Workouts in JAMAICA!!

I know... I know... I just posted the 2nd round of photos from our 20th anniversary trip to Italy this past summer (the 3rd/final round is coming soon), and now I have photos from a week we just spent in Jamaica. Yes, life is good! My parents took my family and my sister's family to Jamaica for a week with them. We had a great time! More pictures coming soon, but here's a bit about my workouts this past week...

• SUNDAY 1/14: travel day. Nothing got accomplished but getting there.

• MONDAY: long run of 10.15 miles, 584 yards of snorkeling. It was warm and humid (obviously), but I wasn't ready for it to POUR on me for most of the run. I left the resort around 6 a.m. when it was looking like this:

It started to sprinkle, and then RAIN around mile 1.


Just outside of Ocho Rios... damp.


It cleared up a LITTLE near the finish...
enough for this naked man to wash himself in the ocean.


Looking nicer.


The damp main drive of our resort.


JUST SOAKED back at the resort.


WET and covered in grit back in my room (stretching on a towel).


Laid out to dry on our balcony.


REFUELING!


Out-and-back to downtown Ocho Rios.

I had hoped to go more like 11 or 12, but I was aware that the heat (which my body isn't used to right now) might knock me out. And the latter happened. Well, and the pouring rain happened! Instead of a faster 6 miles in the middle, I only did 5 (something I decided on pretty early in the run), and I only went 10.15 miles total. My "pace" miles in the middle had half-mile splits of 3:18, 3:08, 3:02, 3:13, 3:16, 3:21, 3:21, 3:16, 3:18, 3:20 = 32:36 for 5 miles (6:31.20/mile pace) when I'm used to being around 6:10.

Then I swam with my boys looking for fish by our resort to tack on 584 yards of swimming.

• TUESDAY: 1300 yard open water swim. Our resort had a LONG beach that was buoyed off for swimming (nearly a 1/4 mile), so I took advantage of the calmer morning and swam back and forth and back and forth, all in about 5-7 feet of water. It was after I lifted weights with my nephew (and then found my family still passed out in our room... so I grabbed my suit), so it wasn't fast. My back was fried from lifting weights!

I was slow, but at least I was consistent - my Garmin takes splits in open water every 500 yards, and I looked at it when it beeped: 9:59 for the first 500, 9:59 for the second 500. I was swimming 2:00/100 yards pace.

The resort's beach right near my start/finish.


2 laps.


A wider shot showing where our room was.
(I got a lot of steps in for the week!)

• WEDNESDAY: easy run, core, and legs. (And some more snorkeling in front of our hotel.) It was NOT pouring for this run! So YAY! I just ran easy along the same route, just not as far:

Cool roots.


Morning light.


A view withOUT a naked man.

• THURSDAY: early 1200 yard open water swim, and good upper body. I was a bit faster this time as I was more confident and I hadn't lifted weights right before: instead of 2:00 pace, I swam 1:50 pace. (So still not fast.)

Looks similar to 2 days before. Because it was.


Soaked through after lifting! SWEATY!

• FRIDAY: 12x400 run, a little legs, and some snorkeling. Wait, more snorkeling?!? Yep, that makes 5 days straight of swimming for me! It wasn't a lot of swimming on any of these days, but I've never had such a nice stretch of swimming.

But onto the run... The resort had about a 1/3 mile driveway (with a sidewalk on either side) that you can see in the wet photo above from 4 days earlier. I figured I’d run that stretch to do 1/4 mile repeats. I decided to do 3x (4x400 with 60 secs between) with 3:00 between the sets of 4. I knew the heat would get to me, but that workout seemed like something I could handle. I got it all in, and it looked like this when I was done:

Lots o’ back-and-forth!


Close-up of the north end.

I QUICKLY realized that it was uphill on the way “out” (the even intervals) and downhill on the way back (the odd intervals). It REALLY showed in my splits. And my fast intervals felt easy, and my slow intervals felt like a slog. Here’s what my splits looked like:

1:18.8
1:26.2
1:11.8
1:24.8 = 1:20.40 ave

2:51 rest

1:14.8
1:24.9
1:11.9
1:25.2 = 1:19.20 ave (started dying in this 8th one!)

