

Anyway, I need to finish my lunch and get back to the grind.

Laterz

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