Cold and Painful

Morning Workout
RUN
17 minutes
2 miles
Heart Rate Zone: Theoretically, one mile of warm-up in Aerobic (Zone 1) then 3 x 2 kilometers in Steady State Threshold (Zone 4). In reality, not so much.

Evening Workout
SWIM
2500 yards
Main Set: 24 x 50 yards, twelve of them being all out sprints

Random Comments: This morning’s workout sucked, for lack of a better term. Come to think of it, “sucked” is a pretty good term to describe the sad excuse for a morning workout. The warm-up was all nice and fine as I piddled around the track for ten minutes, stopping for a nice good stretch after half a mile before I piddled around some more. When I started my first 2km repeat my legs were still feeling a wee tad heavy, but nothing was hurting. Then something started hurting around 1500 meters into the event and that something lies somewhere between my left calf and my left achilles. I hate stopping in the middle of a workout, but I’m really trying to be smart about my body. So I stopped and stretched. Then I tried to run again but that didn’t work out so well for me so I stretched some more. Tried to run once again. Nope, not working. So I walked. Well, that hurt too. And that’s about the time I realized that I won’t be running today. Which explains why I was only out there for 17 minutes and why I’ve been icing my leg on and off throughout the day and why I won’t be exercising tomorrow and why I’m going to be smelling a heckuva lot like Ben Gay come later this evening.
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Star Spotting Of The Day: Paul Lieberstein, aka “Toby” on The Office

Location: Westwood Brewing Company in Westwood (duh!)

What He Was Doing: Seems he was drinking some beverages with some friends from what I could gather from my vantage point.
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Catherine started getting sick last night. Bit of a head cold, it appears. Seems this head cold is all the rage these days. I heard about quite a few folk today that have come down with the thing. Being how she wasn’t feeling so well, Catherine opted out of our workout today. Which I think may have gotten me injured. Funny how Cat’s cold makes me pull a muscle.

Let me try to explain myself a bit. As you know, all of this Ironman training malarkey can be a very time intensive activity. I would imagine that it would be a slow and painful path to becoming bonkers if you had to do the whole thing alone. Imagine twenty hours each week of painful solitude. Five hour bike rides with nobody to talk to except the pavement in front of you. Early morning swims with nobody to motivate you when you’re tired, your body hurts and it’s far too cold on the wrong side of your down comforter. Simply put, having a training partner makes it all the more bearable in a variety of ways. Fortunately, Catherine and I train together just about everyday of the week. We motivate each other and entertain each other and when we annoy each other we eventually end up consoling each other. A training partner definitely has its benefits.

This morning, I learned about one of the drawbacks that I experience with the whole training partner scenario. I’ve grown accustomed to having Cat nearby. Even when we’re not swimming at the same pace, she’s there in the pool with me going through the entire workout. When we’re not running at the same speed, she still somewhere on the track motivating me. I’d use the same wording with the bike part, but I’m gathering you can figure that out yourself.

So when I got to the track this morning and there was no Catherine there, well, it seemed like a piece of me was missing. Unfortunately, that piece of me had a little sprinkling of motivation attached to it. So as I slogged myself around that track, my legs felt about as heavy as my mind. And though I did everything right in terms of proper warm-up, stretching and all that maintenance malarkey (yes, I used the word malarkey twice in one story. So shoot me), I ended up writhing on the ground in pain. OK, maybe not so much with the writhing, but I cut my workout dramatically short because of the pain.

So, you see, I’m not blaming Catherine for my injury today, I’m just hoping that she feels better real soon. It hurts me when she’s sick.