2:46 rest

1:15.8
1:23.6
1:11.8
1:26.7 = 1:19.48 ave

Interesting to note that I ran a 1:11 as the 3rd rep of each set. And I ran 2 uphill intervals in 1:26, with my slowest being my very last interval. I was pleasantly TOAST - I was DONE on the last set. I LOVE to negative split my workouts, but when I die at the end, I also feel like that's a "proper" hard workout. I did this workout last April hitting averages of 1:18, 1:16, and 1:15, and then I did it again in September hitting averages of 1:16, 1:16, and 1:15. But those were all on a track. I was JUST FINE with these slower averages in the middle of winter running on a hot sidewalk.

• SATURDAY: upper body and core. This was a bigger workout in the gym. I ran into another guy who lifted with me 2 days before, and we became gym buds. I did 8x circuits in under an hour:

- Bench machine: 130lb x15 (was lighter! Or easier as a machine)
- Dumbbell row: 45lb x16-20 on each side
- Pull-ups: x6-7
- Bicep hammer curls: 35lbs x20
- Triceps: random (lots of tricep dips x12, cable pull-downs x15, etc)
- Shoulder flies: 15lb x13

REPEAT x8!

Sweat ALL FROM MY FACE after doing 8 mins of old PT
shoulder exercises at the end of my workout over a balance ball.
(Yes, I wiped this up after taking the photo. I'm not a monster.)


Again, SWEATED THROUGH after this workout.
Hard to tell, but this shirt is solid sweat!

• SUNDAY: long run of 11.23 miles. I figured I'd get in one final long run before heading home. But I made 2 concessions for this run: FIRST, I wasn't going to do my "normal" 6 harder miles in the middle, but just do some random fartleks instead (to not be so depressed by how slow I felt in that heat). And SECOND, I realized while I was starting out that it was too dark (as I had to start early before packing up), so I went back-and-forth and then back-and-forth AGAIN on a stretch of open road to let it get lighter outside before the darker and windier roads. And therefore I really lengthened my warm-up from the normal 2-2.5 miles up to 3.5 miles:

A little hard to see, but half-mile splits 2-7 are all on this stretch.
Then I hit a lap quickly as lap 8 to finally start running hard.


The rest of it looked more like this: random laps with speed or easy running.

I did my "normal" fartlek workout that I might do 2x/year, but I planned on not doing it 2 full times. So I went through it once and then just did a few more efforts for some added distance:

3:00 hard: 0.48 miles, 6:14 pace
2:00 easy: 0.28 miles, 7:12 pace
2:00 hard: 0.34, 5:51
1:00 easy: 0.13, 7:53
4:00 hard: 0.66, (2:58 for 0.50: 5:57 pace, 1:02 for 0.16: 6:27 pace)
2:00 easy: 0.27, 7:25
1:00 hard: 0.18, 5:43
1:00 easy: 0.14, 7:08
5:00 hard: 0.82, (3:04 for 0.50: 6:08 pace, 1:56 for 0.32: 6:08 pace)
3:00 easy: 0.38, 7:55

Started over planning to just do efforts of 3, 2, and 4 mins.

3:00 hard: 0.49, 6:07
2:00 easy: 0.24, 8:28
2:00 hard, 0.32, 6:17
1:00 easy: 0.13, 7:58
4:00 hard: 0.65, (3:12 for 0.50: 6:25 pace, 0:48 for 0.15, 5:37 pace)

This route wasn't hilly, but it wasn't flat either. Some of the odder splits are due to hills: like how in my first 4:00 effort that the first 3 mins of that was at 5:57 pace, and then the last min was at 6:27 pace.

Pace chart looks right on (notice the slivers that drop down
in the first few miles as I kept turning around on that road), but
I don't believe that HR that jumps up to 203 for a while.

I got back, stretched, we packed up, and then headed back to Minnesota! This wasn't a bad week in paradise:

- 4697 yards of swimming
- 33.64 miles of running (artificially large because my long run for the week of the 22nd was moved up to the 21st)
- 7 hours and 28 mins of strength work

Back with some more vacation photos shortly!

UPDATE: here's a bunch of photos from our trip!