Wednesday, February 22, 2012

My new least favorite exercise

After running a marathon, things can get tricky. You hear all this stuff about how you are supposed to take one day off for every mile ran, but generally you're all pumped up from wearing the medal around, and already planning your next race. 

I took two complete days off, then was ready to get going again. My legs were still really sore, like the kind where going down stairs is tough. I haven't been sore that long after a marathon since my first. Of course, now I'm all jazzed up on running and can't wait for my next marathon (especially after reading Kari's  post yesterday). So it's kind of weird that I now have to shift gears, and start boning up on two other sports. 

Now that the marathon is over, I intend to start following my Half Ironman plan fully. Tuesday, the plan called for 60 minutes of biking and 30 minutes of running in "Z2", which means conversational pace. I was barely prepared to do that, but I tried. It's hard to tell what's conversational pace by yourself.

I had woken up Monday feeling somewhat better, but 10+ hours in the car took care of that for me. We didn't get home until after 9pm, so I was expecting to want to cry when my alarm went off at 5am the following morning, but getting up was surprisingly less terrible than expected. I did a pretty easy hour on the trainer, and then quickly layered up to run, since it was 27 degrees outside.

Running was pretty painful, but my "I love running because running is the greatest!!!" high carried me through a quick 3.3 miles. I was surprised to see an average pace of 9:17, since I was expecting this run to be more in the 10:00-10:30 or even higher pace.

My friend Jackie and I have been discussing doing a boot camp workout for months, and never seemed to be able to find a date that worked around everyone's crazy work and marathon training schedule. During Monday's painful car ride home, an email reminded me that we'd finally managed to schedule it. For this Wednesday. 4 days after the marathon. Awesome.

I wasn't about to back out since we had started talking about doing this in October, and since Jackie was designing it, she was nice enough to make it mainly upper body. Which may help, since I have a 1.2 mile swim coming up in a few months. I'd never done an outdoor bootcamp, but I'd heard they can be brutal. Even more brutal than waking up at 4:20 am to get there. 

The workout was brutal (and this was an "easier" one since it was our first and we are all recovering from intense races) but it was awesome. Jackie did a great job. She designed four circuits, with quick bursts of all sorts of crazy stuff - pushups, variations on pushups, situps, variations on situps, mountain climbers, planks, tricep dips, etc. She had one lunge set, but my quads were still screaming, so I did push ups instead. Extra upper body work never hurt a runner. I was also introduced to bear crawls, which may replace mountain climbers as my least favorite exercise of all time. 

I drove an hour round trip and paid $3 for the toll for the pleasure of that torture. Worth it. There's really no chance in hell I'm doing bear crawls and pushups at 5am on my own. Plus, once we get the hang of it, we are going to rotate who hosts/leads the workout. 

Obviously boot camp wasn't on the schedule, and I'd already skipped a day of the plan on Monday, so I had to replace a day of running with bootcamp. It feels weird, but I need to get used to the fact that if something needs to go now, it's running. I can't afford to skimp on cycling or swimming.

Tomorrow the schedule says an hour of swimming. I've never swam that long. Actually I've only swam half that long. I'm scared.

18 comments:

  1. You can do an hour of swimming. I have faith in you. I did it in highschool when I was on the swim team, and, as Kara pointed out, you're way cooler than me. You got it.

    Bear crawls are worse than mountain climbers? How about burpees? If they really are, I hope I'm never introduced to them!

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    1. I don't remember pointing that out, but it's true. :P

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  2. You act like you don't talk to yourself while you're exercising. Oh wait, that's just me?

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  3. I will never Tri because I hate swimming so very much. Something about being cold and wet doesn't appeal to me in the least bit.

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  4. Clicked Send too much. I am jealous of those that can do it though. You WILL get it done :)

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  5. I really wish I could lead a bootcamp, but then I wouldn't have any friends. When I taught cardio kickboxing in college, I had people complain to management that my class was too hard. Pussies.

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    1. Why does this not surprise me in the least?

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    2. When I trained at a local gym, management had me come in 2 hours early to get my workouts in so I'd be tired before my classes started. Not kidding.

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  6. Good luck with the swim. I tried to do it last year as cross training and hated it. I think it is harder to swim for an hour than it is to run for an hour. Although I have yet to run a marathon. So you should be okay.

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  7. you were a champ today! the workout was super fun! and even though I enjoy inflicting torture on myself and others, I would never do any of that stuff on my own...so its nice to have buddies with me when I leave the comfort zone! and we certainly left the comfort zone today! I'm already thinking of creative things for next week - Mua hahahah (ok, i don't know how to spell an evil laugh - but you get the point) :-)

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    1. and you can DEFINITELY swim for an hour! Show that pool whose boss :-)

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  8. Wow. Just wow. And here I am whining about 5 total workouts that were tough in the last 2 days. Resting today as my muscles need to heal. Phew.

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  9. You tri people scare me. I can lay in the sun for an hour. Wait, no I can't even do that unless I fall asleep. Can I use a floatie? then I could stay in the water for an hour.

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  10. You can totally swim for an hour. You know how long runs are usually twice the distance of your mid-week runs? It's like that...this is just the "long swim." :) If you can do 30min, you can do 60min.

    That said, I can't believe you're training again already. You are awesome. I like to lay on my couch moaning after marathons...for like days.

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  11. Somehow teaching OR attending bootcamp makes me work so much harder than I would on my own. I feel like I need to push more when people are watching, I guess?
    I hope your swim went well today!

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  12. Good luck with the hour long swim, that scares me too!!

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  13. I have really got to learn to swim. I feel all inspired by your HIM plans, but apparently you have to be able to swim and ride a bike to do any kind of triathlon. Weak. Anyways, I'd google bear crawls, but frankly, I'm afraid. Very, very afraid.

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  14. Good luck with the hour swim! I bet you can do it!

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Thanks for commenting! Comments make me probably more happy than they should.