Weights and Push Ups and Treadmills, Oh My!

Last night I arrived at the Y for my first Total Body Conditioning class. How was it? Tough to say.

The geniuses at the Y decided to schedule a blood drive in the same room where most of the classes are held. So, instead of teaching class in her usual room with her usual equipment, our instructor was relegated to a completely different room with completely different equipment. She attempted to take it all in stride and had us pull out steps, stability balls, mats, body bars, and weight balls. And, without music, we did squats, push-ups, crunches, bicep curls, shoulder presses, and tricep presses.

Did I ever mention I hate push-ups? No? Well, I do. And we did a TON of them.

I'm reserving judgment on the class until we get back into the room she usually teaches in. She seemed rather discombobulated last night and I felt as though the pace of the classes alternated between too slow and too fast as she tried to think of what exercise we should do next. On the plus side, she's really big on working at your own level. As she said, you can do 20 push-ups, but if only 5 of them are any good and the rest are crap then you're not really helping yourself. Do the 5 good ones and work up to the 20 good ones. Yeah, that will be me.

After class, I headed to the cardio room to do some speed work on the treadmill. I took Kristen's favorite speed workout and figured I'd try it. She said her favorite is 1x1600, 1x1200, 1x800, 1x400, 1x200. Kristen, you are now on notice. That was HARD. Or maybe I just did it wrong.

While at work I used a the Runner's World training pace calculator to figure out what my pace should be for my speed workouts since the McMillan Running Calculator website was down. The RW one seemed to indicate my speed workout pace should be between 7:37 and 8:08 minutes per mile depending on what race I entered. Okay, I thought, I'll set the treadmill to a 1% incline and the speed at 7.4 MPH (which translates to a speed around 8:05 minutes per mile).

I did a half mile warm up at 5 MPH. The treadmill I was using had an awesome "speed interval" setting so you just set your "jog" pace and your "run" pace and toggled between them at the push of a button. After the half mile I hit the button and zoomed up to 7.4 MPH. I did my first mile (or 1600 meters) without stopping. Then I took it back down to 5 MPH for a quarter mile recovery jog. Then it was back to 7.4 for another three quarters of a mile (or 1200 meters). Yeah, that didn't go so well. I had to stop and rest a few times in there. I followed that with another quarter mile of jogging at 5 MPH. Then I tried to do the half mile (or 800 meters) at 7.4. I managed a quarter mile before I felt like I was going to die. So, I slowed it down and jogged for the rest of my Y-Cardio-Room-Imposed 30 minutes. I then figured out today that according to the McMillan Running Calculator that my max speed for speed work should be 8:26 minutes per mile or more like 7.1 MPH on the treadmill. Runner's World, you are also on notice.

So, I did a speed workout. More like 1x1600, 1x800, 1x400 instead of what I was aiming for. But, that's okay. I got in three miles of running and today my body can certainly tell I did something last night. In fact, I'm really looking forward to my yoga class tonight. I'm hoping I'll get a good low intensity workout with lots of stretching. I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow!