Blog

Today’s strength training session was… different. We did simple exercises, but many (MANY) repetitions of those exercises. There was no single exercise I couldn’t do or even struggled with - unlike what sometimes happens during a strength session. One would think I would’ve cruised through today’s session, but I did not. It was challenging! By the time of my work’s morning stand-up meeting, my legs were still shaking. Strength training still remains one of my biggest workout challenges. Even, it seems, when the exercises are within my means.

I have to word this carefully as I do not want it to sound pessimistic. I find things don’t work for me as it does for others. When I rest, I become unfit quickly. Although it was hard work training for a marathon, marathon training caused me to run slower. I know we were training to run further, not faster. But still… My experience is that I have to be exceptionally disciplined with everything, otherwise it does not work as it should. But I have been working for years to break my “all or nothing” patterns — which usually resulted in nothing. I try to live by an “always something”-mentality. It doesn’t seem to serve me well, though. As if “always something” is not enough. ...

Today’s training was a 40-minute strength session. My workout included sets of hold, flow and high-energy exercises. I found the hold exercises in each set the most strenuous. There were squat, plank, lunge, pilates-hundreds (I am unsure if this name is correct) and bear-crawl positions to hold for as long as 40 seconds at a time. These exercises were challenging! The flow and high-energy exercises were easier to manage, but I struggled whenever I needed to jump out of a position — someday I will get this right. At the end of today’s session, Jateen said he found the chest-to-floor-getups one of the easier exercises of the day. I do not share his viewpoint. ...

Who am I? I always start answering this question by saying that I am a software engineer, a happily married mother of four, an avid runner and the author of two books. That is more or less the order these things occurred in: software engineer, married, mother, runner, author. But those are things that I do. They are not who I am. So, if I take all of those out of the equation, who am I really? ...

And it is a wrap! What an incredible three days of running. Thank you RunZone and especially Graham Block. Day 1 - 30 km This was the race I needed to push myself in the most. I’ve never run 30 km, but we heard rain forecasts for the weekend, and I wanted to have the extra 10 km to play with if necessary. Day 2 - 20 km This was the most challenging route of the three days. If I never run this route again, it will be too soon. I could also feel the previous day’s 30 km and it was difficult to push through. ...

I always push myself during our running club’s Wednesday afternoon time trial. The time trial from two Wednesdays ago was no different. I pushed and pushed some more; I ran my heart out. Yet my watch recorded a disappointing 38m 17s — more than two minutes slower than the former time I ran it! Back at our clubhouse I reluctantly filled in my time on our leaderboard sheet. Our club chairman spotted me and asked, “How did your run go?” ...