Phew! It’s good to sit down for a breather. I’m pleasantly knackered. Not felt like this since… probably since the marathon, 23 weeks ago.
Does gardening count as cardiovascular exercise? If so, I’ve racked up 4½ hours today, including the 2:25 of biking and gymwork this morning. Even without the two hours of mowing and chopping, I’ve attained nine hours of cardio this week, which I have to be pleased with. In lard-melting mode, an hour’s exercise a day is a good target, and anything above that, a bonus. Including the garden toil (and it certainly feels like a workout), I’m running at about 1½ hours a day this week. The dividend on this investment has already arrived. According to the scales this morning, I’ve off-loaded 8 pounds in the last two weeks.
How boring dare I be in these entries? Do people really want to hear about the guts of my training? Or is there as much apathy towards my details as I (frankly) feel towards others? I love to read good race reports, and descriptions of runs, but listing activities and times is astonishingly tedious. Ironically, I store a mass of data, and can spend hours of my valuable free time just gazing at graphs and spreadsheets — as long as they are mine and not yours. It’s the way it is. This year, I’ve dived deeper. Navel-gazing has never been more riveting. It’s no longer enough to log what I did this week; now it has to be compared with what I did this week last year.
This was all relatively simple when running was the only thing I did. But now, there’s cycling and gym. And things can’t be lumped together as merely “gym”. Each activity must be logged and analysed and compared. A further twist appeared this weekend. Following Phil’s suggestion that I should get back into the heart rate monitor groove, I’ve fiddled with my chest strap enough to get it going again, and these figures (average HR, max HR) must now be recorded too. Fortunately, much of this data is automatically captured by my Garmin 305, and beautifully presented in the miraculously free and easy Sportstracks.
It’s taken a long time to realise that cross-training could be useful, and to admit that it can be enjoyable. I did try the gym a few times over recent years, but it never lasted beyond the initial blast of enthusiasm. That seems to have changed: I’ve notched up ten visits in the last 14 days. It was last year, while laying the groundwork for the marathon campaign, that I finally cracked the gym habit. To say I’ve learnt to love the treadmill would be a stretch, but I’ve grown to accept that it has its uses — particularly intervals.
Phil gave me a short introductory intervals routine for the treadmill. For anyone who wants to try it:
5 minute warm-up at slow pace.
Increase treadmill speed to a moderate running rate (depending on current fitness — I’m only on 8.5km per hour this week). Then:
Run for 1 minute with incline at 0
Run for 1 minute with incline at 2
Run for 1 minute with incline at 0
Run for 1 minute with incline at 3
Run for 1 minute with incline at 0
Run for 1 minute with incline at 4
Run for 1 minute with incline at 0
Run for 1 minute with incline at 5
Run for 1 minute with incline at 0
Run for 1 minute with incline at 6
5 minute warm-down at slow pace.
It’s easy to see how you can extend this as fitness improves, by increasing the speed of the treadmill, and/or the length of each interval, and/or the incline (e.g. start at 4 rather than 2, and so on).
Anyway, let me apologise for this most boring of entries. Something exciting will happen soon, I’m sure.
