Weeks 19 & 20, 2014: Week of the princess & back on track.

Week 19 was the week leading to the Princess-y Cinderella race. Even with the race coming up I still wanted to fit in a hill run on Tuesday but my shins were hurting so I ended up not running that day at all and only doing two easy runs on Wednesday and Thursday. Still my shins were giving me trouble just before the race so it was quite surprising to see that the race actually went pretty well. With the race being the highlight of the week, not much more I can say, except for directing you to the race write-up for details.

With race on Saturday, I took Sunday off but the following Monday I was already on the move. That might have been a bit too early as on Tuesday I could hardly walk and had to take a day off :)... but then I followed up with three easy runs on three following days.

By the way for those of you wondering what does "CPro" label next to weight training means (yeah, yeah, I know you guys and I know you like to study my weekly calendar in detail and wonder about just such things ;), let me explain. I joined a new gym few weeks ago. The selling point is that they have machines that look as if they were taken straight from one of the Transfromers movies. They have moving parts that adjust to any exercise from a large pool of supported movements. Moreover, the machines are smart enough to compose (supposedly intelligently) your workouts, choosing exercises, reps and resistance; tracking your progress and adjusting future plan accordingly. You can see such a beast here.

All this sounds really great in theory and I'll admit there are benefits to coming to the gym and not having to think at all, just doing whatever CPro tells you to do. However, with this vast amount of data that they collect during your workouts (certainly a selling point for me) they are doing a really bad job (so far) at sharing this data with trainees in interesting way (or in any ways at all). So jury is still out on whether I'm going to stay there or not.

Although they do some other interesting stuff. For instance this week was the first week of the Mt. Everest challenge. The idea is that we were split into teams of around 10 people and every day for 3 weeks we can climb on vertical climbers. The winner is the team that reaches the cumulative height of Mt. Everest with the fastest average pace (I won't go into details but the rules are a bit more involved than that and in effect there's even a strategy component to the game). But the really interesting part is how bloody tiring climbing on those things is. I was doing it every day, each time for around 1 minute and it is comparable to a 200 meter sprint; after finishing the effects range from not being to stand due to jelly legs all the way to feeling like puking from the effort ;).

Back to running... Saturday was a full day trip, including a ferry ride and a very nice hike, to Angel Island. And on Sunday I was exploring El Corte de Madera, a very nice park recommended by a friend. Finally a proper, long weekend run like in good ol' times!

So in the end a week with 5 runs and a total of 90+km (or well over 100, if counting the hike); really awesome for a week following a 50k race! Let's hope I can keep this up because it's time to start training for Chimera...

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