Success and Failures

Getting back to the routine brought my weight down. I lost 3 pounds from the previous day. I know that the weight is not real but I am glad to be getting back into the swing of things.
I jumped on the bike again on Tuesday morning. I dialed in a tempo workout which consisted of a 10 minute warm up followed by 3 x 10 minutes at intensity with 2 minutes of recovery and then a 10 minute cool down.

I failed again. I only completed the first 10 minute interval and a couple minutes of the second interval. However, I did not end the workout there. I reloaded and completed another 20 minutes at a little less intensity. I have never really trained like this before – at set intensities. Most of my previous cycling has just been volume with some aggressive group riding thrown into the mix. I think I am just getting caught up in the numbers and wanting more than I can accomplish. I only rode for 40 minutes.

At lunch we did the STADIUMS. I lopped off 10 seconds from the recovery and then had to add two additional reps to the session for a total of 17. The round trip was 1:50 – 15 seconds up and 1:35 recovery. Next time I will deduct another 10 seconds from the recovery. My legs were screaming at me for the first three reps but then they settled down. Fortunately, the repeats never got harder – I was able to just churn them out. It felt good to succeed!

I checked the last time that I did this workout (October 22, 2009) and my average heart rate was 149 BPM with a MAX of 178. This week, with the same workout my average heart was 128 BPM with a MAX of only 165. I do not remember what the temperature was and everything but I will take it (but my blog says that the day was beautiful)!

After the STADIUMS we did just one rep of the stairs at the back of the Cochran Center. These steps are about 50 percent longer than the stairs at the STADIUM. My heart was racing much harder doing just the one rep!

Back at the gym I continued to work on the chest for the “pump and run” challenge. I had some intel come through and I believe that Robin is able to squeeze out about the same number of reps that I can – somewhere in the 30’s. And being that Robin has a good minute or two on me in the 5k I need to get to work. So I did four sets of flat bench press. I only put the 45’s on the bar so that equated to about 87% of my body weight – well my hope to be body weight. I am counting on 155 on competition day. For some reason I felt strong and was able to increase my reps by a couple. I did not doing any max outs but I did get 3 sets X 15 with a fourth set X 12. I was only working out with one other person and we purposely kept the recovery short. To win this competition I believe endurance is the name of the game.