August Goal Check In: Week 4

This week, my workouts were a little bit better than last. I unfortunately didn’t make much progress toward getting in lots of strength workouts, but I at least got the running workouts done successfully! Let’s check in on the week of 8/23-8/29 (week running Tuesday to Monday, since I last checked in on Monday):

Tuesday: 4 mile tempo run, with splits of 8:57, 8:42, 8:20, and 7:54. I was so happy to get to change the pace every mile rather than die of boredom! At the time, I wished I could have gone faster, but yesterday I saw that I need to be careful what I wish for. Average heart rate: 150 bpm.

Wednesday: This was supposed to be a Girlfriend Choice!!! workout, but I slept too late to get to a class and so instead headed down to the treadmill, swapping with Thursday’s scheduled interval workout. I did a half mile warmup, then 10 sprints of a quarter mile each at 6:20 pace, with a 0.05 mile walk break in between. (I do walk breaks by distance rather than by time, because it’s easier when I’m on the treadmill.) This felt a lot easier than my half mile intervals last week, even though those were a lot slower. I almost wondered if I was running the wrong pace! Average heart rate: 156 bpm.

My 6pm meeting was canceled, so I was also able to squeeze in a class at The Barre Code before a work dinner. I expected it to be a barre class, which I thought would be a nice stretch break (and also some strength work). However, I hadn’t looked at the class description closely enough: it was actually a combo cardio/strength class, with a heavy emphasis on jumping. My calves were sore after, but luckily not enough to mess up future workouts. Average heart rate: 121 bpm, with big spikes for the cardio sections and valleys for the strength work in between.

Thursday: 6:30am Flywheel class as my Girlfriend Choice!!! workout. This was supposed to be Wednesday, but it worked nicely to do it after all the running. I was excited to go to class with one of my favorite instructors, Missy (who even gave me a shout out mid-ride!), but this wasn’t a great class for me. My legs were dead for the whole workout, so much that I wondered if my bike was “tight” (and not properly reflecting my efforts). Nope, I was just tired! I ended up always being 3-5 torq below whatever Missy asked for, and that still got my average heart rate up to 130 bpm. Fortunately, on Friday I had…

Friday: Rest day! I was going to need it with the Mountain Gathering ahead.

Saturday: 4.5 hours hiking the Mohawk Lakes trail. Good for endurance, but my average heart rate was only 97, because of all the stopping and starting as we tried to figure out where to go.

Sunday: Time for an easy distance run! I slipped out of my bunk room before my roommates woke up, and drove a few miles to the trailhead by Sallie Barber Road. From there, it was 1.5 miles up (393 feet) to the mine, 0.5 mile down (262 feet), and then about a mile of flat before I turned around and retraced my steps. I tagged on a bit at the end to make it an even 10K (6.2 miles), and my average heart rate was 132 bpm.

On the return leg, I had some excitement: my workout was interrupted by a massive fox right in the middle of the trail staring at me! I had seen a skinny malnourished fox in Breck on my first night in town, but this fox looked very well fed, and I hoped it wasn’t from eating solo trail runners. I knew that you were supposed to yell at foxes to make them go away, so I summoned my courage and did just that. But what was I yelling? “Hey, you! It’s me! Look out, fox! I am here! It’s me!” I know it doesn’t matter what you yell at an animal (or does it???), but I hoped there wasn’t anyone else listening to the inane words coming out of my mouth 🙂 Fortunately, after eyeing me for a few seconds, the fox headed away up the hill, and I was able to continue on the trail (looking back over my shoulder all the way to make sure he wasn’t returning for a sneak attack).

Monday: I had planned to do a barre class, but skipped it in favor of sleep. However, I did sneak in a quick 10 minutes of Brit’s biceps workout, which has made my arms nice and sore. I need to try to do more quick rounds of strength more often, rather than thinking everything has to be an hour workout!

All in all, I didn’t do nearly as much strength training as I had hoped, though I was happy to get a bit of it in. For the next week, I’m guessing I will be similarly unsuccessful on that front, since my travel schedule is very off, and I’m also trying to take a few rest days at the end of the week in preparation for a 5K on Sunday. I’m going to try to go all-out and see how I do, but with how off-and-on my training has been in August, I’m assuming this will be a baseline to see how much I can improve with solid training in September. Stay tuned!