weekend workouts

Did 4 miles around Greenwood cemetery yesterday. Didn't go so well, even though the weather was perfect. Lungs were pretty rough and I was coughing up quite a bit. Legs, too, were tight and sore. So the run was slow, with lots of walking. I was disappointed.

Today's workout was in the gym, with 25 minutes on the elliptical and about 45 minutes lifting weights. The elliptical was normal until I saw "pedal backwards" flash across the readout. So I tried that. Immediately my heart rate shot up and stride rate dropped. It's pretty hard! Very interesting. But I didn't want to do a long, intense cardio workout, just a short one, so that was only 25 minutes. I moved on to weights - haven't lifted in two weeks. I've been concentrating on my upper body and have developed a routine with the machines and free weights that I like a lot.



There is a certain degree of difficulty to some of the machines, like the one pictured above, that's unexpected. Even though they restrict to one axis of movement, the arms move independently, rather than each side being tied together. This increases the difficulty as each arm has to do its own work. (Picture is 40 pounds each side. tried 45, but couldn't quite handle eight reps with that.) Got a real lesson today in just what each arm's realtive strengths are. By the end of my workout, my hands and arms were shaking and I could barely hold my water bottle. When I reach that point, I'm done.

I need to start working some more abs work and some legs work (any at all) into my weights routine. There was a time I could do 45 situps with a ten-pound weight held across my chest on an inclined situp - not anymore! Maybe I can get back to that. I need more core stability for running.

So now I'm sitting here finishing up this post, listening to Academy Awards red carpet dog and pony show, drinking a scotch, and worrying about my Vectorworks class tomorrow. We're a little behind, but not as bad as I'd feared. Given that, I'm not going to move on to the next project yet. I'm going to drill them on some exercises with some 3D commands, demo how to finish their homework for the week, and assign them the last touches to the course titleblock.