Swimming. I still don’t know what to do with the graphs and charts from my Garmin Swim yet. I’m just including them for color.
Also, I was going to go out and do some errands tonight after work but my stomach is acting pretty sketchy. Gonna lay low tonight and try not to get worse.
Today was my second Hundred Pushups workout. I forgot to grab a screen cap of the workout but if I recall correctly it was something like this:
For a total of 100 pushups. Each set had a 90-second rest interval. So far the program is pretty easy. We’ll have to see how it ramps up.
Next was a run. I decided to mix it up today for two reasons: 1) variety in training is good and 2) I was in a hurry and didn’t want to spend 40-minutes out on the road. Good enough right?
Luckily it was a hard effort run day. It’s a lot easier to adjust your time factor and still get the workout you want on a hard day than on an easy day. On an easy day, less time means less distance. No way around it. But with a hard day you can be creative. I wasn’t that creative since I just did a 2x1600m interval with a warm up, cool down and 200m recovery interval in between, but at least it was something different but still relevant to my goal.
Obviously, my second 1600m wasn’t as strong as the first. Part of that was fitness, part was poor strategy. I think I should have gone a little easier during my recovery period in order to maximize my effort during the hard legs. I really like this workout for the longer sustained effort it requires. I think that 1600m intervals are great for training my mind to the difficulty of a 2-mile run effort.
[Note: I realize that posting the maps is fairly pointless at this point since I run the EXACT SAME ROUTE every time but I’m just getting in the habit because my hope is to start mixing up my run locations so I have a neat collection of maps and even getting some elevation changes in there so I can justifiably post the elevation profiles of my runs too.]
As promised, I tried something new for my cycling workout today. I tried this:
This is a cycling training DVD that I have had for years. And yesterday when I went to use it I had to take it out of the shrink wrap. So yeah. I’m not 100% sure but I believe I got this for free with my CycleOps trainer. Not sure though.
Anyway, I’ve never used a training video before although obviously I know they exist, and I even have a good friend who used to have a special set up in his garage to ride in the winter and watch videos (training and otherwise). I wasn’t sure what to expect, and honestly I wanted to do something different but I didn’t want a flat out, 100% interval intensity workout since I had a hard run scheduled the next day.
Anyway, turns out the video has a several different viewing segments that you can select and mix and match as desired to create the length you want.
I didn’t even actually do the main workout segment (“The Race”, like I said, I was saving my legs for my next run) but I did enjoy the parts I did. It was fun to have a structured program to follow, I enjoyed moving up and down the levels of intensity and moving between the different video segments really broke up the duration and made riding on the trainer much more tolerable. I’m definitely going to look for a good opportunity (scheduling wise) to get more into this DVD and do a good long workout of it that includes the main Race segment.
If you’ve read any of my other cycling posts you know that I normally dread the trainer. But it’s pretty easy to make it more tolerable. If you’re actually training for cycling or a cycling-inclusive event (like a tri) I think that training videos are definitely the way to go. They make long trainer sessions tolerable and give you a good motivational boost and a gauge for how hard you are training and how hard you need to be training. If you’re just spinning along for cardio training or you’re using the cycling as cross-training then the key is entertainment. Set yourself up in front of the TV or your computer and queue up a bunch of YouTube videos or Netflix shows and start churning those legs. I like to listen to audiobooks while I’m riding but that’s just me.
For the time being my focus is on running, so I probably won’t hit the cycling intensity too hard, but after I’ve reached my CPFT goal I’ll start to diversify my effort a little bit. I’ve already got my eye on some other cycling training materials including some online/downloadable/streaming videos with custom sound tracks matched to the intended pace/intensity that look completely badass.
[Note: no Garmin Connect capture today because my 310XT froze up on me. It went to the “Transfer Data” screen and got stuck. It was like that for hours. None of the buttons would work. So yeah, no data on this one. Just a manual place holder on my calendar.]
Short, 30-minute jog today in the Five Fingers. My feet and calves are feeling it. I am not as used to running in those things as I was four months ago.
I really, really, REALLY can’t wait until I live somewhere that has more than one viable running route available from my place of residence. I am getting extraordinarily tired of the scenery and traffic on my current route.
But, the more exciting note for today is this:
That’s right. I did a pushup. More precisely, I did 80 pushups in five sets, separated by a minute. One of these days I’ll do a post just about the app that is shown above, but suffice it to say (for now) that today was the first day of my quest for 100 consecutive pushups.
Which is the first day of my renewed quest for the 375. Pushups and pushup motivation are the big rock to be crushed in this equation (shhh, don’t think about the metaphor, just keep going, it’s okay) so for now, I’m going to start doing pushups. Saturday, I’ll be doing 100 of them (not consecutively).
Yup. Swimming in the rain, in the dark, in the cold . . . well the RELATIVE cold. Which is actually pretty comfortable. Just an easy 30-minutes. Back in the day (2-3 years ago when I was training for my second half-ironman) I used to do actual swim workouts. Drills, intervals, kick drills, pull drills, etc. I may get back to that eventually but right now my swim days are really more active recovery that full bore training event. So for the moment I’ll stick with what I’ve got. Such as the following from today:
Old Faithful (with a twist): 8 x 400m w/200m recovery intervals, but the fourth and eighth intervals were at a faster target pace and there was a 2:00 minute moving recovery interval after the fourth 400m.
