Day 16: The Gauntlet

I’ve officially made it through what I have lovingly named “The Gauntlet”.  This is the middle of the week when my exercise routine is the most strenuous.  I meet with my trainer on Tuesdays and Thursdays and do cardio on my own on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday.  If I make it past my Friday morning workout, I have officially made it through the gauntlet.  Here I am at 7:00 am and I’m still in one piece.  The truth is, I actually feel pretty dang good right now.  I just finished a ride on the stationary bike and I’m feeling good.  It’s amazing how much better the cardio workouts make your body feel the day after a pretty brutal strengthening workout.  The initial reaction when the alarm goes off always seems to be: “My body hurts, I can’t exercise” (Warning: this feeling lasts about ten minutes into your exercise as well).  However, at the end of a workout my muscles feel so much more relaxed and not nearly as tight as they did before I started.

Yesterday I got my Polar F11 (for those of you who aren’t familiar it’s just a fancy exercise watch.  Don’t worry, I didn’t have a clue what it was until about two weeks ago) in the mail so I decided to give it a shot this morning to see if my workouts are getting me in my target heart range.  Unfortunately, I found out that I’ve been dogging it on my cardio a bit.  I generally ride the bike between 11-12 mph, but I didn’t hit my target heart rate until I was going more like 13-14 mph.  I was able to keep the new pace up for nearly as long as the slower pace so I consider that an indication that I’m getting healthier.  I have increased my time riding the bike each day in an attempt to push myself a little harder so I keep improving.

Starting Monday I will have the joy of doing interval training on Mondays and Fridays instead of traditional cardio.  Interval training is basically cardio with a sadistic twist.  Instead of riding the bike for 13-14 mph for 30 minutes, I will be breaking my entire workout into 2 minute segments.  This doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that half of the time I will literally be working twice as hard as my normal cardio routine.  The goal is to raise my heart rate about 20 bpm (beats per minutes) and then bring it back down again.  How hard is it to raise your heart rate 20 bpm you ask? Well the last two minutes of my workout today I pushed myself so that I could get into that next target heart zone.  I had to ride about 25 mph on the bike to keep my rate steady at around 155.  That means, starting Monday, my interval training routine will go something like this: Two minutes at 13-14 mph then two minutes at 24-25 mph and then back and forth until I’ve worked out for a total of twenty minutes.  I’m not terribly excited for it but I know that I can do it.  Nike says I can!

The diet still remains completely intact although I need good morning food ideas.  I’m having a hard time keep my morning meal diverse and still getting the number of calories that I need to keep my body moving.  I’m sure this Google thing I’ve been hearing so much about will be able to help me out with that.



One Response to “Day 16: The Gauntlet”

1. No More Bacon » Blog Archive » Day 19: Exercise 101 says:

   August 3, 2009 at 3:17 pm

   [...] morning was my first day of interval training. I expressed my fear of the intervals in an earlier post, but it was honestly even harder than I anticipated.  It took me about two minutes to get my heart [...]

   Reply