Harder Week to "Test" My Injury: Decent News!

I decided about 10 days ago to "test" my sore butt. About 10 days ago, I had a treadmill 5K in 17:32 as I posted about last week. And then I kicked off this past week with with a pretty normal long run (also written about in that last link).

Here's what last week looked like:

• MON: long run and PT legs. Very normal! (Except that I pooped myself a little...)

• TUES: long trainer workout and decent upper body. This was a solid day! I had a good upper body workout of 8x everything (except shoulders as my right shoulder is still sore), and then the stars aligned with kids' activities and class schedule to allow me to get time for a long trainer ride. After a nice warm-up, I did efforts on the trainer of 10 minutes, 9 minutes, 8 minutes, etc, etc. with 50% of each "effort" as easy spinning (so a 10 min effort was followed by 5 mins easy, a 9 min effort was followed by 4:30 easy, etc.). Here's what I did for each effort:

10 hard
9 standing
8 alternating standing and seated every 2 mins
7 shifting to an easier gear every 1 min (standing for 2nd to last minute)
6 hard
5 standing
4 shifting to a harder gear every min
3 of standing and seated every 45 sec
2 of an easier gear spinning fast
1 hard

Easy to see the workout in my heart rate graph.

• WED: easy run, PT legs, and core. Normal. Good.

• THURS: decent upper body and easy trainer ride. Again, a nice 8x upper body like on Tuesday, and just an easier 80 min spin with 1 "effort" of 10 mins to get the blood flowing in the middle.

• FRI: 2x2 mile intervals, PT legs, and core. The legs and core were normal. And I hit the paved trail along River Road for some normal 2 mile efforts. It was a BIT icy here-and-there, but that just slowed me up a LITTLE... I was watching my form to make sure it didn't throw me off and make me hurt something more in my leg/butt.

The workout was a bit slow, as to be expected coming off this injury and with the not-quite-ideal conditions. My half-mile splits looked like this:

2:56, 3:03, 2:56, 3:01 = 11:58.8

3:00 walking rest

2:53, 3:01, 2:55, 2:57 = 11:47.1

Half-mile splits: started at the lower-right, running 1 mile
to the upper left, and then back to the lower-right.


Interesting that I immediately sped up after turning around in the middle of each interval.

• SAT: normal trainer workout and another decent upper body workout. We were gone from 8:45 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. at a birthday party in WI all day, so I got up early to get in 2 decent workouts. First a THIRD upper body workout of 8x everything on the week! (Saturdays I usually do them as circuits, so that's what I did: push-ups, back rows, pull-ups, bicep curls, tricep presses, and then repeat 8 times.) Then, even through it was 50 degrees out in the heat of the day, I had to get in an early workout, so I did 95 mins on the trainer with a basic 3x10 min effort workout.

• SUN: core and an easy spin on the bike trails. It's usually NO biking or running, but it was too nice and I needed to escape my boys for a moment. So I got out on my mountain bike for 40 minutes along River Road. I was scoping it out for my long run the following day (today) to see if there'd be a lot of melting that would re-freeze in the morning. I was hopeful this wouldn't be TOO nasty at 32 degrees 14 hours from this ride:

Mostly damp, with a few puddles here-and-there.

So it was a decent week of training! Nearly 6 hours in the saddle is a NICE week for me. I had 1706 "intensity minute" on the week to put me a little above average:

Last week on the far right.


And 158K steps too.