A personal training & food journal. Read about our weight loss progress at Train With Ron in Chicago, our nutritional habits and the life changes we're making to get in shape and stay healthy!

Monika and I stepped it up in advance of the holidays, and did 3 workouts in the last 5 days. Monday I worked with Ron, and it was very tough… I had two other guys in my group who were younger, in better shape, and not as heavy as me… that’s a big factor when you’re doing pushups and pullups, which we did quite a few of. We also did relay “sprints” (I put it in quotes because you could hardly call what I do, “sprinting”) as a threesome… those were pretty brutal. Luckily, we beat our time the 2nd time through, and this saved us from 20 “burpees”, or squat thrusts as we called them when I was back in gym class.

We then did “team pushups” – each of us had to do 100 in two sets of 50… the angle was, when it was your turn, you did the pushup and returned to the down position and held it… utterly brutal and I couldn’t really do all of them.

We wrapped this up with some squats and wall sits… progressively longer and progressively harder. My thighs were screaming… and today, there is still an echo. Not to mention, my shoulders are still sore from the pushups… but we went again today and DB got a hold of us.

It was pretty tough… we had to run 40 yards, do 5 squat thrusts, run 20 yards, go down what amounts to about 5 flights of stairs, back up the stairs, 20 yard run, 5 more squat thrusts, and finish that with a 40 yard run. We had to do this… four times.

That was just the first 20 minutes or so. I won’t give the rest of the details but needless to say, Monika and I are both recuperating.

For Thanksgiving, we are going to eat turkey, stuffing (whole wheat, mushrooms, and apples, of course), Moni’s cranberry sauce (made from scratch, and is excellent), garlic mashed potatoes (guilty pleasure), string bean casserole (we had this when I was a kid, I make it, the only bad thing in it is cream of mushroom soup) and she is making her FAMOUS pumpkin cheesecake pie (no thanksgiving would be complete in our house without that… it is HEAVENLY!!!) So we’re going to live it up a bit tomorrow, but I plan to keep the quantities small.

After Thanksgiving we plan to boost our Training With Ron to 3X a week, and I have an opportunity to get into a hockey league again, which I think I’ll be doing… so that will amount to four active days per week… 4X as many as I used to have!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING everyone!!!!