STR: Days 17-23

It's been a while since I've checked in, so what have I been up to? Travel, travel, travel. Which, for my workout regimen, would better be written "travail." In short, it's been more eating than running, more drinking than lifting. So it goes.

Day 17
Wednesday: This was the day that we were leaving for the first leg of our first summer trip: Indiana to Cleveland (family) to western PA (friends) to D.C. and Maryland (friends). I didn't get any kind of workout in before we left (too busy getting ready to leave), though I tried to shoe-horn one in before bed once we arrived. It was a pared down version of what I would have done that day: 1-legged squats and 1-armed pushups (both modified as I've talked about before). I skipped the extra pushups and the Australian pull-ups but did the core work (reverse crunches and back raises).

 Day 18
Thursday: I got up early at my in-laws and went for a run. As runs go, it wasn't much, but I guess I didn't really expect it to be.  Their subdivision is not my favorite place to run. It's nice enough, in that there's little traffic and all of it is slow, and half the streets even have sidewalks, but there's just not much of it to run. I could go our of the subdivision, but that puts me on a road with no sidewalks and very little shoulder--but a lot of traffic. Since it was also looking like it might rain, and since I barely felt like doing any running (maybe because Day 17's workout was late at night instead of the morning?), I stayed in the subdivision so that I could call it quits whenever. I ended up doing 3 laps of the place, which added up to 1.99 miles. I just barely managed to do better than 10-minute miles, thanks to a bit of a kick on the last lap. Some days you just have to be happy that you did a run at all. We drove 3 1/2 hours to visit friends in western PA, where we had a great time and ate some delicious food (but too much of it!). The vegetarian chili was tasty and nutritious, though the cornbread and the other snacks and beverages probably were not. But hey: who are we to spurn hospitality? Although I'd kept in touch with most of my friends there, we hadn't actually seen any of them in person in at least 3 years, and it was great to see them. One of them was my best-ever workout buddy, but we didn't find the time to get a workout in.

 Day 19
Friday: We drove 4 hours to Washington D.C., where I dropped my Lauren and the girls and picked up one of my college buddies, so we could drive another 2 hours to get together with several of our friends. Five of us represented the old gang, though we spent the next few days eating enough for all 12+ of the guys. Do I need to add that no exercise happened?

 Day 20
Saturday: does walking around throwing a frisbee count as exercise? Near my friend's house, there's an abandoned military base, where the housing units were all demolished, but that roads that linked them are still there, and it's been turned into an official frisbee golf course, with the baskets and everything. So we went out and played 9 holes. It was strange for us--we've all played our share of frisbee golf, but it was always of the kind that begins each hole with "the next hole will be" and then inserts some object from the landscape ("that big rock," "the second tree on the left," that car that's been stuffed full of paper and wrapped in TP"). Actually having baskets, into which your disc was supposed to end up, well, that as a bit much for us.

Actually, what was a bit much for us were the guys walking around with 20 discs, especially the guy who was talking to his buddy and saying things like "We could go out and play a round every day, but we're never going to get better that way. We need to be training for this." O-kaaaaaay....

 The lived-experience highlight, which was also the health/fitness lowlight, was dinner, for which one of my buddies used this:


to make the absolutely most amazing pulled pork I've ever eaten. I probably--no [intentional] exaggeration--ate a pound of meat. Minimum. Plus the coleslaw another friend made. After a walk (hooray for token exercise!) I had room for apple pie with strawberry cheesecake ice cream. Good lord. And I wish I could say that's all I ate/drank that night--I could tell you more, but it's making me a little nauseous just to think about it three days later.

Day 21
Sunday had me saying goodbye to my friends and hitting the road for 7+ hours from D.C. to north-central Ohio. It also had me getting my diet inched closer to where it should be after the weekend's week's excesses. And that's no small feat when you're on the road. No exercise to speak of, except playing around with squats. To the extent that I've been doing 1-legged squats, they've basically been negative reps--that is, I have a controlled descent (down to the short chair), but getting back up, I've got to cheat one way or another (usually my off foot ends up pushing against my active leg's ankle, so it's helping but the focus is still on the active leg). So I was playing around with doing deep squats and then leaning into one leg or the other to work on the muscles I need to complete the one-legged squat. But I was doing that as much to get the stiffness of the long drive out of my legs as anything else.

Day 22
Monday was another travel day, with almost 6 hours in the car, all told. As such, it was a minor miracle that I got any exercise done today, but all I did were the one-legged squats from what would be my normal routine. I figure since I do squats M-W-F, I should get them in so that I could potentially make up the rest of the workout the next day without doing squats on back-to-back days.

Day 23
Up early to get ready for a run, but by the time I was set to go, it was raining pretty hard. I guess if I was a real runner, I would brave rain and sleet and snow, derechoes and tornadoes and hurricanes to get in my daily run, but I'm really more of an in-the-gym kind of athlete. So... I finished up yesterday's workout instead: handstand push-ups, kettlebell swings, skipped the pull-ups (for now) as they're out in the rain, and super sets of plank and bridge for a minute each.

I did some light cardio (i.e. picking up around the house) and then braved the drizzle to go for a run. Since it was still raining and the weather map showed that we were still on the front edge of it, I decided against the long run that has become my Tuesday tradition, and kept it short and quick, just to the one corner and back, 1.62 miles. I knocked the run out in 12:18, a 7:35 pace. Given where my times have been on longer runs (or Thursday's short run), I was pretty happy with that.