Mileage reporting 15th week 2014

4 miles on Thurday, 6.25 yesterday. Thursday's run was just to get a measure of how much the virus is gone, and yesterday's run was better than Thursday's. Now I'd just like to stay free of colds and get back to running regularly again. For a while there at the end of February and early March, I had built a lead over the 1,000 miles in a year pace bunny. As of this morning, I"m 18.4 miles behind. It's been a bad series of weeks thanks to weather and getting sick.
 
20.4 miles on the week. Didn't get in my planned long run on Saturday. Oh well. Didn't get in my final st workout either. Oh oh well. Or my second weekly plyo/mobility workout. Oh oh oh well.

Thursday afternoon. 1 mile run and then mid-back st. I moved my seated rows over to this workout. I had been doing all the cable stuff on the same day, but it makes more sense for the seated rows to be with the other rows of this workout. Helped me get a better pump. I also moved the rope pushdowns from the upper back day, where most of the cable exercises are, to the chest and arms day, where they belong. For a while I got too obsessed with minimizing equipment changes, to save time messing around, but my workouts are sufficiently pruned of low-yield exercises now that a little extra time setting up an exercise here or there isn't going to drag out the workout too much. Abide also introduced me to the concept of Pendlay rows, which are like normal bentover rows, which I do with my lat blaster bar and swivel platform, except you're allowed to return the plates to the floor after each rep. This means it's OK to jerk the weight at the onset of the movement, which means I can do more weight without feeling bad about letting my form get off and jerky. So now I'll do normal bentover rows at 150 lbs, 3-5 reps, and then a bunch of Pendlay rows at 200lbs. It's always nice when the solution to a problem is simply defining the problem out of existence!

Friday morning, 3.1 run, then afternoon run commute, then did my squats. I did 2 reps x 225 lbs and was on the second rep of another set, with plans to do a third, single-rep set 20lbs heavier, which would be a new PR, when my wife and son opened up the garage door. That got my form off a bit. I felt a little twinge in my right knee and decided to call it a day, and didn't pyramid down. No lasting effect, and I still was nice and sore the next day, especially in my glutes, so made some progress. And I still got in my overhead squats and good mornings. Overall, the squats are starting to feel pretty solid. I think I'm almost ready to push the weight a bit more. Scratch's idea of using saw horses as a safety net has been key to getting the squat weight up in the 1-2 rep range.

Like Dutchie, my morning runs would still qualify for Winter Challenge miles, but none of them are challenging anymore, mostly above freezing with the windchill going below it once in a while. The only challenge now is all grit that others have remarked upon. I'm getting pretty good at embracing it though, as I change from my snow-soles to more of a asphalt tread. The streets and sidewalks are usually lit enough that I can avoid the bigger stones and asphalt chunks.

Deepest sympathies. Distance makes it all the more difficult.
Those anecdotes paint quite the picture. Impressive lady.
Yah, but now my wife's told me that her mother said it was probably the cigarettes that killed her. I didn't realize she was a regular smoker. Her most endearing trait perhaps was her Makhuwa accent in Portuguese. They don't have voiced consonants and a few other differences like that, so a word like 'agora' (now) becomes 'akora.' She had great patience with my Makhuwa. Every time I said something wrong, I would tell her it was because I was speaking a different dialect.

It's fun reading your weather reports. You almost always get what we got 24-48 hours earlier. Our rain yesterday was just a sprinkle. I think I'm already ready to declare this the best spring ever. So nice after this last winter. Our three-year-old rode a bike with training wheels for the first time yesterday. Maybe this will spur his big sister to learn how to ride a bike without them.
 
I'm a few days behind:
-Tue/Wed: Surfing, running takes a back seat when the waves are good. Basketball game in the evening.
-Thur: Brought gear to work for lunch time run with a few others, but some schmuck called a lunch time meeting and I missed the run.
-Fri: My gear was still in the office, so I did 10km by myself at lunch time. It was raining a little, and I got to jump through a few muddy puddles. I was very cheery and up-beat all the way, for some reason. At one stage, I was running near a cafe and saw a little girl watching me from a table about 50m away, so I did a bit of a little wiggly finger wave at her, and at the same time two chicks that I had ran past earlier were coming down a set of stairs behind her and it probably looked like I was waving at them. Funny moment.
-Sat: Ran with my local running group - 7.5km in shoes for a change as they ran the gravel track. On the way back we ran along the beach and a wave washed up and soaked my shoes. I told them that was just another reason to go barefoot.
-Today: Nothin. Another rest day. I seem to have beaten my knee soreness from a couple of weeks ago, but I'm not taking too many chances. I'll head out tomorrow morning if I can make it out of bed.
 
4.4 miles this morning, easy pace. The strange thing was that HR says it was easier pace than the 6.25 yesterday, but in some ways yesterday's felt easier. I imagine my legs felt tired because of yesterday's run. But I also guess that the lower HR and slightly faster pace means that the body has made more progress in recovering from the latest virus. I'm not all the way back yet, but there's progress.

The other thing the colds did for me was cut back my appetite some. I've lost about 4 to 5 pounds the last 4 weeks.

Also did 4x8s hill sprints after this morning's run. I really ought to do them 1 to 2 times a week, but I've been terrible about that because of the winter weather and being sick with a cold 2 times in the past 4 weeks.