Weekly Update

Training

I had a pretty successful week of training and got all my workouts in, with a few minor adjustments.  It was a miserable week of weather with a severe cold snap that gave us highs of -14C to -18C  (0F), wind, and snow, and a wind chill of -30C.  Needless to say, I did my two weekday runs on the treadmill. 

Mon - Trainer for 60 min
Tues - Treadmill for 45 min and 3X12 reps on 7 upper body machines.
Wed - Unplanned rest day - tired. Decided to ride trainer on Friday.
Thur - Treadmill 45 min and 3X12 upper body weights again
Fri - Trainer 60 min
Sat - 90 minute run outside
Today - I'm heading to the gym in a while to swim and do all weights.

By yesterday, the cold snap had broken and although we had a dump of snow on Friday night, I drove down to Gyro Park to run along Abbott and the boardwalk. It was pretty messy and slow going until I hit the bike/walk path which had been ploughed and then it was easier, although a little slippery which slowed my overall pace.  The air temperature was a balmy 0C so the run itself was quite lovely.

Since the previous week's run had only been an hour (instead of the planned 75 min), I was making a fairly big jump so ran easy and took planned one minute walk breaks every 20 minutes or so. In addition, I had to walk frequently when moving back and forth from the road to sidewalk in some sections where the sidewalks had not been cleared.

My Newtons are pretty useless in snow because of poor traction and open mesh in the uppers so I wore my Pearl Izumi Peak XC trail shoes.  They have much better traction and are very comfortable but my shins are a little sore today because I haven't worn these shoes for a long time and my legs don't like switching shoes very much. I'm hoping that I'll feel fine for my short runs this week. If not, I'll only do one mid-week run.

This upcoming week has some challenges that will force me to move my workouts around somewhat because I have after-school appointments on Tuesday and Thursday which are my usual running days.  I'm going to try to move my runs to Mon/Wed but I'll to wait and see how my legs feel on Monday.  If they're still sore, I may do the elliptical instead and only run on Wednesday. Tuesday will have to be my rest day because I'm busy all day right up until I get home at 9:30pm.  Other that than, I plan to ride the trainer for an hour 2 nights this week and hit the gym for upper body work once of twice.


Strength Work

I've been pretty dedicated to using the new machines at the gym for the past 5-6 weeks and I've been showing some progress and starting to feel stronger. I've been able to increase the weight on all of the machines at least once since I started. The struggle has been with the lower body workouts.  I found that if I do lower body weight training on the same day that I run, I am sore for several days after and have trouble doing my next run.   If I do lower body weights on alternate days, I'm still sore the next day and it affects my run (and no, the weights are not too heavy).

I tried something different this week - since I was the the gym for the treadmill anyway, I did all of the upper body machines right after my run so that I was at least getting strength work in.  Today, my plan is to do all the machines after my swim as usual, which includes the single and double leg press, walking lunges, step ups, and leg extensions. Since my legs are a little sore from my run yesterday, I'm hoping today's workout doesn't further impact my upcoming runs.  I keep hoping I will get to a point where I will have built up my strength enough that a workout will not have a serious affect on my running. It just goes to show how weak I am in some areas of my hips/glutes.

Diet

My diet sucked this week.  I was too busy/lazy to record my calories and subsequently my diet suffered.  I tried to eat reasonable portions and stay away from crap but there were several times when I made bad choices.  All it takes is an extra 100-200 calories a day to mess up my weight loss plan and I suspect when I weigh in tomorrow, I'll be up a half pound, instead of down a full pound.

Therefore, I'm committed to counting calories all week, and in addition, I'm going to cut back my cals another 100 per day to 1500 since it looks like even with training 45-60 minutes a day, 1600 calories is maintenance, not weight loss.  Eating only 1500 calories a day will be hard for me but I can do it.

For the past 2 weeks, I've planned out the week day dinners and have done all my shoppoing and food prep on Sunday.  I've found this has REALLY helped keep my organized and on track. I've been recording what we have for dinner each night on my iCloud calendar so now it's nice to look back to get ideas for the upcoming week.

And so another week begins - I hope your training is going well!