While I have been pretty good about keeping active, I've been a bit erratic at settling into a particular routine. For a short while, it was barefoot running a short distance each day. Then, a couple weeks ago I had a session with the TI coach to find some new ways to refine my swim stroke. That resulted in some focused effort on swimming, including some dilly-dallying into how I should go about swim workouts. Should I approach it like Daniels does with running - go with low stress, distance building type workouts first, before handling the more speedwork related sessions? Should I try to mix them all up and have distance and speedwork variation in my workouts on a weekly basis? I definitely want to keep doing long swims (~ 30 minutes straight) on a regular basis, just to keep that mental picture focus of swimming for that long a time.
In the meantime, I jumped from 2 miles to 3.15 miles of barefoot running. In working up to 2 miles, I was increasing distance very gradually - about half a mile at a time. This was to keep the calfs from getting so sore that I couldn't run the next day. However, after a couple days of two miles with little soreness the day after, I decided to try jumping from 2 to 3.
It might have been a tad too much, but not extreme. About 2 miles in, my left knee was feeling a tad abused (not the IT band, actually) when I'd plant every so often. As expected, my calfs were pretty tight and sore for about two days afterwards, but it really wasn't all that bad. I did the 3 miles on a day when I knew I'd have at least 2 rest days coming up due to work travel.
The bigger concern was that it appeared my quads were tight enough to make me feel the IT band rubbing on occasion over the next couple days. Not sure whether that was an effect of the distance jump, or the longer distance at a faster pace (about 8 minutes/mile) than I should probably be going at before getting fully warmed up.
As luck would have it, another curveball was thrown my way soon after. For a while, I had been looking for a Yoga studio close by, as I've been told multiple times from multiple sources that Yoga would help me with flexibility and core strength. Late last week I looked around and saw a local place had opened up, offering unlimited classes for 2 weeks for $20. The normal single class drop-in rate is $15 - so the $20 for unlimited classes sounded like a great deal for seeing whether Yoga would be helpful.
So at this point, I've signed up and attended a few classes. The discipline is called Bikram Yoga, and is done in a room @ 105 degrees with 40% humidity. It progresses through a series of 26 poses, both standing and on the floor. By the third pose, I'm dripping buckets. It is actually rather gross, and I fear for the owners of the establishment that I may chase some people away. But I do a pretty reasonable job of keeping my funk on my little area where I have my mat and towel - so hopefully that counts for something.
It is still a bit early to tell whether this Yoga will help what ails me, but I can definitely see where it could have huge benefits. Some aspects of flexibility have improved noticibly in only three classes, and although I'm not flexible enough to fully get into most of the poses and make it look good (actually, with that qualifier, I'm not flexible enough to get into any poses), I still get some benefit. I just have a lot of bottlenecks to work through.
Anyhow, workout information:
Swimming:
11/9
36 laps
32:26
(I am thinking the easiest way to judge improvement for this is to do 36 laps, 1800 yards, or about 1 mile and compare overall times)
Running:
3.15 miles
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