Wednesday Workout Update - Picture Edition

What a wild day we had on Monday - Brad had a special workout planned for us - an entire hour in the gym, doing an "Extra Filthy Fifty" - because apparently just a plain old "Filthy Fifty" (50 reps of each exercise, for time) wasn't enough! Linda grabbed her camera and caught us in action, so I'm glad to be able to share with y'all a little bit of what we did:

Me doing a chest press, Brad cheering us on, Jenny doing tricep curls, Jeri doing burpee/box jump combos.

Please note that Jenny and I wore our GLOW run t-shirts with pride on Monday!

Jenny doing some sort of pull ups (I think they had a name but I've blocked it out); me doing a walking plank where I would move my feet to each side of the stepper and then back on. Kathleen doing a kettlebell row (that kettlebell is 26 lbs!)Kathleen doing the burpee/box jump combo; Ashley doing the kettlebell row; Jeri doing the burpee/box jump combo (it took a while to do 50 of these!)Kathleen flying through the air with her box jump!Me finally doing a box jump - more on that later in this post....and she sticks the landing! ::cheers::My favorite picture: Jenny beating the tar out of a punching bag. This was the most fun out of all the exercises!

So yeah, about that burpee/box jump combo. As it was easily the hardest exercise of the bunch, I decided to start off with them - get them over with while I was freshest. I did my first burpee, then moved to do the box jump...and froze. I could not get myself to do it. Stepped back, tried again. My body wasn't moving. Stepped to the side and did a practice one, then stepped back in front of the box and...no go. At this point I was holding up other people, so Brad told me to move on and come back to them. I went ahead and did all of the other exercises and then faced the box jump again. What the hell was wrong with me? I can do these - a month ago I did 50 in one day and then 40 the next day! It still wasn't happening, and I was thisclose to losing it out of frustration. Luckily Linda saw what was happening and started calming me down and talking me through them. At that point I remembered that the last time I did these, Brad had been adding extra height to them, using the 45 pound weight plates, and I fell when I tried to jump 14 inches (the standard box is 12 inches). While I didn't hurt myself, obviously it stayed with me. It took a few more tries, but finally I was successful.

It is amazing to me how much of this is mental. From doing something scary like a box jump, to going for a run and pushing past that voice that starts screaming "What are you doing?!? You aren't a runner! You can't go any further - stop right now!" - there is pushing your body to do something and then pushing the self-doubt out of the way, which for me takes more strength than doing the actual physical stuff!

Today I thought there was a good chance of getting to run during our workout, so I brought my running shoes with me. I don't like to workout in them because the soles are not as flexible as my Asics, but they are awesome to run in. Anyway, I ran on the treadmill and can't believe how much better that felt in my running shoes (I know, duh!). I felt GREAT and did 1.34 miles in 16:30 - starting speed was 4.5; ending speed was 6.4! This will be my last run before Sunday's Armadillo Dash so I'm glad to have such a good one under my belt.

After we spent our time on the machines, we played the "Deck of Cards" workout - Linda drew a card and we had to do whatever exercise matched it. For example, if she drew the eight of clubs, we did eight mountain climbers. It's a fast-moving, random workout that really keeps your heart rate up!

We hated to see a spade pulled!

Finally, here's a picture of my calendar for February - I didn't run as many days as I did in January, but my times and distances are increasing. It's fun for me to see the improvement!

...my glow sticks were still glowing, a couple of days after the GLOW run!