Good morning 🙂

Sorry (again) about the smushed together catch up post thingy, but I am just emerging from underneath a horrible cough/cold/ear/throat infection thingy… It is the second cold this month and as such has annoyed me a lot! I has so far managed to stop me doing body pump and a park run and PT!

It didn’t stop me doing my daily work out…but it made me nearly want to…not good! So without further ado (or complaining…) this is what I got up to..

Day 238 (Friday)

Friday, after work I sat in the gym/park car park arguing with myself about going for a run in the torrential rain / 35mph winds…

I won 😉

That is to say, the part of me that said…it is very windy, raining and you have a sore throat and earache won…

so I went home and did one of my newly arrived Jillian Michaels DVDs.

6 Week 6 Pack to be exact…mainly because I hadn’t done it yet and I thought some core strengthening would fit in with the climbing etc that I have been doing recently..

It turned out to be quite challenging in places, I still can’t do a side plank no matter how strong my core seems to get…although give me time and I will get there! It was basically 2 goes round a quite long circuit which involved lots of different core exercises. they were not just endless crunches mind you…there were aerobic/core exercises (plank jacks, mountain climbers, burpees) interspersed with strength/core exercises (side planks with a knee twist, single/double leg raises) and standing core exercises (standing crunches, side bend lungey things) and many more that I have temporarily blocked from my memory…

I will add the same caveat tp this DVD that I have to all the rest…it is good, it will work, but it is better if it isn’t the only exercise you do 🙂 (and no…I do not think that in 6 weeks time I will have a 6 pack…too much to get rid of from on top of the muscle for it to go away in 6 weeks…but it is a start 🙂 )

Day 239 (Saturday)

Saturday morning should have  been my inaugural park run with my friend Lisa. However, I was still feeling like I had a cold coming on along with a sore throat and earache and to top that off the wind speed was likely to be 40 mph so I decided to postpone this run until later. I promptly spent a large amount of the rest of the day asleep.

Later in the day, I woke up and felt better, so I decided I would risk going for a run (I had some guilt because I had bailed out on Lisa and now I was running, but I had slept a lot of extra hours in between and the wind had dropped completely…also the non-pressure of it not being a park run meant that if necessary I could turn it into a walk…

Anyhow…after my disappointment with the first 10k trainer app, I decided to try out a second one…I found one by Redrock apps which was purple and had other features that made me think it would suit me better…not least of which was the runs,a although they involved short intervals at first were all 40 mins or longer rather than 25 mins 🙂 The other major advantage was the gps tracking it provided…
Look there it is, with its deceptively easy looking intervals and its plethora of lovely data! It even shows me on the map which bits I ran and which bits I walked 😀

The run actually went better than I expected 😀 I could complete the intervals pretty easily and because it was a nice long run (time-wise) I managed to get 2 episodes of Zombies run! completed in one go.

OK…that is not strictly speaking true…I had to extend the run by 5 mins to finish the last episode…but I managed that too and so I consider the whole thing a success! On to day 2 😀

Day 240 (Sunday)

Woohoo Sunday was Pilates day!

After all the strength training I ended up doing this week, my Sunday reset was very well received 😀

I just about managed all of the exercises at an advanced level, but I could really feel that I had done a lot this week! I was feeling slightly better from the cough/cold sore throat thing though so at this point I couldn’t tell if I was ill or just tired…

I do, at this point have to confess to a less than ladylike, less than demure moment in the pilates class. An incident which, I am sure I was the only person to find hilarious… I have no idea whether this says more about me or the other people in the class…

It all started with a shoulder bridge.

we were holding the little squishy balls between out knees, and Sarah gave instructions for the one legged option, but accidentally gave instructions for option b (over there) rather than option a. (no that wasn’t the funny bit…) she rapidly corrected herself, saying you can’t raise you bent leg of you are using the ball…there would be balls flying everywhere! which I found endlessly amusing and nearly fell over out of my  bridge… I shortly realised that no one else found this remotely funny and pulled myself together…

Ok…just me then…maybe you had to be there…

sorry…

awesome pilates class anyway 😀

Day 241 (Monday)

By Monday morning, it had become abundantly clear that I was actually ill and not just tired…I was coughing and sputtering and so dizzy I couldn’t actually walk…

So…I stayed in bed, slept a lot and didn’t get much better 😦

I was determined to go to Body Pump, I was dressed and ready and loaded up on stemitil and actifed and everything…

and 7:55 rolled around…and I was supposed to be leaving…when I realised I was far too bleugh to be doing body pump…and not really safe to drive any where…

grrrr!! first body pump class missed since it started in September! grrr!!

I really really wanted just to stop for the day…but I there was no way I was letting a little cough /cold thing stop me so I did a short work out at home:

Press ups – according to app (7, 6, 6, 5, 3) with standing leg raises / standing crunches in the breaks
squats according to the app (24, 16, 15, 16) with lunges (10 per leg) in the breaks
3×10 bridges
3×10 per leg single leg straighten thingies
I then attempted sit ups only to realise that this made me very dizzy and had to be picked up off the floor by my husband and put back on the sofa…

Not the best ending to not the best work out…but it was something…

Day 241 (Tuesday)

Tuesday was the day  I learned that running with a cough/cold/infection-y thing is hard work and it makes me slow…

It was late in the day, I had spent a lot of time sitting or asleep and my legs needed me to do something energetic…

 

So I wrapped up against the cold and set off on an intrepid adventure to embark on my 2nd go at 10k training using the more successful of the two apps.

ok..I might have over sold it a little bit there…but it was cold and I did do running.

The second session of the was 46 mins long with more running than the last session. I didn’t find it as easy as the last time, which considering there was only about 3 mins (or so) more running was probably not due to sudden escalation in difficulty. I can only assume that coughing, not being able to breathe properly and having no energy at all probably didn’t help my performance at all!

However, I completed it as proscribed and managed to do another 2 missions on zombies run 🙂 so all in all I think it was a pretty good work out considering 😀

Th other thing I learned was that my gym trousers are not thick enough for running in winter! I have been using my thermal running tights a lot recently but they were in the wash. Sadly, it was too late to do anything about it by the time I had figured that out…and I had very cold leggies! a fact that probably didn’t help my speed much…

Not all the best workouts I have done, but I managed one whether I wanted to or not 😀

Say days 238 – 242 complete 😀