Marathon Pre-Training, Week 2

Another week done. 

This week's stats:

• 6.73 treadmill miles
• 5.71 outdoor miles
• 2 hours on the elliptical machine
• 3 weightlifting sessions
• 1 yoga class
• 0 pounds lost

Total pre-training stats:

• 2 weeks
• 15.60 treadmill miles
• 5.71 outdoor miles
• 3 pounds lost

No weight loss on the scale this week.  Just hanging out there at 212.  Disappointing, but I think there might be a hormonal reason for that.  I would blame it on us going to dinner at a friend's house last Saturday night and eating a bit too much, but going a couple hundred calories over goal one day can't possibly counteract the amount of high-intensity gym time we put in this week, so I'm figuring it's just a timing thing, if you know what I mean.

I got to go outdoors!  The weather has been beautiful and warm this week and the snow from the blizzard has all melted, and though it was windy, cloudy, and cool yesterday morning it was still great walking weather.  We headed out to a paved trail I hadn't tried before and walked an hour out, then turned around and walked back.  I walked with my girlfriend, so it was a slower pace than I would have gone alone, but at this point I'm not stressing over it.  I really didn't want to walk a new trail all alone, especially knowing that it went out into unpopulated areas.  Next time I think I'll try it alone so I can go faster.  I liked the trail, though.  Enough other people on the trail to make it feel safe, not enough to feel crowded.  It's certainly not somewhere I'd want to walk in the dark.  But it's nice and straight, so in the daylight you can clearly see if there is anyone ahead of or behind you on the trail for fairly long distances.

Little equipment plug:
I use miCoach on my Blackberry to track my outdoor walks, and I'm impressed with how much data it gathers for a free app.  I'm all for investing in good equipment when it's necessary, but not if you can get the same functions cheaper or free, so having a free app that tracks my route, maps it for me, tells me how fast I'm going and such in real time, and gives me access to all sorts of stats about speed over time and such is great.  Granted, it's dependent on my phone maintaining GPS contact, but so far it hasn't lost GPS often enough to be a problem.

This week we ended up splitting our strength training workouts into a night of arms and core and a night of legs.  This cuts each workout down to an hour or slightly less, which is more manageable.  And, as we discovered tonight, if instead of turning each workout into one very large circuit we break it into smaller circuits of two or three exercises involving equipment in close proximity to each other in the gym, we get a faster and far more strenuous workout.  That's mostly because it doesn't give other people time to reset the machines or move the equipment somewhere else requiring us to chase down and reset everything all the time.  It really breaks the groove when you have to hunt down the ten pound medicine ball three times in one workout.  (Yes, we did make the ten pound ball joke once or twice, and got a good laugh about it, but we're over it now.)

I'm making friends with the treadmill.  I really like it for interval walks -- the time goes by faster when you're changing speeds and keeping track of shorter distances and times, and it's nice to be able to precisely control speed changes. 

We switched the order of our workouts to put strength training first and cardio second.  On nights when we work our arms, it's no big deal.  Wednesday night after our leg workout I went for an hour on the elliptical.  It wasn't hard until about 45 minutes in, which doesn't usually happen otherwise.  Not so hard I couldn't keep up, but I definitely felt like I had to work harder to make it to the 60 minute mark.  I'm curious to see how it affects future workouts.