Slip, sliding away...

Thursday, January 10, 2013

I just couldn’t do another day on the trainer, so I went to the park to either do a Survival Workout or a run.  My rib cage is still a little sore so I used my big brain and decided to just run.  I drove through the park looking over the trails as I went and could see they were full of ice and mud.  It was not going to be a fast run and I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to run at all.  I did notice the paved all-purpose trails were clean, but I really don’t like running on pavement.  I certainly have a lot of exercise-related issues.

I started on a bridle trail and found the edges to have melted down to the earth and had decent footing there.  This petered out shortly though, and I was forced to run on the ice.  I had to slow my pace about a minute a mile, but was able to get reasonably good footing.  I went off-trail for part of the run and between the snow I found there and trying to maintain my balance once back on the ice, I was getting a much better workout than I would have on a clean surface.  By the time I returned to the car, I’d run 35 minutes but felt like it had been an hour.  I noticed that the muscles of my legs and hips were much more fatigued than they would have been normally for such a short run, which I attribute to the need for the muscles to be constantly adjusting in the maintenance of balance.  It may have been slower than usual, but I’d burned a lot more calories than I would have normally in 35 minutes.

I returned home and started pulling ingredients from the freezer to make my smoothie.  Jack was watching and quite grossed out by my use of frozen spinach and bananas.

“Why did you freeze them in the first place?” he wanted to know.

“As soon as they start to spoil or get rotten, I throw them in the freezer so I can still use them,” I said.

“You should have thrown them in the garbage…they look gross,” he said.

And he didn’t take me up on my offer to share it with him once I had it blended.

Run duration:  35 minutes.

Training Heart Rate:  140 bpm.

Calories burned:  650.