STR: Days 10-12

Day 10 (otherwise known as Wednesday)

We're back to another body weight workout, with a similarity to Monday's workout. But before I got to that, I took our 3-year-old to her tennis lesson and spent 30-40 minutes hitting serves. Which must have been some kind of workout, for reasons I'll mention later. But first, the workout I did after we got back from tennis:

5 sets of 5 reps of one-legged squats: taking a cue from a YouTube video that I'm too lazy to locate that suggested sitting back onto stairs to build up to a full one-legged squat, I used one of my daughters' mini-chairs (they're wood chairs that survived decades in a church nursery, so I trust them to handle me) and sat back onto it, so I got a good negative getting down to it, as long as I didn't just plop down. I couldn't just use one leg to get back up from there, but I tried to keep as much weight on that leg as possible.
5 sets of 5 reps of handstand push-ups: the ultimate shoulder exercise--I couldn't actually get 5 sets of 5 reps, but for each of the sets I started off with full on handstand push-ups, went to failure, and then used a chair to take some of the weight off and do 5 reps that way.
3 sets of yoga wheels: it's hard to mimic the dead lift with a body weight exercise, and doing wheels like this seemed like it worked my shoulders more than my posterior chain, but I did 3 sets of them.
3 sets of pull-ups to failure: I sure am glad that our back yard came with clothes line poles.

The workout that I was basing this body weight workout off of called for "prone bridges," which everyone I know calls "planks." Since someone calls them prone bridges, however, that gave me an idea:
3 sets, alternating between 30 seconds of plank and 30 seconds of bridge (another yoga pose, which hits the posterior chain at least as well as wheel pose.

Then, because even all this wasn't enough workout for me, in the evening I biked the three miles each way to my tennis league and played a doubles match there. Where I pretty much stunk it up, starting with the serve that I'd practiced twice now this week. Which points to a couple things: 1) serves take more work than 1 hour in 1 week to really groove and 2) that was enough time to make my elbow and (to a lesser extent) my shoulder sore. No excuses, though: we should have won our match. Grrrrr.

Day 11
Up early in the morning and out for a run. Usually (as much as "usually" applies to something you've done 3 times before) I run east, into town, and run around town. Except for the first, mile and a half of each run that way, there are sidewalks, which are nice enough. We're on the edge of town, though, so heading west took me out into the country. Since I grew up firmly planted in the cornfields of northern Ohio, "the country" feels like a very comfortable place to be--and to run. In fact, when I was at my most avid, I was running in a landscape that looked very much like what I tackled Thursday morning, surrounded by fields, woods, and the occasional house, encountering the occasional car speeding by at 55 (or way s'more than 55) on what's basically a narrow 2-lane road. I ended up running 4.6 miles (for a weekly total of nearly 11 miles for the week) in just over 40 minutes, which made an 8:47 pace: I knew it was slower than Tuesday's run, even though it was a shorter run. So it goes.

Day 12
Today brought me back to a workout that was so much like Monday's workout that it was identical, barring a few tweaks:
5 sets of 5 reps of one-legged squats: 2 minutes between sets, but in that 2 minutes, I also did 10 deep squats.
5 sets of 5 reps of something-like-one-armed-push-ups (The other arm just supported from my fingertips): the first couple sets had 2 minutes between them, the last three I cut it down to 1 minute)
3 sets of Australian pull-ups to failure: 2 minutes break in between
3 sets of push-ups to failure: 2 min break
3 sets, alternating between reverse crunches and back raises: no rest between sets

There were so many ways I didn't want to do this workout. I just wasn't feeling it, probably in some measure because I spent 2 and a half hours push-mowing a lawn yesterday and then we had friends over for dinner, which was exhausting on top of exhaustion, and wonderful, and a great excuse to have a few beers and eat a lot of delicious (but not necessarily healthy) food: pasta with a lemon cream sauce, salad, a rice dish, s'mores... and probably not enough water. Lauren went to bed with a headache and nausea, while I just woke up feeling crappy. It didn't help that this morning was a warm, muggy morning.

So it wasn't the best workout I've ever had, but I pushed through and did all the sets and reps that I'd planned to do. Some days, that has to be enough, I guess.