Last summer when I was training for the NYC Marathon, my running buddy kept telling me about an exercise DVD she was doing called Insanity. I had vaguely heard about before. It’s high intensity workouts that don’t require any equipment, other than a bit of space to jump around on your living room floor. She told me about how she was doing an Insanity video once or twice a week and how she really though it was helping her running. Being a sucker for punishment, and wanting to be fit for the marathon (and our wedding!), I ordered the DVD’s off Amazon.ca.There’s two separate months of DVDs. You do month one, then have a week where you do a recovery DVD, and in month two, the length and intensity increases for different videos.

We started with the first month of Insanity right after we returned from Challenge Penticton. The very first day you do a fit test, which since it was only a 20 minute video, Chris and I decided we would go for a five kilometre run afterwards. That was an optimistic plan. The fit test kicked my butt and I definitely did not make it very far on the run. Fortunately, I found that the more we did the videos, the somewhat easier they became (huge emphasis on the word somewhat – they were still so hard). We also tried to follow the nutritional plan, but found that with marathon training in addition to the DVD program there’s no way I could eat the number of calories the program was telling me to. But we did our best!

We managed to keep up with Insanity for the most part for almost all of September, and in to October. During the second weekend of October we went to Kelowna and ran the Okanagan half marathon. I had been approaching this race as a training run, and without even trying too hard, I killed it – taking eight minutes off my previously fastest time and finished under two hours the first time ever. I attribute a lot of this to the Insanity workouts we’d been doing, as I really hadn’t changed anything in my run training. Insanity hugely helped with my hip and core strength and speed.

Unfortunately after that half marathon, with just a few weeks before New York, I couldn’t keep up with month #2 of the videos as well as keeping my body in peak running shape at the same time. I found that I was too fatigued from Insanity and was unable to get quality runs in, so I stopped. I was maybe doing one video a week in October before the NYC marathon.

I’m curious, have you done any exercise DVDs or serious other workouts while training for an endurance run? I would love to hear about it! Would you like to hear more about the specifics of the workouts or nutritional plan? Let me know!

Side note: Late last year I started hearing about another program by the same trainer, called T25. I really like Shaun T as a coach and a motivator, so I had no doubt this other program would be great as well. I purchased the T25 DVDs and started them in January 2014. Review to come shortly!