Just before I started typing this I checked, and there are 69 days until the Bluenose Marathon, or for me, the Bluenose Half Marathon.
I started “training” this past week, meaning I’m giving myself a full 10 week training schedule for this race, with hopes that I’ll actually be able to stick to a training schedule this year.
The past two half marathon’s I’ve run, I’ve only had a handful of long runs to really get me through the races. A combination of injury and overtraining concerns keeping me from ever walking up to the start line fully prepared. I mean I’ve done okay, I’m not fast by any standard but I’m also not horribly slow. I’ve been in the middle of the crowd, which is pretty good all considered.
While speed has never been a great concern of mine, it would be nice to run a race knowing I was actually ready for it. That I’d gotten in the necessary training for once. And with the changes I’ve made to my teaching schedule over this past year, I think I’m finally in a place where I can do just that and still have at least one full-on rest day/week. Something that was unheard of in the past few years.
The plan is to run three times/week. Right now I’m limited to the treadmill until enough of the snow and ice melts for it to be safe for me to run outside. I cannot wait for that to happen! I’m keeping my fingers crossed that next weekend the sidewalks will be dry/clear so I can do my first long run of the season. I just cannot run a long distance on the treadmill. I hate it so much! Even still, I managed to hit the treadmill three times this week For nearly 30 minutes each time.
(BTW, I’m now finished season one of Serial. I totally binge-listened!).
My plan isn’t going to be set in stone as to which days I run, as that can vary depending on how I’m feeling and what’s going on, but my general plan is to run on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturday or Sunday. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have my heavy teaching days which include multiple classes, and a Zumba + Zumba Toning class and a full Zumba class both days. A readout of my Thursday activity level via my Jawbone UP24 will give you an idea of why it’s been hard for me to train properly in the past…
For the record, I don’t for a second believe that I actually burned 2560 calories through exercise on Thursday. I take those reading with a grain of salt (or 10). Anyway, now that I’ve managed to get the craziness down to two days/week (the other days I teach classes that aren’t aerobically difficult) I can count these two days as cross training days.
What I realized tonight after my treadmill session though, is I’m going to have to go back to doing something I don’t really love doing. Wearing my heart rate monitor while I teach my cardio classes. The reason I’m going to start wearing it again is because I want to be able to properly track my training load, my Polar RCX3 doesn’t just track calories (and speed when I’m running outside), but when I sync it to my computer it takes all the data and plots it on a chart to show my my training load. That load will show me based on my heart rate during each workout if I’m working out too hard/too much, or if I can stand to go a bit harder.
Right now I’ve been wearing it only during my runs, and I realized tonight that I’m not getting true feedback because I don’t wear it during my cardio classes. The reason I stopped wearing it while teaching is because it’s a little uncomfortable when teaching Zumba, and my old Polar (the FT4) didn’t have the training load feature, and I had it strictly for calculating calorie burn and after a while I had a decent idea of how many calories I burned (and really I didn’t much care that much) so I stopped. But now it’s not about calorie burn, it’s about making sure I’m training at the right level. Not too low, and not too high.
And as a data nerd, I’m pretty interested to see what my training load looks like a week from now after using it for a full week. I just hope I don’t forget to put it on…
One thing I haven’t quite figured out is strength training. I definitely get some strength training in during the week while teaching, but in those classes I’m there more as a coach and motivator, and less for my own workout. So I’d really love to incorporate one or two of my own strength workouts using a combination of moves from Tamara’s book, the 30 day Transfrom Challenge workouts, and some of my own moves to make a progressive total body workout for the next two months. That’s my goal for the week I guess, planning wise. To create my strength workouts for the next 8-9 weeks. I feel like I need to get used to adding in my running workouts consistently before I should worry too much about strength. There is always the worry of adding too much too soon on top of what I’m already doing. But now I’m just rambling. Big shocker.
The long and short of this rambling post is, I’m planning to document my training in a weekly post here on the blog. A recap of my workouts from the previous week, and anything else I feel like sharing along the way.
Another part of training is nutrition, and starting this week I am going to be really tightening up my meals. The past couple years have been filled with stressful events that through food and/or increased cortisol (I’m pretty sure it’s a combo of both) I’ve put on about 15 pounds of fat. That fat has got to go. Stat. I’m tired of my clothes not fitting right and I’d very much like to fit in my shorts and jean skirt again before summer gets here!
So let’s do this.
P.S. In case you missed my announcement a while back on social media, I’ve joined Brooks Running Canada this year as an ambassador. I’m so darn excited about this, and was even more exciting when the mother load arrived at my house on Wednesday!
So exciting!!
The post The Road To Bluenose… appeared first on Confessions of a Fitness Instructor.