This past week of workouts were pretty tough for me. I was dealing with a lot of nausea the entire week (even with expecting it to happen, it still took a toll on me). I modified things as much as I could, but some of the workouts just weren’t designed for someone nauseous to be doing them. But I pushed through as much as I could. And I will say that one thing that helped me a lot was that we had a lot of rowing. Rowing isn’t the easiest thing for me when I am nauseous, but getting to work on it this past week has made it so hopefully in the future it will be a bit better.
Monday’s class was a mix of strength and endurance and unfortunately I was having a pretty bad nausea day. I think this nausea was a mix of the usual hormonal factors but also stress and other emotional things happening in my life. I hated that I felt so gross that morning, but as always when I’m nauseous I was just ready to do what I could do and be happy with that.
The cardio portion of the workout was a run/row format (so bike/row for me). Every round we did more on the bike and rower starting with a .4 trip on the bike and a 100 meter row (for people on the treadmill, it was a .1 mile run). Then each round I added .4 on the bike but every .4 I added resistance. And every time on the rower I added 100 meters. Considering how I was feeling, I was actually impressed with what I did. I only had to take a break once during a bike ride, the rest of my breaks were as I was switching from the bike to the rower. And I was able to increase the resistance every time I was supposed to. Both my pedaling and rowing were slower than normal, but I still got it done.
On the floor, we had 3 blocks. The first block had single arm low rows, squats to single arm high rows, and leg lifts to crunches. For the single arm low rows and single arm high rows, I was able to use my heavier weights. I seem to use heavier weights on my nausea days to make up for any issues I had with cardio. I tried to do the leg lifts to crunches but after halfway through the reps I had to split the moves into 2 parts instead of doing them together. But I did them. The second block was goblet lunges, lunges using the bench for one leg, and side plank pendulum. And while I normally can’t do the lunges using the bench for one leg, since I was going extra slow I was able to get my balance and do them. And the last block was a core blast with alternating toe reaches, crunches, sit-ups, and leg lifts.
Wednesday’s workout was a strength based day with a benchmark row. But unfortunately, my nausea got much worse and I was feeling pretty miserable. Because I’m so competitive with myself, I hate when a benchmark event happens when I know I can’t do my best. But I figured I would do what I could and see what happens.
For cardio, I was on the bike. Fortunately even though I was feeling awful I was able to do some decent work using the resistance on the bike. We had a couple of different 30 second hills (or high resistance for the bike) and I was able to go higher than my normal push or all out resistance on the bike. I rarely go higher than level 10, but this time I was doing a lot of those 30 second hills at level 12. So at least I got to feel a bit accomplished.
The benchmark row was a 500 meter row. I know that my record for it is very fast and I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to get close to it. I really wanted to be able to do my row in under 2 minutes, but I also knew that was going to be pushing it. I tried to ignore the 500 meter split time on the monitor because it was driving me crazy. Instead I focused on trying to keep my speed steady. I have the Dri-Tri coming up soon and I know working on being at a consistent pace is something that will help me. My rowing was pretty steady for the first 400 meters and then I went crazy for the last 100 meters. I know I overdid it at the end, but I really just wanted to feel like I tried my hardest. I did the row in 2:07 which isn’t my worst and close to my goal for the day. But I really would have loved to have been under 2 minutes.
For the rest of the floor work, we had a lot of work with weights. We had deadlifts, front raises, lunges with weights, and pull overs. I was able to use my heavier weights for all of those. We also had sit-ups and half get ups for ab work. For the half get ups I did one round with my normal weights but at the end I had to go with a set lighter for the second round. But considering ab work is tough on bad nausea days, I was happy I could use any weights for those.
Friday was a 3 group workout so I knew it would be another class with a lot of rowing. But I was hoping it would be all short rows. But that wasn’t what the class had.
For the cardio, I was on the bike and I did manage to use my resistance levels like I normally would. It was a strength based workout so the treadmills had inclines and I had extra resistance to work with. I did have to take some breaks on the bike to let the nausea pass, but it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting it to be considering how I felt that morning when I woke up.
On the rower, we had all long rows. The first row was 1,000 meters. Since the Dri-Tri is only a week away I should have been excited for a good practice row. But it was just tough to try to keep going the entire time. Somehow I managed to not need to take any breaks during the row, but it was a pretty slow row too. After the row, we were supposed to have jumping jacks but I knew I couldn’t do those with my nausea so I did side lunges and some squats instead. Then it was a 500 meter row, more jumping jacks (or lunges and squats for me), and pulsing squats. I didn’t make it further down the row block because my rowing was slow.
On the floor, we had one long block. We had Y raises on the straps, lunges with weights, ab work, reverse flys, single arm snatches, and skaters. Fortunately, all the floor work was stuff that was ok for me to do with how I felt. The skaters were a bit tough because they can be a lot of up and down movement, but I modified them to be much smoother. I know I didn’t work as hard as I could have when I feel fine, but I was proud of myself for figuring out how to do things as work arounds.
Saturday’s workout was an interesting one, but it ended up being a pretty great class. I was still nauseous so I was still on the bike, but that actually worked to my benefit. It was a partner workout that had 2 blocks of partner work and 1 regular block in the middle.
For the partner work, I was partnered with a girl who was also using a bike for cardio but it turned out that it wouldn’t have mattered. I did feel a bit bad for having a partner who was going to be depending on me to make sure we switch quickly enough, but I found out that this was her first class back from a surgery so it worked out well that we were both not at our best.
The 2 partner blocks were the same, but for the first block I did bike and floor work (my partner did floor and rower) and for the second I did floor and rower (and my partner did bike and floor). The person using the cardio was the pacer and they were all pretty quick. I don’t think either of us was on the cardio for more than 2 1/2 minutes. For both the bike and the rower each time we were back the distance we had to go went down a bit. The rower started at 500 meters and went down 100 meters every time. And the bike started with 1.2 trips and went down .2 each time. I surprised myself with how well I did on both the bike and rower and I think my partner and I were very equally matched.
For the partner blocks the floor work was the same both times. We had burpees, half squat swings, overhead tricep extensions, sit-ups, and neutral full thrusters with weights. I tried using my normal weights for these and it was a bit of a struggle for the swings and triceps so I went down on the weight for those. And for the burpees I didn’t have the bench down so I couldn’t jump back and forth. The burpees were hard because they were making me feel more nauseous, but I was glad that the floor work wasn’t the pacer so I could take my time.
In the middle of the 2 partner blocks, we had a regular cardio and a regular floor block. For the cardio it was 3 rounds of push to all out paces with the push pace getting shorter each time. And on the floor we had squats, reverse mountain climbers, and plank arm reaches. It was a pretty short block for both that cardio and floor block so I didn’t feel too bad on them. I was glad to have them in the middle of the partner work to break things up, but it was better to be able to end the workout with the partner work because that seemed to end things on a higher note.
Hopefully my nausea will only affect the beginning of this workout week. Not only do I want it to end because I hate feeling nauseous, but I have the Dri-Tri on Saturday! I really want to do well on it and hopefully PR in at least one section of the challenge. But I also know that my endurance and strength isn’t quite what it was before so I have to work extra hard this week to get ready for it!
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