My Last Workouts of Being 31 (or 174 Workouts)

This past week of workouts was intense for me. The workouts were harder than they have been in a while (several people said that so it’s not just me), I finally did 4 workouts again in a week after several weeks of only 3 workouts, and I pushed myself harder than ever to celebrate my last 4 workouts of being 31.

This week had a bunch of run/row days. I personally like those because I’m not a huge fan of the treadmill. So when it’s a run/row day, you don’t spend as much time as usual on the treadmill. During the run/row days, we sometimes have longer treadmill segments, but sometimes we have sprints. And on Monday we had sprint segments. Those short segments were perfect for me to test out if I could bump up the speed a bit more on the treadmill.

I was able to do several of those run segments at 3.8 and 3.9 miles an hour. And for one I did it at 4.0 miles an hour, but that was starting to hurt me and make my heart rate up too high so I brought it down a bit. I’m still struggling with increasing my base pace, but it’s nice to know that I’m able to get sprints in a bit. I think that since 4.0 seems to be too fast for me (at least for now), I really want to try to focus on stepping up my base pace. That is important for me to do in order to increase my 5K time. I’ve got about 3 months before my next race, so I’m feeling like it’s time to get more into training mode.

Besides progress on the treadmill, I finally was able to make some improvements with my strength workout! I know I’ve been talking about hoping to do that for awhile, I just was too scared to do it. I’m still using the same weights for many of my strength exercises, but I’m definitely experimenting a bit with the heavier weights. I finally had a chance to use the heavier ones on Saturday. We had a strength block were all the exercises were 6 reps each. That’s nothing. Especially when in the block before it there were 20 reps each. So since the rep count was so low, I knew that this was my chance to work with the heavier weights.

For my pullovers (when you lay on the weight bench with your arms behind you and pull your arms up toward your stomach) I usually was using 15 pound weights. But we were encouraged to go for it and see what we could do. I went for 25 pound weights. It was tough and my arms were shaking, but I did it! I wasn’t able to do the bicep curls with the 25 pound weight, but just doing it for the pullovers was better than nothing.

And finally, this week I did my last workouts of being 31. I celebrated turning 31 at Orangetheory last year. That was at the beginning of my Orangetheory journey. I added up how many workouts I did between that birthday and this birthday. And as you can guess from the title of this post, I did 174 workouts. I was shocked by that number. I had set a goal of doing 175 workouts in 2015. That goal was set after my birthday (obviously since my birthday is in August and I set that goal in January). So the first few months of the last year of workouts was before that goal was set, and therefore before I really starting tracking my workouts. Even without tracking for those few months, I still was only 1 workout away from what I now have as my 2015 goal. That makes me think that maybe my goal was set too low.

I think that those 174 workouts were amazing. I think I’ve made some serious progress in my fitness and I think that others are able to see it as well. I’m seriously so beyond grateful that I found my workout home at Orangetheory. I love that the people who work there are awesome and that they care about the people who work out there (and not just because they are paid to).

So that’s the end of my workouts as a 31-year-old. Now to see what great things I can accomplish in my workouts as a 32-year-old!

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Some Holiday Workouts (or Back On The Treadmill This Week) Back To 4 Workouts (or More Rowing!) A 4 Workout Week (or Only A Few More Weeks Of 2015 Workouts) Thanksgiving Workouts (or Getting My Family Involved) Birthday Workouts (or Just Having A Good Week Of Workouts) My Last 3 Workouts Of Being 30 (Realizing I’m Stronger Than I Thought)