Quasilaur’s Blog

OK - sorry this is coming so late! I’ve been busy (well, as unemployed life goes) these past few weeks. The report on the running is that I’m not making the progress I wish I was - that is to say, I’m doing the “slow and steady” bit, and so far, am not improving time-wise, but seem to be improving endurance. This is great for the long haul, but I wish my success was instantaneous. The good news is that I’m still doing at least three sessions per week, and I’m mixing it up with some inclines because this is Seattle, long flat stretches just don’t come often, and get boring after awhile.

I’m considering entering a 5k fun run at the end of the month, just to give it a shot. I know that I might end up walking part of the way, but maybe I should just do it. I’ll consider it after next week.

So, what’s been keeping me so busy? (more…)

This week I paid a lot more attention to my heart rate monitor, and less to the distance. This means that the day after yoga, I was a lot slower. Yesterday (see above) I went farther than usual thanks to my accidentally setting a program on my heart rate monitor. Instead of it beeping at me when I was at 76% of my max hr, it was waiting until 84%, which was a lot harder on me. I’m happy that I got a good distance at the end of the week, but it was exhausting and not terribly enjoyable. I set my hrm back to the moderate pace, so next time I hope to not be so strained.

I was thinking of switching my running to 3x/wk instead of 4, but I think I’d miss it. I also want to do yoga at least 1x per week, if not 2, but I need to get my body warmed up to that idea. Then there’s scuba, which I’d like to do at least once every two weeks. We did a brief dive on Saturday, but the viz was horrible and at 68 ft, when it started to clear up, it was dark enough to need a light (this was during midday).

So this week, I try another yoga class, continue to jog with my hrm and train a bit better, and mostly just try to relax.

75 minutes of yoga is powerful stuff. I went to my first real yoga class in many years last night at a local studio, 8 Limbs Yoga. I was able to do a lot more than I feared, and came out feeling fantastic. My muscles were a little sore today, but felt good. I decided to do my regularly scheduled 30 minute jog and found that I went the shortest distance I’ve done in a month.

I was a bit annoyed by the short distance, then I came home and read up on using my heart rate monitor for training, realizing that I maybe just need to throw this distance thing out of the window once and for all. Here’s another clue - my muscles were sore BEFORE I went out. Maybe going a shorter distance was expected by my body, if not exactly what it needed. Then there’s the thought that maybe I should have skipped my jog today because right now, I hurt!!

Today’s lesson, in sum, is yoga is a lot tougher than it seems and overworking my muscles does nobody any good.

Ouch.