07232018 – Run

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Moving up to 600’s!! 4x600m workout on tap today.  Man I started out sluggish on the warm-up.  Sore and tired legs, but as the warm-up progressed they felt better! I went a little different way on my warm-up and got most of the first interval done on the mostly flat part of Wirth! And I tried to shorten up the route a little bit since I knew I’d be done early, but that didn’t really work and I had a long cool-down at the end.  Oh well.  600m didn’t seem too long actually, I guess having done 800’s helps with that, but I thought they would feel harder than they did.  I guess that means I could have taken them harder!   It was a nice cool morning for the run. The rest interval was 400m easy.

Here are the intervals:

2:56

2:55

2:53

3:07

Total was 4.77 miles in 49:49.

07232018 – CrossFit

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Unloading a trailer full of dirt (about 1 cu yd) right after CrossFit isn’t necessarily the best idea.  Especially after having loaded the said trailer the night before by the shovel load!  It wasn’t actually that bad, but I felt really tired afterwards.

Today’s warm-up included Banded Kettlebell Swings, Cossack Squats and Thoracic rotations in a straddle position.  The Banded Swings felt really weird as the Kettlebell kind of shot back down really quick.

Monday is Sumo Deadlift, so we added 10#’s to last week’s lift.  Today’s 155# tied my PR for the lift. We had only done it one other time outside of this cycle and that’s when I hit 155.  At that time a coach probably gave me a percentage of a traditional deadlift and that’s what I did.  155 felt heavyish but I didn’t have any trouble with the 5×7 workout.

The MetCon was a doozy.  Not a true chipper workout, but it sure felt that way!  The workout was:

30 Overhead Lunges with a 25# dumbbell

15 Pull-Ups

15 Toes to Bar

30 Overhead Lunges

15 Pull-Ups

15 Toes to Bar

30 Overhead Lunges

My toes to bar are a little shaky still so I was somewhere between Toes to Bar and Hanging Knee Raises. I got a couple correct, but struggled with continuing to kip for the T2B.  The lunges felt a little easy at 25#, but that felt good to be able to push through them.  The first round of pull-ups I did in sets of 5 and the second round in sets of 3. I think that my kip is getting better for the first 3, but after that it falls apart.  All in all, this was a tough workout.  My time was 10:53.

07222018 – Run

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On tap this morning was a 2 x 5K with 10 minutes of rest in between.  It was a nice cool-ish morning.  Theodore Wirth Park was abuzz with activity getting ready for an Adventure Triathlon.  I decided that the 4-ish miles of new event trails would be a good place to run.  They were marked for the race, but I tried to be careful and not step on any of the flour markings!

The event trails are primarily mountain bike trails, but they will be good for running on as well. This was my first look at the Karate Monkey section of the trails and they were nice. This is the harder section of trail due to some tight turns.  There is one section called something Spaghetti and that is a few tight twisty turns. This will be a fun section to get out on and ride sometime soon.  I had ridden the Area 36 trails before and took the quick return route, today I took the longer route. It isn’t any harder, just longer and winds back in to the quick return.  My 10 minute break was in the Area 36 trails.  I walked about 5 minutes of it and jogged the last 5 minutes.

After the event trails, I still had a lot of miles left so I ran down and cross Hwy 55 and ran the prairie loop I usually skip just northwest of the lake. I was basically trying to get as close to home as possible but still giving myself some cool down time.  It ended up working out pretty well.

The two 5K times were: 30:03 (9:42) and 28:35 (9:13).  Total mileage was 8.38 in 1:26 (10:16).

This picture is on one of the event trails.

07202018 – CrossFit

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Today’s accessory warm-up included bent hollow holds, single-unders, single leg dumbbell Romanian Deadlifts, and banded hip extensions.  This was a continuous 8 minute warm-up.  I’m liking these warm-ups!

Our strength portion for the day was an 8 minute EMOM of 5 second plank hold variation, slow lower, and 5 second hold at the bottom.  This looks “easy” but is actually hard to do, 8 times! My variation was using the rings (really low) and doing a ring plank hold.

The MetCon was a gasser though.  It was tricky since it included significant rest, but not really complete recovery. It was 3 rounds of 6 minutes with 3 movements. The score was your slowest round.  My Silver level movements were:

30 calorie row

20 alternating dumbbell snatch (25#)

10 deadlifts (135#)

I might have been able to increase the weights to the Gold Level, but this work was hurting at the end.  My slowest round ended up being my first.  My thought was to not kill it on the first round, but I could have gone a little harder.  My rounds were:

3:29

3:19

3:09 (after the last deadlift I just laid down on the floor for a minute!)

07192018 – Run

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I made a mistake when ordering something from Lowe’s.  Lowe’s isn’t super close to our house, but we get Discover Cash Back Reward cards for it, so that makes sense.  Instead of having the order delivered to Maple Grove where we usually go, it got delivered to West St. Paul.  It isn’t a huge difference in time to get to West Saint Paul, but it seems a lot further away. I was able to incorporate my visit there with a run at a new location.

Battle Creek Regional Park is a place that the kids and I visited once, but didn’t spend a ton of time at. It has some Mountain Bike and Cross Country Ski trails so I decided to go for my run there. Not having been there before I did some research and found this blog that offered a route to run. I read through their route once and proceeded to go for my run.  It didn’t make a ton of sense, but some of the parts stuck out to me as I started running.


The workout was 6×800.  I didn’t want to start my run by going up the sledding hill, so I made some random turns here and there in the “flat” section of the ski trails. I ended up going past the same point a few times once I entered the wooded area.  It was also hard to know if the single track I was on were Mountain Bike or hiking trail.  The ground was dry and I never saw any bikers, so it wasn’t a big deal.  Everything make more sense now having been there. I only made one real mistake and ended up on a dead end trail on private property.  The only other real error was during the cool-down I almost went on a long loop away from the parking lot. I wasn’t too worried about getting lost or anything as long as I got my workout in.

I never saw the view from the Bluff of downtown St. Paul, but I did see some cool views of the Mississippi River. There were plenty of hills on this one so the intervals really depended on whether it was more up or down!

4:39

3:41

4:44

3:50

4:50

6:12 (this one was uphill, I ran into the dead-end and almost vomited up a bug that flew into my mouth)

The total was 5.5 mile in 1:02.

This picture is from when the kids and I were there: