Check out this video I found over on the Steve in a Speedo blog:

I love videos like this.  The question I ask myself when I see stuff like this is whether she’d have won WITHOUT the fall.  Would she have had the adrenaline, the anger, the fire to really push or would she have gotten caught up in the strategy and gamesmanship of the run and maybe waited too long for her kick?  You never know but it’s just awesome to watch.

I’m just barely hanging on by the skin of my teeth to anything resembling a workout routine and my self-respect with regard to exercise and self-discipline.  I have a ton of excuses and I’m planning to write up a confession/way to avoid them in the future post but that will probably have to wait until sometime this coming week.

Tonight I’m going to post my run from yesterday – very cool run, proud I made myself do it – and confess that I totally skipped any kind of workout today for absolutely no reason.  Bad inertia.  [Shrug.]

The Girlfriend and I went up to Bangkok on Friday night because she was flying out at 0700 Saturday morning.  Rather than get up at 0300 to drive up there we used a free night certificate I had laying around to stay at the JW Marriott Bangkok.  It made for a nice evening in Bankok, a reasonable wake-up call, a short 30-minute trip to the airport and a chance for me to do a run in Bangkok with a place to go back to and shower, change and have breakfast before checking out and heading home.

It was an interesting and fun run and a cool route.  I’m going to add it to the growing list of run reports in the queue because it’s late here and I’m getting ready for bed.  Besides, I still haven’t found my camera’s download cable to put the pictures I took in.  For now here’s the basic data that I inputed into Garmin Connect (did I mention I forgot my Garmin?) and a snapshot of the route.

That’s a 9:30 pace, by the way.  For some reason Garmin Connect didn’t calculate it from my data and wouldn’t let me input it manually.  I’m pretty sure I’ve done it before but I couldn’t figure it out this time.  No bid deal.  Kind of.

Wore my FiveFingers today for the first time in a while.  I still like them but there is some seam related chafing.  But my feet and ankles are pretty well adapted to them from the period when I was wearing them almost exclusively during a high frequency training period.  Now I can put them on once or twice a month and not have any soreness or tightness in my feet or ankles.  I’m thinking about maybe trying out a pair of New Balance Minimus shoes, split the difference between the FiveFingers and the traditional running shoes.

This was supposed to be a max effort test.  I guess that’s why the app wanted me to restart on week 3, so I’d have two weeks of work before another test.  Oh, well.  I went ahead and skipped that and went straight on to the next training day.  It was a tough one.  Much harder than W4D3’s.  But I did it straight with no added rest time above or beyond the scheduled intervals.

Recognize this route?

Sigh.  Yeah, me too.  There is something to be said for routine and there is something to be said for having a go to run route.  But this route is not scenic or pleasant.  The traffic is not ideal and it’s still the best route anywhere within pedestrian starting distance from my front door.

Anyway, did a nice easy four miles tonight.  Gotta grease the groove again and get back into a strong routine.

Got back to my pushup program a few days late.  Not gonna lie, the extra rest probably helped a lot.  I felt really strong on this workout.  The rest interval was . . . 90 seconds? . . . I think.  My memory is not the best but that sounds right.

I knocked out all reps of all sets without any significant problems.  In fact I was feeling so good that on the final 40(+) set I actually did 50 reps.  Pretty happy with that.  We’ll see how strong I feel in the next two weeks of the program when things ramp up and the rest breaks go down.

This post should have some great pics and even some videos of a downhill mountain biking trip that Erin and I did over this past weekend when we did a long weekend trip to Chiang Mai.

Unfortunately I am having some technical difficulties (i.e. I can’t find my camera download cable) so instead I’m just going to put in this quick place holder post and move on.

But be on the lookout for a fun post about this fun (for me) and terrifying (for Erin) biking experience.

NOTE: And yes, I realize I am almost a month overdue posting my long promised Lumpini Park sightseeing run post.  I’ll get to that soon.  I promise.  Really.

Today was supposed to be a bike ride on the trainer.  Long story short, that didn’t happen.

But I did go down to the fitness center and run through a four station machine weight circuit.  It wasn’t exactly a Crossfit workout.

File today under “at least I didn’t do nothing”.  No sarcasm, I’m gonna call that a win.

Rin ran run.

I also found out why Sunday’s pushup workout was so ridiculously easy.  I did indeed do “week 4, day 1” . . . of level one.  Yeah.  So today I did week 4, day 1, level 3.  More challenging.  Still much easier that than last few days of the program before the test but not nearly as pointless as Sunday.

Back in the pool for tonight’s workout.  First time in a long time.

Still no idea what there are.  But man are they colorful.  I PROMISE one day I’ll look up what they mean and then use the information for good.  Someday.  And no CCR lyrics, I’m really going to do this eventually.

I also dropped into the fitness center before my swim and did a quick, short, low intensity circuit of the weight machines.  Pull-downs, shoulder presses, leg presses and weighted crunches.  Nothing excited and nothing sexy but it was a good warm-up, it reminded my muscles they do something other than hold my clothes off my bones and it’s the first step in a gradual return to strength training.  Which is something I’ve put aside and am really missing.