Tuesday, 29 January 2013

Tuesday 29th Jan: bike/swim/circuits

Rode to work again today.  I still haven't got lights for my road bike (awaiting new brackets so I can use the ones I already have on the mountain bike - I'm not spending £50+ on a second set of lights!) and it is still dark at this time of the year, so rode my mountain bike.  It's a smoother ride along the cycle path anyway which can be a bit uneven for a road bike.  But I'm itching to get on the road bike when I have some time during the day!

At lunchtime I headed for the pool and did about 30 minutes swimming.  It is very convenient* that I work at a university with a great gym (Herts Sports Village) and that my office is about 30 seconds walk from it.  So I have just about enough time to go there at lunchtime for a swim, or use it for somewhere to change and shower if I go for a run.

In the pool,  I tried to work on what I had learned yesterday with arm technique.   I like to have a specific new point to work on for each coached session and then practise that in my solo sessions during the week.  Like in my early months of skydiving, if I try to focus on one thing I end up forgetting to do something else, but hopefully it will soon begin to fall into place!  I can't do much more than 30 minutes, I have yet to build up this sort of endurance so I get tired quickly.  Wish that running endurance and tunnel-strength automatically resulting in swimming fitness!!  Hmm maybe it helps a bit, and if I did no other sports but swimming I'd only manage about 2 minutes before getting knackered!?  Yesterday I'd watched the end of the club session before ours, which was made up of young kids - maybe 8-12 year olds.  Got slightly jealous of them, so young and such skill!

When I get home I will need to get the brush of shame out on the trail shoes.  They are caked with mud from Saturday's long run (much of which seemed to be XC!).  Or should that be the brush of pride now?

Got home and had a bite to eat and watched Miranda (such fun!!) and EastEnders on iPlayer before heading back to the sports village for a circuits class with Tri-Force.  It was a good session - more traditional circuits this week which I prefer (every second week, depending on the instruction, it is more core focused and involves some pilates).  It was a big group today, and too many people to have one station each.  So we did each station in pairs and did worked it twice (30 sec each time).  One person would do the station and the other would do a set exercise such as star jumps, squats, jogging, press ups and so on.   I enjoy circuits - my previous class, before I joined Tri-Force, held a decent session at the local girls school which I was going to since 2009 (around the time I started running) but sadly with the increasing rent they couldn't sustain the costs and stopped back in October (we were quite gutted about this).  I lost a fair bit of my core fitness after that and so it is good to start to get it back again.

*Although sometimes it feels like I live at the Uni!

Total training

Bike ride to/from work (8 miles)
30 minutes swimming
1 hour circuits class

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