Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Hitting Your Ten

My usual cardio workout for the last few months due to my knee have been 20-30 minutes of running, stationary biking, or very rarely the elliptical (I'm not a fan). This is because of a few reasons:

1. My knee.
2. Time constraints.
3. My *()!$ knee.

The time constraints come from working out at lunch instead of before or after work. I do go after work on occasion, but we all know how easy it is to stay home once you actually get planted in front of your home computer or on the couch. Especially when it's -47C. Since I'm used to pumping out a 20 minute HIIT run or 30 minutes on the bike, I don't think much of it. When I'm done, I'm sweaty - that's the goal right?

Today I decided to essentially double up my workouts to see how my knee handled the bike to run transition (spoiler: poorly) since I'd like to do a triathlon in the spring. Normally, I get about 12km out of my 30 minutes (2 m 30sec per km). Today I did 10km in under 20 minutes (1m 57sec per km). Um, WHAT??

I wasn't even very tired as I jumped on the treadmill. I've been doing a 4/10 interval (four minutes walking, 10 minutes running) to try and appease the knee gods. As I finished up my second set of running, I realized I could definitely keep going; the only reason I didn't was my fear of what my knees will do to me tomorrow for doubling up, let alone adding a longer run on.

Obviously, I'm not coming anywhere CLOSE to hitting maximum exertion. No wonder my training is going so slowly. Once again I'm going to have to try and find a way to hit those tens without the Joint That Shall Not Be Named acting up.

2 comments:

  1. Great post E3!

    I love how the weather network is always like "It's -30, but it FEELS like -47". Guess what, that means it IS -47, jerkwads.

    Also, -47?! Living there should be illegal.

    I am also training for a tri (it is ON sister :P) and have been getting a great workout (read: destroying myself) at the pool. It's the best cardio I've found and is very low impact.

    Also, if you join a masters swim group (which is not too expensive, and all levels are welcome) they often have instructors on hand who can help with form. Which is great for me since my dog paddling puts me just this side of not drowning.

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  2. Good idea! I will look into that as I usually end up gasping (ironically?) like a fish on dry land because I can't figure out the damn breathing pattern despite years of lessons.

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