Asphalt Junkies Spring 2013 - Closed (Page 42)

Well I ran out of time this morning for the weight machines because I had to come home early to let the dog out. My husband has been letting him out during lunch on T/Th but he is out of town today. Sounds like a good excuse anyway right .

Karl I have been doing the following machines 2 sets of 12-15 reps: adductor, abductor, leg extension, seated hamstring curl, seated leg press (just added that one on tuesday). Plus all of my PT exercises for my back which are all floor work but things like side leg lifts with my leg straight then bent like a clam shell, then touch my toe in front and behind the leg on the floor etc. The hard part of these is I'm supposed to engage my core throughout the exercise by contracting my abs and raising my side off the floor.

I might still drag out my fitness ball and free weights and see if I can mimic some of the exercises at home.

I did not have a plan for my swim today so I just swam one long set for as long as I had time for which turned out to be 45 laps. That was kind of fun for a change. No thinking or worrying about what # interval I'm on. Just swim.

Didn't have a free minute yesterday to post. I'm down 3 lbs this week. So a total loss of 4 lbs with 26 more to go.

Jo- Sorry to hear about all the difficulties you and your family have been going through.

Ha ha, you mean that secret ingredient is not a secret anymore?

Take care of that illness Jeff - mine started kinda like that and got out of control pretty quickly.

Sam - acupuncture was going to be my next step in tennis elbow recovery if it didn't heal.  It seems like some people swear by it, others not so much.  I didn't see any negative results from the people who weren't excited about it, so I don't think there was a down side.  I know your form of tendonitis is a little different than what I had, if that means anything.

I didn't post my weigh in either.  I adjusted my goal to a lower number, so I have 18 to lose.  I'm down 5 so far, so I started at 28 and I'm now at 23.  I'm declaring T/Th/Sat no ice cream days.  Baby steps.

Jeff I feel for you. I get pretty cranky when I'm sick! Hope you get some relief and SOON!

And if you would like a little chuckle today....

The pup was laying on my lap and my daughter was scratching his belly. She looked at his anatomy and said "Look, he's a wiener dog! That's cause he has a wiener."

Hahahaha!!!!  Cute! 

I ended up having a really good swim today!  Yay!  I haven't been able to do my workouts from my swim coach because they are all really hard and long.  It's too much for my foot.  I was browsing some swimming websites and came across this one:

100swimmingworkouts.com

I modified #93 slightly.  It made for a very good workout that addresses one of my weaknesses; bilateral breathing.  For the first time EVER, I swam a straight 400 while bilateral breathing the whole time AND sighting once each length!  I was so excited!  It was painfully slow, though.

Anyway, there are some really good workouts here.  Check it out!

I want to second the congrats to all those who have been losing weight. I am down 3 pounds and hope to continue to lose slowly. I know exactly how you feel Dina. I did a 2 hr bike ride yesterday morning and then worked chest n tri's at lunch. I did a long swim this morning and was slower than ever. My arms felt like bricks. My muscles were tired and I just took it very slow and found a second wind and was able to push through the very end of the workout and swim a few extra laps. I usually try to keep rotating what I am working so that I can keep pushing Training. I am also not training for long periods, sprint/ Olympic, not HIM yet.

x2 too funny

Tracy that's great glad to hear you had a great swim workout and that you were able to do that 400 while bilaterally breathing. Thanks for posting the link for the swim workouts.

I got another short run in today of 5 miles. I did it this evening after 5 pm. I am thinking I need to shift my workouts to the evening with the exception of my swims. It will be a little easier to do which means running in the dark. It wasn't too bad this evening but man was it cold out there. It was 20 degrees with a wind chill of 7 when I started with winds at 16 mph. It was much colder when I finished and the wind was just brutal at the end. I need to get some new gloves as well the ones I had just were not cutting it for that kind of weather.

