Friends and Rowing (or More Records In My Workouts)

Another great week of workouts for me! I’m seriously so happy that each week lately has been going pretty great for me. Even with the few setbacks I’ve experienced, overall I’d say that these workouts really are going better than normal and that I’m able to do a lot more than I’m used to. I hope this keeps being the trend for the next few weeks because I’m going to be getting in as many workouts as I can!

Monday’s class was promoted as a signature workout. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it pretty much means that it’s a workout that we’ve done before. This is a way that we can track out progress (like Peak Performance Week) and see what we have been able to do. I track my workouts on Evernote so I can see my progress all the time, but it was nice to have this workout as another way to track things. The format of the workout was a modified run/row. Each block started with a timed row and then we went to the treadmill to finish. The rows were 1 minute, 2 minutes, and 4 minutes. I had goals set for each one and the only one that I missed was the 1 minute one (I wanted to do 300 meters and only made it 299).

But I had set my 2 minute goal to be 500 meters (I did 504) and my 4 minute goal to be 900 meters (I did 933), so that is pretty incredible for me. It wasn’t that long ago that I thought of rowing as my weak point in my workouts. And while they aren’t as great as everything else, the improvements I’ve been making in rowing has been helping a lot. After those timed rows, I really wanted to run on the treadmill but my legs were having it. I ended up power walking the entire time doing my push paces at 8% incline and my all out paces at 10% incline.

Wednesday’s workout was an endurance day and as a surprise, JZ (who used to be the regular Wednesday coach) was coaching! I do miss seeing her on a weekly basis, so it’s nice when I’m surprised and get to have her as my coach. With the endurance workout, I know it can be tough for me to try to run as much as I would like, but I decided to test myself again. The first block started with a 4 minute progressive push pace. Each minute, we were supposed to increase our speed and I did go .2 mph faster each minute. It’s still a bit tough for me to run for 4 minutes, but it was good to test myself like that.

The rest of the first block and the entire second block were shorter push paces (between 1-3 minutes) and I walked all of my base paces so it wasn’t too tough to keep doing the run segments. I also ran all of the all out paces (as I pretty much always do)j and tried to bump up my speed as much as I could. I was able to do 2 miles on the treadmill in under 30 minutes which keeps giving me hope that I can do another PR at my 5K in about 2 weeks.

On the floor, both blocks started with a 700 meter row. I wanted to do that in under 3 minutes, and I was able to get that done both times and was able to get faster the second time I tried!

The first block also had squats and single leg deadlifts. I usually do single leg stuff as double leg stuff because my balance isn’t so great, but I gave the single leg deadlifts a try (with lighter weights than I usually use) and was happy to see that they weren’t as tough as I expected. I had to keep putting my back foot down to get my balance again, but as long as I took my time I was able to get them done. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do a lot of balance work after surgery (that involved using my core and I know I’ll be restricted on ab work), but this is a good sign that maybe I can keep working on balance stuff later this year.

Friday’s workout was a mix of endurance, strength, and power and was a run/row day. And I also had a friend (Elizabeth, who was with me cheering on marathon runners) taking her first class ever that day! I love having friends join me for class, and a lot of them are signing up for memberships so I get to keep seeing them in class! Elizabeth started on the floor when I started on the treadmill, so we didn’t get to work out next to each other, but I could tell she was having fun.

The run/row format was a tough one. It was a .15 miles all out pace run at 15% incline and each round you brought the incline down 2%. I might have been able to do a little bit of running at that incline, but I didn’t want to overdo things because I knew I would have the Dri-Tri the next day (spoiler for a post coming up later this week!). I ended up power walking all of the treadmill segments but I did bump up my speed a bit more than I normally do so I could make sure that I was getting into the right heart rate zone.

The run/row felt really long this time and I was really glad to be switching over to the floor. We had 3 blocks on the floor this time each. The first block was some weight work with squats, strap work with chest presses, and body weight work with running man and hip bridges. The second block was all work on the BOSU ball with doing arms and ab work. And the last block was all medicine ball work with squats and lunges. It wasn’t an easy class, but I felt super accomplished when I was done. And I think that Elizabeth liked it too and she’ll be coming back to try another class next week!

As I spoiled earlier in this post, I did the Dri-Tri on Saturday (which I’m counting as my 4th workout in the week). But because that’s something special and not really a regular workout, that will get its own post later this week!

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