Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Wednesday gym

Body sculpt class. Not bad--at least this time I had more appropriate weights--good exercise, and certainly I am lazy about going to the gym for a serious workout on my own, so I think it is worthwhile--but I cringe inside at the parts that are the spiritual twin of 1980s-style aerobics, that is anathema to me....

Afterwards I went and did two easy miles on the indoor track at the gym, with a couple short fast laps in the second mile to break the tedium. (3 x 1/10 mile, to be precise.) It is amazing how that can transform my mood--I have been a sinkhole of negativity this past week, but just those couple short bursts of fast running have made me feel much more myself again. Good thing to remember....

(Time to dig out the running books and come up with some sort of notion of what kind of speed workouts might be appropriate? I don't want to go crazy with it, but it's very enjoyable--maybe just some casual stuff like that is good, but probably slightly longer stretches of faster running? 1/10 mile is not very long: next week I could try 1 mile warmup, 2 miles doing two laps fast and three slow for a total of four times through the cycle, 1 mile cooldown?)

3 comments:

Spokane Al said...

A sinkhole of negativity? I don't think so.

If you are looking for a great running related read for the mind I highly recommend Running and Being by the late Dr George Sheehan. He was a hero of mine and one of my favorite authors.

Becca said...

I LOVE 1/10 mile sprints--I do them in NY: two blocks sprint, two blocks walk. When I was training for my last marathon, I would do my 2.3 mile run fast once or twice a week--got it down to 16 minutes. And then at the end of my normal (1 hour) runs I would do short sprints. Then my long runs I did just normal. I cut 14 minutes off my time from my previous marathon.

Danielle in Iowa in Ireland said...

I do speed work on thursdays and our coach always has us to long intervals (800-1600 m) repeats since we are all distance training, not 5k training. Of course, just running up and down hills is good speed work too!