04122019 – CrossFit

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I don’t want to give up my Friday time at Solcana, the PSE Pro training plan has Friday as a Sport Specific Strength and Conditioning Workout. I need to do a better job at the beginning of the week in mapping out the plan for the week so I can move workouts around better. I also need to do a better job of getting up and out in the mornings for a workout too! Solcana doesn’t publish the workouts until 8pm the night before, but I do now know the strength schedule will be squats on Friday and Power Snatches on Saturday.

The warm-up was Kettlebell windmills, swings, and jumping lunges.

Strength was Back Squats and Pause Back Squats. We slowly worked our way up to the working weight and then did 4×4 it was supposed to be around 80%. I got to 155#’s and felt that was weight for the day. Then we dropped a bunch of weight and did squats with a 2 second pause at bottom and a 2 second pause just above parallel each rep. I did these at 115#’s. It was supposed to be around 60%. 80% for me is 165 and 60% is 123. I haven’t squatted since January and nothing consistent since last summer so that isn’t too surprising.

We then did a partner workout which was simple, but was a 14 minute AMRAP of waiter walk and weighted lunges with the same kettle bell. I used the 35# one. I can get the 53#’s up and locked out but would have struggled to maintain it throughout. I ended with 5 complete rounds and Rica finished us out with a few lengths on the waiter walk and she started first so we had a total of 10 rounds and a few reps.

04112019 – CrossFit

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Snow day… We ended up with a snow day today!! I had planned on running, but couldn’t get out of bed in time and it was a mess outside with 4 or 5 inches of fresh heavy snow and some drifts and ice. We probably could have had school, but I think it was a wise decision to be safe. Since today was a scheduled run day and because I had biked on the last run day, I felt like I should do a Strength and Conditioning workout instead of the bike trainer. For simplicity sake I’ll continue to call these CrossFit workouts because they are essentially that with the same format and theory base.

Today’s workout required overhead work so I brought up my barbell and weights and did the workout in the little entry way between the dining and living rooms! I ended up scribbling the workout on some junk mail: 

The Strength was 4 rounds of 2 strict press, 3 push press, and 4 push jerks. I warmed up and did the workout with 65#’s on the bar.  I finished the conditioning workout in 10:45.  For the jump rope I did single unders and just doubled the number.  This was supposed to be PSE Gear 1-4 which essentially means not open mouth breathing. Haha… I tried that but didn’t make it through the first round!  

It was nice to get a workout done and not to leave home on a snow day. 

04092019 – Bike

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Another nice morning for a bike commute. I’m glad I have a reason to add bike commuting to my schedule! So 5.5 easy-ish paced miles to work.

After work was the first ride with my bike class. I have 4 kids in the class who don’t know how to ride so a co-worker and I took them out during the day to the basketball and tennis courts and worked with them. One kid was just needing the final push to do it so we just held her seat and boom she got it pretty quick. The other 3 were more at the beginning level so we took the pedals off the bikes and had them stride. One bike I could only get the 1 pedal off so she did her best. (I was able to get it off once we got inside). We really only ended up with less than 45 minutes to practice. When it came time to ride after-school I asked the girl who just got it if she was going to ride with us or stay back and practice some more. She told me she was going to practice but changed her mind and joined us. As expected she was a little slower than the group but she had a great time until we did some small hills on the way back! As a group we rode just over 2 miles to the nearby regional park. The kids had an awesome time and we did a little exploring.

On the way home I decided to spice up the ride a little bit and did some sprint intervals basically a fartlek on the bike. After every street crossing on Victory Memorial Parkway I sprinted for an increasing number of light poles before getting back into a relaxed pace. I obviously got several segment PR’s this way but still wasn’t riding super fast.

At home my little guy was wanting to ride so we did a little ride. He wanted to go down the hill but not come back up it! So we went down the Washburn hill and rode a few blocks around and found a less steep hill to come back up! We did just over a mile.

This was about a 13 mile day on the bike.

04072019 – Bike

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There was a chance of rain off and on all day today!! Good news, both kids are now riding their bikes without training wheels!! I had the opportunity for a longer ride and was going rain or shine so I was happy to get it done without any rain!

Some wind on the way out which meant that heading East I had a nice tailwind. I took Wirth Parkway to Cedar Lake Trail and then East on the Midtown Greenway. A man and woman were on my tail and passed me around the Bde Maka Ska and so when they went around me I decided to tuck in with them. We were hitting 20+ mph and I was trying to stay out of their spray but still stay close enough to benefit from their slipstream. I stayed with them from the lakes up and over the Sabo Bridge. Then they slowed down so I went around them and hit the River Road all the way back to Plymouth. Going through downtown was a little crowded with all the Final Four tourists. I hit a couple of PR’s on River Road one of which was coming up the hill from the Flats to downtown. That is a tough hill but not one of the steeper ones.

The ride was almost 25 miles in about 1:40. It felt good!

04062019 – Run

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Today was the first time trial of the season. A 6K Time Trial that was supposed to be treated as a race. It was a little hard to build it up that way, but I did put out good overall effort. I actually slept in which was really nice! And was able to get the run in between periods of rain. It misted a little bit, but not too bad. It was around 46f. I finally switched my watch to kilometers and set up a 6k interval. I didn’t have a specific course laid out, but thought that I could add bits and pieces here and there to the loop around Wirth lake from home which is approximately a 5k.

After the warm-up I increased my pace and tried to hold it steady. I wandered around a little bit but ended up basically running the same route as yesterday which was my own fault but a little annoying! My overall 6K time was 31:30 which was slower than I thought it would be but I’ll take it and build from here. This was 8:27 per mile average.

Overall distance was 5.09 miles in 47:41.