Thursday, March 23, 2017

Training Log -- Week 3 (part 1?)

It's totally possible that I'm more or less done working out for the week, because Thursday was crazy busy as the students leave for spring break, then Friday we'll be getting ready to travel and then travelling, Saturday we'll be spending a day at Kenyon (and travelling to and from). It's getting busy, I've gotten in 3 days of work and we'll see where it goes from here.

Monday, I got into the weight room and hit "the usual": leg press, bench press, squats, and lat pull-down. I pushed the leg press hard and got more reps in my two minutes than I've gotten before, and the same on bench. Pretty solid effort, all in all. Go me.

Oh, and I also worked in some speed work after that. Nothing too big, just four sprints, each about 120 yards (or whatever the length of our indoor track is).

Tuesday I went for a run, and it was just nice enough to draw me outside, but not nice enough for me not to hate it. Recently, I've only run inside in nice flat, controlled conditions. Outside sucks. For those who know my school, I "like" (I use the term loosely) a loop of about a mile from the fitness center down to the lake past the flag poles, along the lake to go around the crew building, then up parallel to the road to the football field, then between the football field and the lacrosse practice field, across the parade field, up the steep little hill by the health center, then angled up that hill in front of the chapel back to the starting point.

Before I'd even gotten started good, this seemed like a terrible idea. The ground was still saturated from recent rains and a good deal of the loop is on grass. So my shoes (granted, they're Vibrams, so there isn't much to them) were totally soaked pretty much as soon as I started. And then when I made the turn to cross that big field from the crew building up to the football field (which seemed way far away), I was running into the wind and--I would swear--at least slightly uphill. Every step was like running through something that's hard to run through. Something that's so hard to run through, it saps the mind's ability to form similes. That's how bad it was.

And then, as I come around to finish each loop, I have to go up a steep (albeit short) hill and then a long gradual slope. So that by the time I finish a loop I really want to just quit. My plan, congruent with what I said in the last post, was to run about 40 minutes, which I supposed would be 40 minutes. I was ready to quit before I finished the first mile loop as well as at the end of each loop, not to mention in the midst of several of them. I slowed to a walk just a couple times, to pull out twigs that had lodged between my toes, but basically I ran the whole 40 minutes, so I guess that's a win. Definitely slower than 10-minute miles by the time it was done, but I wasn't really timing my splits.

Wednesday, I once again had post-40-minute-run sore legs, but I also once again pressed forward with a workout in the weight room: 2 minutes of 135# deadlifts, 2 minutes of shoulder presses, and 2 minutes of seated rows. It's amazing how challenging six minutes of actual work can be, but there it was. And, just like last week, I felt like it was not only challenging, but also a great recovery workout, as the legs felt just a bit fresher when I was done.

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