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2000 archives

August 4, 2000

Dread, dread, dread.
I didn't sleep well last night so I stayed in even though I would have preferred to be rested enough to get to gym early again. So I am doing the Thurs. intervals tonight, and I'll probably either skip the "casual" Friday stroll assignment or do it as part of recovery on Sunday. That's no biggie. What I dread is tomorrow. And I mean DREAD.
My Saturday endurance session is for 4.5 hrs. On the bright side, it's the last super mega long one on this schedule. The rest of the month tapers down. I also got my new Athena sports bra to try out. I can hope for good weather so I can at least do a split: 2:15 hrs at the gym, break for lunch, then try 2:15 around the neighborhood, a park, or a more scenic trail.
But it's still 4.5 hours, and if the weather is bad, all at the gym staring at the same four walls I look at every single day. *groan* I don't know if I'll make it.
posted by Cat 'Astrophe' 5:35 PM

August 3, 2000

Training Walk For 8/2

Focus: 45 min casual stroll
Duration: 45 min
Where: crosstrainer @ gym
Distance: 4.3
Hear Rate: 153-157
RPM: 53 ish
Difficulty: physically ok, but mentally annoying!/li>
Adrith and I talked about this a bit before -- not being able to judge speed by ourselves without aids like pedometers and stuff. Maybe because people aren't objective. I know I've done the same speed workouts before under different moods and if I was in a bad mood it felt horrid and "too fast" and if I was in a good mood it felt fine and "just right." It's like the time passing. Flies when you are having fun.
For a while I just gave up trying to learn to control my speed because my bigger problem was just going and sticking to the schedule. Worrying about control seemed premature then. Why do I give a hoot now? Everything I've read about training says the best way to train is to make your body perform under different intensities. If you train at one speed all the time, you won't get as many benefits as quickly.
In more practical terms, I'm not looking to win this marathon. So much for worries about super duper speed. But I am aiming to finish, so I'm not off the hook -- I do have to worry about endurance. I won't finish in time if I go all the way through on my "slow" setting and I will die before midpoint if I try to barrel through the whole dang thing on my "fast" setting. For me to last I'm going to have to alternate between the two so I can keep moving but kind of "rest" during the slower bits so I can build up the energy to get through the faster bits. Unfortunately I have no "medium" settings because I don't know how to do anything but the extremes. Very definitely slow. Very definitely the fastest I can move.
So I need to learn deliberate control over my pace. It's time.
[...]
Which means I had a &%*^&(*$#!! hard time this morning!
[...]
Physically it was fine, but I had eyeballs glued to the console numbers and I was a getting tense trying to keep it where I wanted it. I should have brought a different mix -- the music I had was way too bouncy for me to try to be "casual" with it. All I wanted to do was go with the songs and they carried me along too fast. Turning it off wasn't an option -- I hate morning talk shows and their mindless yammering so I had to have mine on to drown out what was coming out of the gym speakers.
(Side note: I was never at gym when they played anything I liked. Apparently everyone else agrees because I never see a person sans their own headphones and music! Why don't they just turn it all off?!)
Since yesterday was "speed", and I was hanging out as close to 65 RPMs as possible. So today I wanted to be slightly slower but I couldn't stick to 50 RPMs. I kept zipping up. Finally I made a deal with myself to stay UNDER 55 and eventually I found evened out to 53 RPMs but it was a fight to stay there. I ended up worn out in my head.
I need more practice at this. Sigh.

posted by Cat 'Astrophe' 7:43 AM

training walk 8/2
Locale: PF
Minutes: 30
Mileage: 1.43
Total mileage: 102.40
Yow. Ow. Yow. Ow. Ugh.
Last night's running was NOT as easy as the first two sessions. My body really fought the notch up to 1:30 running spikes.
This run, and those that will invariably follow which will feel like this run, made me question whether I've got it in me -- to follow through in training -- to finish the marathon. If I'm having this much trouble doing such a little way of running, what's it going to be like the first week of December when I have to move this body 20 miles?
I understand that come December and January it's not THIS exact body that I'll be moving 20 miles. In just three days of my running program I've dropped a pound and a half - down to 240.5 from 242. I expect to be down at least twenty-five pounds by race time. And after months and months of solid training, I should be faster. But I'm not right now, and it's a little bit scary.
All the same, I'm very proud that I got through that walk. It wasn't pretty, but I got the job done.
I was contemplating going back to the gym tonight and doing the 1:30 workout AGAIN, just to see if doing it a second time is any easier with rest now that I've done it the first time. But as it turns out, Joe and I are getting together with my friends from high school for dinner an hour and a half from home. A good time to talk up the fundraising with them!
posted by Adrith 10:02 AM

August 2, 2000

Training Walk for 8/1

Focus: 60 min speed work
Duration: 45 min
Where: cross trainer @ gym
Miles: 4.5
It was super hot yesterday so I didn't go to gym in the evening. Instead I've decided to go back to the habits of long, long ago at try to get it out of the way super early in the day and avoid these stupid weather problems. So I was at gym this morning by 6 AM, and had a good, solid workout. I was so happy with the effort, I knocked off after one tape side and cut out 15 minutes early to beat morning rush traffic back home so Paul could have the car for work. This is the only problem with morning workouts -- the pressure to have the car back in time!
It felt very good -- I'm definitely more tolerant in the morning -- by the time the day has gone by I'm set to be highly irritated very easily by anything at all.
You know how if you see someone yawn, you have to yawn too? There was a lot of that going on. I was also in front of a mirror so every time I saw myself yawn in it I could set me off in this recursive loop of yawning. Yawn, see me in mirror yawning, yawn again, see me with my mouth open, yawn, etc Just writing it makes me yawn some more!.
The weirdest part with yawning so much is that while you yawn, your breathing gets thrown out of whack. You get to the peak of the yawn and your holding your breath and if it's a big, fat YAAAAAAAWWWWN you are without air for a little while. This is no biggie sitting down, but while trying to jog it makes everything wrong. I had a stint of five big ones in a row and it screwed up my breathing so bad it spiked my heart rate to 180 something. That made it so I couldn't breathe deeply at all and my chest started to hurt. I hit pause and took a drink of water and then started back up at a slower pace to shake the sleepyheadedness away before I picked up speed again.
But I did remember to take Benadryl this morning. Hooray. Two nostril breathing!

