Tuesday 13 March 2007

Early morning run

I really enjoyed my run this morning. From the start it felt good. I don't remember ever finding a run easy from the beginning before, but this one was. Usually I'm thinking "what am I doing? when can I stop?" for the first five minutes, but today I just ran.

Leanne had me do something different today. We stopped three times during the run for me to do exercises. The first stop involved 10 burpees. Now, if you ever want a serious laugh at 6:10 am in the morning, you should tag along behind me next time. Burpees and me do not go together. Unfortunately, Leanne has this "never say die" attitude, and so I did 10 very uncoordinated burpees. Well, I jumped up in the air 10 times. I scrambled down to the ground 10 times. My feet went away from my hands 10 times and I jumped back towards my hands 10 times. Any one of those combinations may have borne a vague relationship to a burpee, but it was entirely coincidental.

The second lot of exercises were 10 pushups and 10 situps and the last lot involved 15 lunges on each leg. I am the woman who couldn't do a pushup to save her life and whose reaction to the thought of lunges was to immediately develop a serious injury in both knees. Now, 15 lunges is easily achievable and pushups / situps are a push over.

Leanne explained to me that breaking up the run like that makes it harder. Something to do with losing momentum. I thought the exercises were a good chance to get my breath back. Clearly I had it all wrong.

With all of these exercise breaks, we managed to get back to the gym in 28 mins. We do a short warm up walk, run for a bit out and back, sprint the last few metres and then walk back to the gym. When we got back, my immediate question was "how far did the foot pod say we went?" This obsession with stats is a clear sign that I've become a runner. Anyway, we'd covered 3.8 km, which I thought was amazing. I didn't think I'd run that fast, because the run had felt so easy. I was really pleased.

This afternoon's session at the gym wasn't at all planned. I was a bit all over the place with what I wanted to do. There was a 5 km run that started at 6 pm near the lake, but I didn't manage to get myself into town in time to do that. I thought about running at the gym, but when I got off the bus I discovered that my knees were a little tired, so I decided to do my weights program. I've realised that it's much easier when I've worked out what I'm going to do in advance.

I haven't done any alternative cardio lately, so I'm going to make an effort to use the other machines tomorrow morning. The bike and the crosstrainer should be kind to my knees. I've got squash after work, which involves a lot of dashing around and missing the ball, so I will do an easy treadmill session when I get to the gym after that. Squash is likely to be a little competitive tomorrow as there may have been some sledging going on at work.

On Thursday, I will do some interval running in the morning, and some general cardio work in the evening before I go to Body Jam. On Friday, I'll do my weights program in the evening, and I'll probably do a treadmill session in the morning.

I think that's enough planning for one day!

5 comments:

Celeste said...

Sigh - another speedster zips past me on the virtual running track! You made 7min k's sound decidedly easy and they are NOT!!!!

But well done anyway!

MorseyRuns said...

Burpees! I hate them with a passion- they remind me of school and I am sure I looked like a drunk person trying to do a handstand- I definitely kneed myself in the chin more than once. Good work with the running!

Andrew(ajh) said...

I agree that the exercise breaks seem like a good chance to get your breath back! How many hours a day are you exercising - seems like a lot !

Sarah said...

Yep, some planning def helps! I'm trying to picture the burpees! They don't sound like much fun.

I detest push ups and sit ups and am hopeless at both!

I hear you on the sore knees ... glad I'm not the only one.

lg said...

I HATE BURPEES TOO!!!!! I once did them in a park with a friend and my shorts were knee length. When I started to sweat, everytime I jumped down my pants started falling down - not a good look with pink undies and black shorts!

I like the idea of breaking it up like that - I can see how it would work you!