Still, Ricky Bobby and I set off at 6:49 am, and ran for 1 hour and five minutes. My goal at this point is distance, not time - although when I had a tenth of a mile left, I sprinted, pretending I was running toward the finish line. Guess what I found out? A tenth of a mile is a long way to sprint, especially at the end of a long run! Which reminds me, I need to download the theme from Rocky for my long runs. How long did I run, you may be wondering...well, after getting this comment "...either that or I dare you to do another 5 this weekend..." on the last WWU post, I took Helen's DARE and ran with it - and I'm proud to say that another five mile run is in the books!
I called Jeff over to keep me company on the last mile...I was dying, mentally. He rode his bike alongside me while I ran, chatting about I don't know what...but it kept me going. At one point he was ahead of me by maybe 10 feet, and I pretended that there was a rope tied from his bike to my waist and he was pulling me, then I remembered how when I was a kid, a boy named Bruce tied one end of a rope to a car's bumper, wrapped the other end around his wrist, and had someone (probably one of his older brothers) tow him while he rode his skateboard. Broke both his arms doing that. Bruce was a daredevil and as a result, seemed like he always had a cast on some part of his body. Then I wondered about his brother Matt - he was my age and we were buddies growing up in our sailing club. I should check him out on Facebook. Matt and Bruce were part of a family of five boys and there was someone for every age in our sailing club - the littlest brother, Chuckie, was pals with my brother. Oh wait, I'm almost at five miles! That was a nice mental vacation!
And that's how I got through the last mile of my five mile run. Whatever works, right?
Monday: Although I was a little worried coming into this workout after running five miles (have I mentioned that enough yet?), I did ok. Hit all the machines in cardio, plus some ball slams and mountain climbers. In the gym, we practiced our form - squats were the biggie, with a pvc pipe that Brad had numbered levels next to the cage. The lower your squat, the higher the number of points. We had to hit 300 points. Oh, and we had the bar with weights on our shoulders, just to make it more challenging fun. Jenny went first and knocked out her 300 points in just 12 squats - girlfriend hit 25 every time! I was next - um, I think I hit 25 once or twice, but it was mainly 10's for me...that was a lot of squats! We rotated around the gym doing other isolation exercises until it was time to do the squats again. Of course, Brad added extra weight to the bar, and once again it took me a while to hit not 300 points, but 350 - he upped that as well! All in all, not a bad workout.
Tuesday: Up at the crack of dawn again. Met Jenny at 7 am for our run. We were slower than molasses - don't know what was up with us, other than being a bit sore from Monday's workout. I wore my new Camelbak backpack (bought for the amazing price of $20 - a local store was discontinuing them) filled with VitaCoco coconut/pineapple water. I was pleasantly surprised that it didn't bother me to have this on my back while running, and it worked out really well to take sips at every mile. Only thing is that I think I drank too much - I poured in two containers of the coconut water, which was 23 oz. - and I drained the entire thing! That seems like a lot of fluid for a four mile run (notice how I buried that in here...we wanted to do five miles, but it wasn't happening). Runners, what do you think? I had a bit of a stomach-ache right at the end of mile four, but I think that was due to the cup of coffee I drank before we started our run. Is nearly 6 oz. of fluid per mile a lot? Keep in mind that it was 82 degrees and of course, humid as hell.
Wednesday: Spent the entire hour in the gym doing the Filthy Teammate workout...yes, Brad expanded on the standard Filthy Fifty by having us team up to do a combined total of 200 reps per exercise. Plus he threw some new ones in there for us...things that looked deceivingly easy (and fun) but ended up being a killer.
Michelle and I were teammates ("the Chelles") - we did thrusters with a 45 lb. bar, chest presses with 15 lb. dumb bells, calf raises on the leg press with 225 lbs., T-bar rows with 10 lbs., hip pops (where you have a rubber tube around both ankles and pop one leg out to the side), these crazy crunches involving a 6 lbs. weighted ball - hard to describe - it looked simple enough but ended up being a killer, and tricep hops (not really the name but I've blocked it out) - this looked fun when Brad demonstrated it, but holy crap, it was hard! He has this cage contraption that is mostly used for ab work, but in this instance, he put a Bosu ball under it (for us shorties...the tall people didn't need it). You stood on the Bosu ball, put your hands on the bars and jumped up, held yourself in a locked elbow position for one second, and then back down. Up and down...my triceps got a workout and then some! Michelle and I did 100 reps each of every exercise except for the tricep hops - somehow she had gotten ahead of me, so Brad had us split the last 50 - she did 25 of them while I did 50 tricep dips. I can tell you right now that I won't be lifting my arms above my head later on today, and it's not looking good to wash my hair tomorrow morning, lol!
What a crazy workout week...I am going to try and force myself to get up early on Friday morning and go for a quick one mile run in my neighborhood, just to get a speedy mile in. I feel like I need to redeem myself for such a slow run on Tuesday. This would be a first for me - running before I go to work. Hopefully now that I've put it out here, I will actually do it. We'll see. :)
Tuesday: Up at the crack of dawn again. Met Jenny at 7 am for our run. We were slower than molasses - don't know what was up with us, other than being a bit sore from Monday's workout. I wore my new Camelbak backpack (bought for the amazing price of $20 - a local store was discontinuing them) filled with VitaCoco coconut/pineapple water. I was pleasantly surprised that it didn't bother me to have this on my back while running, and it worked out really well to take sips at every mile. Only thing is that I think I drank too much - I poured in two containers of the coconut water, which was 23 oz. - and I drained the entire thing! That seems like a lot of fluid for a four mile run (notice how I buried that in here...we wanted to do five miles, but it wasn't happening). Runners, what do you think? I had a bit of a stomach-ache right at the end of mile four, but I think that was due to the cup of coffee I drank before we started our run. Is nearly 6 oz. of fluid per mile a lot? Keep in mind that it was 82 degrees and of course, humid as hell.
Wednesday: Spent the entire hour in the gym doing the Filthy Teammate workout...yes, Brad expanded on the standard Filthy Fifty by having us team up to do a combined total of 200 reps per exercise. Plus he threw some new ones in there for us...things that looked deceivingly easy (and fun) but ended up being a killer.
Michelle and I were teammates ("the Chelles") - we did thrusters with a 45 lb. bar, chest presses with 15 lb. dumb bells, calf raises on the leg press with 225 lbs., T-bar rows with 10 lbs., hip pops (where you have a rubber tube around both ankles and pop one leg out to the side), these crazy crunches involving a 6 lbs. weighted ball - hard to describe - it looked simple enough but ended up being a killer, and tricep hops (not really the name but I've blocked it out) - this looked fun when Brad demonstrated it, but holy crap, it was hard! He has this cage contraption that is mostly used for ab work, but in this instance, he put a Bosu ball under it (for us shorties...the tall people didn't need it). You stood on the Bosu ball, put your hands on the bars and jumped up, held yourself in a locked elbow position for one second, and then back down. Up and down...my triceps got a workout and then some! Michelle and I did 100 reps each of every exercise except for the tricep hops - somehow she had gotten ahead of me, so Brad had us split the last 50 - she did 25 of them while I did 50 tricep dips. I can tell you right now that I won't be lifting my arms above my head later on today, and it's not looking good to wash my hair tomorrow morning, lol!
What a crazy workout week...I am going to try and force myself to get up early on Friday morning and go for a quick one mile run in my neighborhood, just to get a speedy mile in. I feel like I need to redeem myself for such a slow run on Tuesday. This would be a first for me - running before I go to work. Hopefully now that I've put it out here, I will actually do it. We'll see. :)





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