On Sunday, my wife and I did the simply strength class. This morning, I rested.
I thought that the class was really difficult. My wife disagreed and said it wasn't that hard. I do heavier weights than my wife, but maybe there was something else at play here. After a huge ride on Saturday, I was following it up with an intense workout on Sunday. Was that too much for me to handle? Maybe.
After the workout, I felt extremely fatigued. My legs and arms were absolutely dead. I upped my calorie count for the day and added more protein to try and help with that. Alas, at night, I got into some junk food and that was not good. My wife tends to buy junk food and I have asked her to not do that. I think it's interesting: she buys organic foods and is all upset about meat that might come from animals that took antibiotics and hormones. Valid concerns. But, then she turns around and buys absolute junk food. In the months gone by, I've been able to avoid it. But, every once in a while, like last night, I succumb to the weakness. What I should have done was eat some high protein foods to satisfy myself. Instead, I ate potato chips and a lot of them.
Oh well. I wore my heart rate monitor on Sunday and burned 718 calories during the simply strength class. I was surprised to see my heart rate all the way up to 150 BPM during a particularly intense part of the workout. But, I'm not kidding when I say it is intense. I also noticed some improvement in some of the exercises, but I still have a long, long ways to go.
This morning, I was going to go to a 5:30 spin class, but I decided that a better approach would be to rest. I'll go at 5:45. PM.
At one point, there was a fourteen minute climb in class this morning with seven different increases in resistance. That got my heart beating!
I find that it's better to let myself eat a little junk food once in a while rather than try to swear off it entirely. If I say "I'll never eat chocolate chip cookies again," well, I know I'm not going to be able to stick to that. If I say, "I'll only eat a chocolate chip cookie once in a while," that I can do. I have to be careful, of course, that "once in a while" doesn't become "every time I want one."
I've done a really good job with this lately - it's a great strategy for me too.
I didn't manage a workout over the weekend at all, but I did get in a ton of great playing with my kids, at least some of which was fairly active. Today might not happen either - we'll see how the night shapes up (afternoon is out because of some work stuff), but my wife has class tonight so that always makes it tough.
I had a good race in Myrtle Beach on Saturday. I broke my PR for a half marathon by about 6 minutes. There were some things that went wrong for me that could have easily shaved another few minutes off, but I'm happy with my performance overall. There's also something nice about setting a PR and knowing that it's not the best you'll ever do. It just gives me more reason to train hard.
Curious, GH - what was your time?
2:07:06. My previous best was 2:13:27. I think by next year I should be able to break 2 hours on that course. It's a nice flat course and a lot of fun to run.