Effort

I haven't been running or biking hard. I had 1 hard fartlek run 2 weeks ago, but that's been the only effort. All of my other runs have been easy/moderate. Just "running."

I've put forth a little effort on my trainer to *get ready for* some actual effort, and maybe I'll pop in a "Spinervals" DVD one of these days. Otherwise, I've just been spinning easy to get a little sweat going. And I've really only had that one outdoor ride that got decently hard.

Where I *have* been able to put forth some effort is through strength training. My wife has noticed a difference over the last couple of months with regards to my upper body beefiness. In case you don't remember, I hurt my foot back in August of last year, and pretty quickly switched the effort from running and multi-sport to weights. I started noticing a change by November/December. And I really kept feeling the change through about March. Now I've plateaued, but I'm totally OK hanging here.

Let's take a look at the ORANGE in my training log. Here's the last 2 weeks:

And here's 2 weeks of last year (May 2019):

This year, I had 8+ hours of strength work in EACH of those week, whereas last year, I didn't have 8 hours in both of those weeks COMBINED. And during those 2 weeks last year, I noted that an upper body routine of "4x for everything" was a really good workout, whereas right now that would be a crappy workout. And I only had 2 upper body days total over those 2 weeks last year, whereas now I'm consistently doing 3 upper body days every week. So the frequency *AND* the intensity have gone up.

I'm just happy if I can be putting forth some effort SOMEWHERE. Time to slowly start working in some effort in my biking and running.