New Cross Training

I was originally looking at buying an elliptical for the house since the wonderful Florida summer is coming pretty quickly.  Soon it will be 80 degrees before the sun even rises.  However, in my search I also started to think about indoor bikes.  Of course those only go up in price so before I really invested time or money into a new machine I started to go to some of the indoor bicycling classes at my gym.

The first class was challenging, fun, and it was a lot of different sets so pretty interesting.  My quads definitely felt the burn.  The second and third classes were with a different instructor who really liked hills.  We did climbing intervals for pretty much the whole class.  However, his enthusiasm and encouragement was off the chart and I really enjoyed the class.  My legs burned even more, especially cause I was still able to increase my resistance on the bikes.

I was feeling all the classes for the whole day.  It was one of those, I'm definitely in pain, but it's a good pain type of feelings.  The most interesting thing is that I haven't been sore the next days.  My legs have been tired, but not sore.  I tried to run after the first class, and it was pretty rough because of how exhausted my legs were.  I am hoping to run tomorrow, but we will see how that goes...

I haven't decided if I'm going to buy my own bike and just sign up for online spinning classes or keep going to the classes at my gym.  Probably the biggest issue will be my schedule and how often I can get to a class.  This week I've had extra days to experiment, and now next week I work a lot.  We'll just have to see I guess...

Back At It... Again

I really need to stop having to re-train.  I know this last time wasn't completely my fault, well intentionally at least, but I'm sick of having to retrain and start at practically nothing again.  Luckily I managed to stay in shape a little bit with my time of the elliptical and workouts at home with Sworkit.

Of course, when I should have been getting back on the road, I ended up going on vacation back home in California.  So I had to deal with hills... lots of hills.  I did manage to get one short but decent run in and was rewarded with a pretty spectacular sunrise.

I finally adjusted back to east coast time this morning and managed to get back out on a run.  I really planned to do a 5k max because I didn't know how I was going to feel, I had a healing ankle (rolled it when I wasn't paying attention), and I did have to go to work... I did end up doing all 3.1 miles and I was proud of myself, but my endurance is definitely struggling.  The good news is that my speed has actually gotten better!  I managed a sub-9 minute mile pace while running and a sub 16-minute mile pace during my walks.  My ankle handled it well and I didn't feel sore at all at work.

It is definitely time to buckle down and get back into training.  Star Wars is next month so I have 8 weeks to get ready for a challenge weekend... I'm back to telling myself that I will at least finish (I can walk it), but I still want to do better than that.  So less than 8 weeks, but I can do it...