posted by Cat 'Astrophe' 8:18 AM

August 1, 2000

training walk 7/31
Locale: PF
Minutes: 30
Mileage: 1.43
Total mileage: 99.44
Holy calf muscles, Batman!
Yep, this was a training walk on Monday. I did this because I'm starting a new interim training which will go up through the first week of our NF Marathon Team Official Training. (Doesn't it look official all in caps? :) I'll put the training schedule on my journal and then link to it when it's ready, but the goal of this training is to get to the point where I can jog for 30 minutes at a time!
So today's session was this: walk for ten minutes, spend ten minutes alternating between jog and walk, and then walk for ten minutes to cool down, for a total of 30 minutes.
I did my ten minute walk, starting at 2.5 and working up to 3.0 MPH. For my first jog 'spike', as I'm calling them because that's what they look like on the treadmill LED, I did one minute at 4.0 MPH. Two minutes of recovery and I did a second jog spike at 3.8 MPH (it just wasn't in me for the full 4.0). Three minutes of recovery -- I was getting tired -- and I did a third jog spike at 3.8 MPH. Two minutes of walking and then into my cool-down walk, done half at 2.8 MPH and half at 2.5 MPH.
When I stepped off that treadmill I felt like I had these super-huge calf muscles! They were SORE. But I felt as though, if I weren't doing this 30-minute 6-week training, I could have walked through my last half-mile to 100 miles. Contemplated it, too. Also contemplated doing a last jog spike from 19:30 to 20:00, but decided the extra thirty seconds wasn't worth the potential for injury.
But I DID jog for three minutes. The goal for this week is to get up to two-minute jogging spikes by the end of the week in four more workouts. So I'll do a workout tonight or tomorrow with 1:15 spikes (in which I will break 100 miles -- whee!!), my third workout with 1:30 spikes, my fourth workout with 1:45 spikes, and my fifth workout of the week with 2:00 spikes.
I'm sad that I'm going to have to do all of this training at the gym, since I lost my watch somewhere. Boo! But, realistically speaking, it's supposed to rain all week so I'd be at the gym anyway..
And how are those calf muscles? Within two hours, they'd returned to normal feeling. WOOHOO! I'm running, I'm really running! And it doesn't seem to be killing me..
posted by Adrith 9:20 AM

Here it is: the 6 weeks to running training program I'm following.
posted by Adrith 10:59 AM

Wow, Adrith is kicking butt! You go! :)
Meanwhile, I'm going to stick to the Walking Magazine Schedule, and it's week 15. Don't get confused -- after August Adrith and I will hook back up on the same NF schedule.
Anyhow tonight is speed for 60 min, and then I have to run to get groceries. Or maybe I'll throw the ice chest in the trunk and get ice for the food that needs to be on chill and get the groceries done before I go to gym? Have to do some ATM banking too. Grr. Why isn't EVERYONE 24 hrs? Somebody asked me how I manage training and the rest of my life at the same time. I don't. Or rather I have no life other than work, gym, sleep!
Since yesterday was a day off I cleaned up my training binder and looked over my dietitian's notes. I've been paying only a nodding glance in that direction and I really need to straighten up with food logging. So I started keeping up with my DietWatch log again hoping that by the time I have another appointment with Karen I'll have a new log to give her that doesn't have as many gaps as the last one!
posted by Cat 'Astrophe' 12:56 PM

training walk 8/1
Locale: PF
Minutes: 30
Mileage: 1.53
Total Mileage (drumroll, please..): 100.97!!
It's two weeks late, I know. But I have finally, FINALLY cracked the secret of one hundred miles, and it feels good.
It's called keeping things fresh. And that's exactly what my new training program is doing.
Tonight's workout, like last night, felt very hard while I was doing it. The sweat was literally dripping off of me, something I've not experienced in quite a while. (And never this prominently -- perhaps I wasn't quite working as hard as I should have been while I was doing just straight walking?) But by the time I hit the locker room the soreness in my calf muscles and my back was gone. I felt fresh. I could have walked another mile easily.
But, I'm sticking strictly to schedule; I may be very close to having benefits but I don't want to have to call for a doctor's appointment the second I get done my benefits orientation because something is messed up in my knee or ankle or back! And I definitely DO NOT want to be sidelined until next week because of same.. things are fresh and new again, and it feels absolutely wonderful.
Speaking of fresh and new: the grocery I frequent, which is a major chain in the Northeastern US, has started to carry Luna bars! At a very excellent price, too. I picked up a lemon zest, chai, nuts over chocolate and sesame raisin crunch. I already know how I feel about the lemon zest bar; I can't wait to try the others!
posted by Adrith 9:35 PM

July 30, 2000

It's official! I just updated my fundraising info and together with Adrith we are now at $1061 funds raised for the NF charity! Yay! Our first grand! Wahoo! :)
Looked rainy so I skipped the training walk in favor of a fast bike ride around the neighborhood. Made it back just in time.
posted by Cat 'Astrophe' 3:05 AM
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