It seems we passed this little virus through the asphalt junkies!  I have been fighting a sore throat for about 5 days now.  I don't think it is as major as what some of you are dealing with it, but all of the coughing is starting to get a little annoying!  Luckily for me I have been able so far to train through it, 

I hope everyone else starts to feel better and gets back on track!

Hopefully things will get better for you soon but Lis is telling me that he stuff that is floating around our area is hanging on for 2-3 weeks.  They are seeing multiple patients that are suffering from whatever it is, which is likely the flu.

Jeff, good timing on the discussion on running pace, although some of it definitely went over my head with the x-axis vs Z-axis and all!  

This got me thinking though, I understand that running slow is the best method and obviously I do well at running EXTREMELY slow, but how do you know when running slow has become too slow?   Everyone has a different level of slowness, Dirk and Jeff's slow is my dead sprint with a puke at the end.  Is it as easy as sticking with a HR level and as it goes down the speed goes up?  I tend to run somewhere between 135-150 on the HR with 135 being too easy and 150 being mildly stressfull but still able to carry on the majority of the conversation.  Over the last year I have put in a bunch of miles and the pace compared to HR really hasn't changed much.  Probably the main difference is that I can carry the same pace for a longer period of time.  There are times where I think I should decrease the pace by 30 seconds across all runs to move to the next level.  I think someone stated it earlier, push to the limit, allow the body to adapt, and then push again!

I may have rambled a little bit so I hope this made sense!

Thanks for this link, looks pretty interesting. 

I'm still unable to do much - getting much better from the tweak in my chest/shoulder but down with cold and fever like many of you others. Luckily, since I got the flu shot, the doctor said it was not the flu so I'm hoping I'm back and training by the weekend. Boy I hate looking at the empty log every time i log in now 

I feel like acupuncture is working for me but it is a slow process.  My trouble is that I am trying to keep myself from injuring myself further and try to heal very, very slowly while training for a marathon.  This seems to get harder all of the time.  The acupuncture seems to provide some fairly immediate relief but then I get right back on the road and abuse my foot again.

Did you change your position at work?  If you haven't, try to change it enough that everything is awkward for you to do.  Your key board should feel weird for you to use as your hands will not be in the same position.  try anything that throws your position off enough to make you have to relearn how to move your hands and type.

I took a brief look at these WO's but I will have to return to them later.  They look interesting and it would probably do me good to shake my WO's up a bit.  Now I just have to find the right time to get some swims in.

Last week I had a day planned to swim but couldn't get there and this week there's no chance of swimming at my pool because of lack of available hours.  I am getting very close to finding another location to swim.  I am very sick of the jacked up hours and the relative infrequency of availability.

Try to use some RPE as a gauge as well as HR.  Between the 2 methods you should be able to see some changes.  One thing I don't think you will see are large pacing gains quickly.  I would expect to see them kind of come on suddenly rather than a slow progression.  Like all of a sudden a 9:30 mile just felt really, really easy.  So you try it again and it's still very easy and you kind of figure out that you have all of a sudden moved into a little bit of a faster pace.

I would also say that you could do some speed work.  You have been carrying a solid base for some time and you are more than ready to begin some tempo runs or track work outs.  I am an advocate of tempo runs because I believe they reflect more closely to what we do in our races.  You begin to do these at anytime you like to build a better, stronger VO2 max.  Just start small.  I would suggest during a 3-4 mile run that you get one mile at your 10k pace or 10-15 seconds slower and slowly build to 3-4 miles at this pace.  Do these once a week for 3 weeks and allow for recovery periods to avoid injury.  You'll see a pretty fair increase in ability and stamina at this pace in a short period of time. 

I would suggest one more thing.  Don't plan on doing these all year.  Do these for 2-3 month cycles and then go back to easy running for a couple of months and then cycle back in again.  Try to time these with some key races too.

If you can get short WO's at low intensity it may help you get through some of the illness sometimes.  I don't recommend doing it if you are running high fevers but low grade stuff should be alright.  Do some light spinning on the trainer to keep your legs moving and blood pumping.