I hit all my interval target paces pretty consistently. It took me until this workout to get my feel for my pace back. Now that I know where I stand I can start dialing up the intensity a little bit.
The accomplishment of today’s workout made me feel like a badass. Not how I performed, or the feeling when I finished (although it’s always a good feeling). No, this time getting started made me feel like a badass. More than usual even.
Why? Because I overcame golden excuses to bail out. I motivated myself to go for my run, got down to the spot along the road where I usually warm up and found out that my Garmin was dead. Boom. Excuse to turn around and go home.
Instead, I pulled my phone out of my Spibelt and downloaded MapMyRide. Now, I’d had this app on my phone previously, so I had an account already, but I’d never used it so I deleted it a while back. Now, I put it back on my phone, logged in and for the first time ever I used it to track a workout. Boom. Excuse eliminated.
So I put my phone away, fired up my bluetooth headphones and took off with MapMyRide running. Aaaannnnnd before going 600m I promptly found that my planned run route was flooded. Four to six inches of water covering a good 50m of road. Boom. Excuse to turn around and go home.
Instead I turned around, ran down a road I’d never run down before and connected up to my planned route a little further down where there was no water. Boom. Excuse eliminated.
Right around that point is when my bluetooth headphones and phone music playlist combined to a) be uncomfortable and unstable [the headphones] and b) play crappy music, not follow the playlist and generally avoid effective user interface (phone). Boom. Excuse to turn around and go home.
Instead I shut off the music, put the headphones in my pocket and agreed with myself to run without musical accompaniment. Boom. Excuse eliminated.
Now, let’s face it. On a badass scale of 1 to 10, overcoming these “obstacles” and doing a 5K run is probably somewhere between 0.5 and 0.8. But you know what? I don’t care. I did a workout in the face of numerous easy outs and did the right thing when it would have been easy to wuss out and do nothing. That’s enough badassery to celebrate.
Here are some screenshots from MapMyRide. I am considering using this a little more to see what kind of functionality it has. Especially since I routinely leave my Garmin turned on when I come home and don’t find out until I try to turn it on before I start running. It does have more adds and falderal than Garmin Connect but it might be worth trying. It’s clearly worth having around as a back-up data collection method.
A nice little spin on the cycle trainer tonight. No screen caps since my Garmin is (as usual) being tempermental about uploading and transferring to Garmin Connect. Spinning on the cycle trainer is approximately 500 times more boring and mind-numbing than running on a treadmill or swimming laps. It is absolutely critical to maintaining good mental health (not to mention for being able to stay on long enough to achieve a fitness objective) to have some form of entertainment to get you through.
TV series on Netflix or DVD are great. Right now I don’t have any of those but what I do have and really enjoy are audio books. I’ve always been a fan of audio books for my long runs or rides when I’m training alone. Same on the trainer. I use the Audible app on my iPhone and a pair of bluetooth headphones so I don’t have to deal with cables. Plus it means that I can put my phone on a table or something and not have to put it anywhere near my grotesquely sweaty body.
So far I’ve almost always just done boring steady state riding on my trainer. Occasionally, I will do some kind of interval riding (warm-up, 2 min hard, 5 min recovery, repeat 4 or 5 times, etc.) but nothing intelligently designed or structured. Just messing about. I actually own a cycling trainer DVD (no idea where it came from) but it’s still in the cellophane. One of these days soon I’m going to pull it out and give it a whirl. I’d like to introduce some variety in my cycling workouts and milk a little more fitness value out of them than just basic cardio and calorie burning.
A nice 5-mile jog tonight. Nothing special to mention. I did wear my Vibram Five Fingers. I hadn’t been wearing them much in the months leading up to Christmas because I was getting some muscle strain in my feet and Achilles tendon. So 5-miles is the longest distance I’ve run in them in over 2.5-months. Plus I wore them on a shorter run last week. Which meant that in the morning after this run I was hobbling around a little.
Once I got warmed up for the day though I felt pretty good. I plan to wear my running shoes for most of my running mileage but I’ll still rotate my Five Fingers in for some of my short to middle distance easy runs. I’m not sure if or how much I want to try them on interval runs. I’ll have to do some testing and decide.
Just a short swim workout tonight. I was going to knock out a nice, easy 30-minute mile but I didn’t get started until late (thanks middle of the evening conference call for work!) and I just didn’t feel like grinding out another 10-minutes.
Two notes on tonight’s workout: 1) one of the main reasons that I’ve gone back to my self-regulated and designed, multi-sport, everyday, patented alternating cardio workout plan instead of using another pre-fab run program is for the flexibility it gives me to adjust to my real life schedules and also to regulate my effort to how I’m feeling physically. 2) I need to figure out how my Garmin Swim works. I really like it, and I’m using it and it’s FAIRLY easy to use . . . but somehow I didn’t “end” my workout until 15-minutes after I stopped swimming. So, yeah. Need to work on that.
In closing:
I’m not exactly sure what the take away is from this visual aid, and I sure as hell don’t have a plan to do anything with this data yet but “we’re paying for this stuff; look busy, will ya?”.
Cheers.