Day 7, Week 11: My sweat-filled non-running workout and stupid pictures from my conference.

So I'm traveling at the moment.  I'm at a conference in downtown Chicago until tomorrow, but I'm not letting that get in the way of me doing a sweaty non-running workout in the palace of a fitness center this hotel possesses.

I only did 30 minutes on the stationary bike, but holy buckets were there buckets of sweat all over the floor around my bike.  I felt like I needed to put up those wet floor signs so people weaving in and out of the empty bikes wouldn't slip and crack their heads open.

After that sweaty goodness, I made my way over to the free weights and did 20 minutes of weights, alternating a lower body exercise with an upper body exercise, making sure I hit all major body parts.  This induced more sweat-dripping awesomeness, of which I tried to take a picture but this damn hotel room lighting made the picture kind of suck.  But who am I to deny everyone the suckiness of this picture.

After that I had to get dressed in, like real adult clothes and do some learning and stuff.  And take stupid pictures.

As you can imagine, all that learning on top of the stupid picture taking sure is exhausting.  It's time for this little runner to head to bed now.

I may be sleepy but the learning keeps on rolling:

• I gotta get me one of them fancy stationary bikes.
• I did learn a lot today at my conference, I swears.
• The only pictures worth taking, in my opinion, are stupid ones.
• I want to know when I will not be exhausted at the end of the day.

Tomorrow's workout:  The plan says 20 miles at 15 seconds slower than marathon pace....but the fact that I'm traveling may modify that plan.  

I'm still broken.

I'm broken.  This tendinitis has me not running for the week.  It still hurts, and I am seriously reconsidering my marathon goal.  I'm considering bumping it down from a 10:00/mile pace goal to a "show up at the starting line and finish" goal.

We'll see.  In the mean time, this week I have been resting, cross-training, and doing things at work like this:

Oxygen and I are PISSED OFF at this whole injury thing.

At least the weather has been crappy enough so I am not missing any good outside running.  The dogs, however, are thoroughly enjoying making snow puppy angels as well as getting all the good snow snacking they can handle:

All this snow got dumped on us on Tuesday, the day I was supposed to do a track ladder speed workout.  Yeah, that didn't happen.  Wednesday I ended up taking the day off.  I meant to go do some stationary biking, but couldn't fit it in after I realized I had a massage that night (massages take priority over pretty much everything in my life, except the hubbs and the dogs).  My wonderful massage therapist worked on the top of my foot, but I think she overdid it--I woke up today hurting.

And, because I was in pain, I did something incredibly stupid--I wore some tight dress shoes to work.  I was in these shoes for all of an hour before the pain got too much.  I switched out of them into some sneakers, which complemented my dress pants and blazer quite nicely.  I sat in my office most of the day with ice on my foot, making videos and scoring my students' blogs.

I know.  My work life is an exciting breathless crazy whirlwind.  I'll give you a moment to let your head stop spinning.

After that stimulating day, I then changed and traipsed down the hallway to the fitness center, where I managed to get my butt onto a stationary bike in-between all the wrestlers and track stars in there doing their conditioning work.  And there my butt stayed for about 80 more minutes, whereby I did 25 miles on the "random hills" setting, dripping in sweat most of the time because I didn't realize the damn bike had a fan on it and worrying that I was going to catch some scary high school superbug bacterium that might be lingering on the handlebars and kill me within days surrounded by men in hazmat suits.  (I made like a doctor in the bathroom afterwards and scrubbed up to my elbows.  I'm a tad germophobic these days.)

On a brighter note, I registered for the Twin Cities Marathon in October, and got the goody bag I ordered along with it in the mail yesterday:

The bag is super nice.

I also purchased some new-fangled shoelaces that are really just tiny bungee cords masquerading as shoelaces and have fancy clips.  They're called Yankz! and the wonderful people who run the company out in Atlanta, Georgia were absolutely awesome about the fact that I put the wrong zip code for my billing address and forgot to put in my different shipping address and, despite my efforts to the contrary, shipped it successfully to me.

I bought two pairs (one purple, one white reflective) and, although they look pretty complicated to install, they were really easy to get on my shoes.  They are supposed to be more flexible when you're running (please to remember that I am injured because my laces were tied too tightly) and let your laces flex with your foot.  I put them on my favorite pair of shoes, and they really are comfortable, and your shoes stay snugly on your feet.  Not too bad for something that runs between $7.00-$8.00 a pair.

So, in sum, I'm still broken, but I'm not giving up hope.  My foot is feeling pretty good now after that biking session.  Tomorrow is upper-body weights, and Saturday....the schedule says an 18 mile pace run.  I'd like to do that long run, but I may have to do it more slowly than pace.  We'll have to evaluate this whole foot injury situation Saturday morning.

So I got this stationary bike thing.

So I got this stationary bike thing for Christmas.  A NordicTrack one, the GX2.0.  Nothing screams "I love you" or celebrates Jesus' birth quite like a stationary bike.

I didn't ask for one, but my husband, knowing how much I love to alternate biking with running when the weather is nice for about 3 seconds per year here in Illinois, got me a stationary bike so I can still do this during the winter.  Last year he got me a treadmill so I can run in the winter as well.

I can now not only run to nowhere, I can bike to nowhere as well.  I was actually perversely excited about this.

We put it next to the treadmill in my itty-bitty workout "room," so now my treadmill has someone to talk to and doesn't have to stare out the back window at the empty farm field through the sheers all the time.  I am sure they will become good friends.

BFFs!

After we let those two get acquainted, I hopped on the bike to grab a workout.  It was quiet.  Too quiet.  I don't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting "quiet."  This thing is an EXERCISE MACHINE, dammit.  It was EXPENSIVE.  It should make lots of stationary bike noise to match the tremendous amount of calories I was burning.  It should groan along with my grunts to tell any person or escaped farm animal that happened to be walking through the empty field behind my house that we are WORKING OUT and we are SERIOUS about it.

Instead I pedaled quietly along.  Pedal, pedal, pedal.  Quiet, quiet, quiet.  I thought I heard the treadmill chuckle softly.  Or maybe it was just one of my dogs snoring away somewhere.

I decided to try one of the pre-programmed interval workouts on the bike.  I chose a speed-interval one over a resistance one, because I am a masochist and am starting a 10K training plan soon and didn't want to wear out my legs for all of the speed intervals I would be doing.  It kept bouncing me between the mind-boggling speeds of 13 mph and 14 mph, and playing with the resistance as well.  But it wasn't anything too tough.

Pedal, pedal, pedal, quiet, quiet, quiet.  Ho-hum.  Kinda easy.  How anticlimactic.  I feared the bike would have little to say to my loud and noisy treadmill.

That is, until I had pedaled for about 20 minutes. I looked down and several rogue beads of sweat landed on my shirt after they rolled off my brow.  They joined a few thousand other ones that already there.

It seems I was getting a workout.  My heart rate was at about 160 when I gripped the silvery heart-rate-measuring thingies on the bike.  Quiet but effective, this stationary bike was.  It was all action and little talk.  I can respect that in a piece of workout equipment.

I have been using the bike on days where I do weight work, and it's a great low-impact cardio workout that's easy on this runner's knees.  Maybe it will give me the courage to sign up for that triathlon I've been thinking about doing for the past 2 years or so.

Or maybe it will make the treadmill jealous.  I guess we'll see soon enough.