Monday
A lot of TOFP, especially in my left foot. I rolled, massaged, and stretched the Dickens out of my lower legs, got rid of most of it, but didn't get rid of it completely until I massaged my ITB later in the afternoon while stretching out my hammies. I felt immediate relief in my feet as I dug my fingers into the band, wiggling them back and forth vigorously as I worked my way up and down it. The tightest spot was up close to my hip. "The hip bone's connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone's connected to the shin bone, the shin bone's connected to the foot bone, .... " er, something like that, right? Amazing how something half a body up can influence pain in the foot.
I think the tofp might be caused by having switched to more of a forefoot landing in my left foot. The landing's become pretty automatic now, but perhaps the muscles and tendons are still adjusting?
Monday afternoon
One-mile run-commute
24F/-4.44
12F/-11.11C
Then Bottom/Top Strength training. Felt a little electric twinge in my right knee cap at 285lbs with the trap bar deadlifts. Shut it down. Dang. Wanted to take the trap bar DLs up over 300 for the first time. The rest of my lower body felt primed. I blew off most of the rest of my workout, as it included a lot of what I did in Friday's Top/Front session. This is because I refined the new two-zone workout schedule from last week. Now the four workouts are Bottom/Top, Front/Back, Top/Bottom, and Back/Front. Each zone has two different sets of exercises, so that no one exercise is done more than once a week, and each zone set has a slightly different point of emphasis from the other set in that same zone, based on the set's initial heavy lift.
Tuesday morning
One-mile run-commute
13F/-10.5C
3F/-16.11C wc
Brrr. A new windchill low for the season. Invigorating! A little later I did my new conditioning routine, which is undergoing constant tweaking in these initial stages of deployment. My adjustable plyo box came on Monday. I had to stare at it for a moment before I got up the courage to jump 14". I didn't want to be an jacka$$ and break something on this aging body. But I jumped up just fine, and again, and again, . . . . Wow, what a great lower body exercise! Then I did a few versions of step-ups and moved on to the other stuff.
As a corruption of HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training), I'm calling my new conditioning routine MINT, or "Medium Intensity Non-interval Training," or maybe it should just be MIC, for "Medium Intensity Conditioning." Still not sure if this is going to be an everyday thing or an every-other-day thing, but it's definitely a good thing.
I now have a full set of conditioning gear--medicine ball, adjustable plyo box, decline sit-up bench, ankle weights, "power wheel" (which is an ab wheel with foot pedals), and wobble board--in my office for doing 10-20 minutes of MINT as soon as I arrive in the morning. That, together with the 9-to-10-minute run-commute I have getting here, gives me about 20-30 minutes of fasted cardio first thing in the morning. I've always meant to do more of this stuff, but could never motivate to do it as part of my lifting routines, nor before or after a run. Separating it from my running and lifting workouts and doing it first thing in the morning seems to be the way to go.
Tuesday afternoon
One-mile run-commute.
26F/-3.33C
20F/-6.7C wc
Then Front/Back ST. My left shoulder is still a little gimpy, so went low weight, high reps on the bench, then did a lot of cable pulldowns (wide, neutral, and chin-up grips) and biceps curls, which didn't bother my shoulder at all. I tried inverted rows. Damn, those puppies are hard. It's going to take some time to get proficient at those.
Then I did one mile of 100-meter sprints down on the jhs track on my way heading out to pick up the kids. I was looking forward to doing my sprints now that the field has dried out from last week's snow-sogginess. I had forgotten that since then, we've had a lot of sub-freezing lows. The ground had become very hard and bumpy, made worse by the teeming dirt-turds created when the field was aerated two weeks or so ago. I had to reduce speed a bit to make sure I wouldn't twist an ankle, and the cold grass provoked a pretty rapid numb-plunge. One mile's worth of that pleasant abuse was all I was good for. That'll probably be it for track work I guess, until next spring. Will have to start doing my sprints up in the fairgrounds. I'm convinced doing sprints once a week is a must now.
Later I realized that my electric massager could be used on other parts of my body besides the legs. Doh! That seemed to help the shoulder a lot.
Wednesday morning
One-mile run-commute
22F/5.5C
13F/-10.5C wc
My soles feel a little beat up from the sprints yesterday. Still, managed a decent pace cuz I wanted to get back inside as soon as possible.
