Tuesday morning was a session with The Boss. I was slightly hesitant as I walked into the studio because last week I wasn’t feeling 100% and the session ended badly – was REALLY hoping it wasn’t a repeat of that!
It turned out to be a really enjoyable session. We spent most of it doing free weight work that I haven’t done before. I’ll admit the arms were a bit shaky afterwards – always a good sign!
The one issue I did have was my monthly goals. I wanted to be able to do 15 nose to ground press ups, I’ve been at 10-11 for a little while now but my lower back seems to start hurting around the 7th one (same with Planks!). I found this article with some strengthening exercises so I’m going to do them a few times a week and hopefully it starts to help me improve!
At the end of that session another Pumped athlete turned up with some protein balls for Kate and I was lucky enough to try one. Holy mother of unicorn glitter it was delicious! I’m going to try and get the recipe off her I promise! I ate it before I thought about taking a picture but they looked like this:
Then something happened at lunchtime… The table conversation started on a runner at work who is currently injured. Someone piped up and said “runners never look happy”. They were joking about it but then someone else came back with “watch out, you’re sitting next to a runner, you don’t want to get hit…” Now I was being a tad antisocial at the time engrossed with Game of Thrones on my Kindle. I wasn’t offended that people said runners never look happy but I was secretly jumping for joy that someone that I don’t spend time with outside of work thought of me as an actual runner! I haven’t really labelled myself as a runner yet, I’m not entirely sure why so this comment totally made my day!! So I need to start changing my thinking… I found this, I run so I must be a runner!!
Wednesday morning I set myself a time limit and started on the deck of cards. I got half way through but seemed to get many high cards so tomorrow morning shouldn’t take me as long to finish the deck.
Wednesday was DOMS day, like I can feel my whole arm when I hold my coffee cup DOMS… I knew it was going to hit me hard today because I started to feel it creeping in Tuesday evening. Press ups and burpees were hard to do with the card game in the morning so circuit could be interesting later on! What’s the good side to this madness you ask? Feeling DOMS in places I don’t normally!
It came time for circuit and it was HARD. We had intervals again tonight: 45sec on a station, 15 sec rest and then a further 30sec on the same station. I started with Lat pull and man could I feel my upper body! After all our stations we went back outside for some reps. Each set we had a few different reps to do followed by a sprint to the letter box – we had an allotted time in which we had to complete as many rounds as we could. The last set we did wasn’t timed but I got the blame thanks for reminding Kate about this horrid exercise when she read my blog earlier in the week! I wrote about it here, still don’t know the name of it but I think they should be called crab walk press ups. We did 20, sprinted to the letter then 15, 10 & 5.
During circuit Kate sneakily asked us a question “What are you doing after this?” I laughed and said nothing (as in I was thinking to myself I won’t be able to do anything after this!). I didn’t think it was a loaded question but it turns out she suspected she had an uneven number for the next circuit (the girls that are doing the 100 Day Challenge this time around) and she had planned a boxing based circuit for them. Who ended up staying?? ME… I was pretty tired by this stage but managed to get through the second circuit and got to know a new Pumped athlete Tash who joined up to do the 100 Day Challenge. For someone who had never done boxing before she had a good punch on her! The funniest moment of that class was one particular boxing station. From memory we did 50 left/rights and then we had to do something that took me back to being a toddler… The pad holder would make a v shape with their body (hands/feet on the ground & bum in the air) and the boxer had to crawl under. Then pad holder would lay on the ground while the boxer jumped over… 5 times… then we repeated the station as many times as we could in the allotted time before swapping gloves/pads. Doing the pad holder V shape, lying down and then going back to the V shape was surprisingly harder than it looked. Plus I got the giggles – it’s interesting crawling in boxing gloves too lol!
Thursday morning I got up and remembered I had some cards left over from yesterday! It didn’t take me as long to get through the last half because I had got a lot of the high cards yesterday but the ab exercises were the ones I felt the most this morning. Now to reshuffle them ready for next time!
Thursday night I wasn’t sure if Liam was going to be running with me or not. This is the first week he has hockey practice and so going forward his PT session has moved from Wednesday to Thursday. He does have time to do a 45min-ish run beforehand but his PT session is usually pretty intense so he was still deciding if he still wanted to run on Thursdays with me. This week he decided not skip the run, the Tuesday running group I’ve been meaning to attend was postponed this week to Thursday so I met up with Anita (running coach) and a few others. They have been working on some interval running and to be honest I haven’t been following this part of the running schedule so far. We did a light jog to warm up then it was 3min on, 2mins recovery. The 3mins was supposed to be around 70% effort so faster than I would normally run but not so fast that I couldn’t sustain it for the whole 3mins. Anita also critiqued me a little on my running technique so for the session I was trying really hard to work on shorter/faster steps and making sure my shoulders aren’t moving as much as my arms were. Increasing the amount of steps I was taking each minute was an interesting feeling, to begin with my brain was telling me I was working so much harder so I must be getting tired faster but it did get a little easier and started to feel a little more natural.
Overall it was a really enjoyable run and I got to spend some time with girls I don’t normally see.
Friday is rest day for me and I relished lying in bed a little longer than normal – Liam even brought me a coffee to sip on! We also had a family dinner out for Jude’s (Dad’s wife) birthday at Buddha Stix (Asian cuisine) I’ve been meaning to go for ages so I was pretty happy when dad suggested it!
I may have gone a little overboard at Rebel Sport today… They had a sale on Nike gear and I REALLY needed some new 3/4 pants. I only had one pair left and the cord on them broke months ago so I’ve only been able to tie up one side… The cord stretches and then they keep slipping down. ANYWAY I found some replacements but I also may have purchased some other items as well. You see, I got new running shoes a couple of months ago:
Both pairs are awesome but the problem?? I had purple/pink workout gear and I like to match… So this is what I ended up bringing home with me today:
When did you start calling yourself a runner?
Do you have like to have matching workout gear?
Sweat Eat Run Repeat 