A Surprisingly Solid Week!

I've had one final already, and I have 2 more coming next week. It's stressful for me as well (but to be honest, it's worse for the students) and it DOES take a bite out of my normal life. As we're busy working in the darkroom, wrapping up design projects, and getting ready for Christmas parties (one of which happened last week already), I'm surprised (and thrilled) that I was able to still get in a solid week last week:

• MON: long treadmill run and solid leg workout. I mentioned that treadmill run in Monday's post - it was the "faster than normal" treadmill run from a week ago.

• TUES: broken 400s and 200s swim and quick 4x upper body. I mentioned the swim in Saturday's post. Nothing amazing, but a good effort, and a LITTLE crunched for time or I would have gone a little farther.

• WED: easy outdoor run and good legs and core.

• THURS: 1:36 on the trainer and decent 6x upper body. The trainer ride had a main set of 4x10 min efforts.

• FRI: moderate outdoor run and good legs and core. The leg workout was right after running, and the core workout was split up throughout the day (I never know if that's a smart thing to do to get in more reps, or if I'm just needlessly burning out my muscles).

• SAT: 1:33 trainer ride and nice 7x upper body circuits. Most of my trainer rides have "longer" efforts (like Thursday's workout with 10 min efforts), but I did shorter/harder 3 min efforts on this workout: 10x3 min. Those 10 efforts were hard, hard, standing, descending to a harder gear every min, hard, a bit harder, descending to a harder gear every min, standing, alternating mins standing and seated, and hard.

• SUN: 1:04 core in the evening. My rest day.

Getting 9 hrs and 56 mins of strength time in for the week is NICE, along with over 3 hours on the trainer and just under 23 miles of running. The rest of December is going to be more random with family commitments, camping trips with the boys, grading final projects, etc, but I was really happy how I was still able to fit in a lot of workouts this past semester where I was teaching 3 classes (2 that were new to me) at 2 different universities (1 that was new to me). I can NOT complain about these last few months of training!