Stomach cramps and three-a-days...

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Like all people who exercise every day, I have my share of aches and pains.  Today, it was stomach related and just wouldn’t seem to go away.  I thought about possible ways to improve the situation and reached the conclusion that exercise was the answer.

I started with a two-hour bike ride through Waite Hill.  I found myself struggling early and often and never seemed to hit any kind of rhythm.  That’s okay.  There will be days like this on Tour Ohio and I’ll simply need to push through them.  And that’s what I did. 

Savannah left me a message while riding that she wanted to do the Survival Workout and I didn’t want to disappoint her, so in spite of the escalating stomach cramps, I put Dakota in the car and drove to the park.  I began with my push-ups, but figured out quickly that it would not be a stellar workout.  I want to maintain some strength though, and know that two workouts a week is the minimum so I moved forward.  I did skip all lower body sprints and climbs and towards the end of the workout was feeling so much pain in the gut that I stopped exercising altogether.    I drove back home and rested for awhile, but after dinner Jack asked me if I wanted to go to the track with him to help him with his workout, so I did.

We arrived there around 10 p.m. and in the light from the moon, he began doing a warm-up jog before his sprints.  I couldn’t just stand there in the dark doing nothing, so I entered the bleachers and began climbing.  By the time he’d done a mile warm-up, I’d hit 10 sets and was breaking a sweat.  I walked down to the football field where he was doing some stride outs in his bare feet and decided to see how the new, artificial surface felt to run on without shoes.  It was wonderful; soft yet firm and perfectly level.  I went to the end zone and rolled into a 50-yard sprint.  After two more of the same, I asked Jack to run next to me and tell me how fast I was running.  By the 10-yard line, I was going all-out and held it for 60 yards.

“Hey dad…you’re pretty fast,” he said as we cooled down.  “I was running about 80 percent.”

That meant something since I’d just clocked him do a 100-meter dash in under 11 seconds, which would make him one of the faster high school athletes in the state.  I could feel my groin muscles tightening though, and after one more sprint, I called it a night.

I’m sure I’ll feel some major aches tomorrow for all I did today, but it felt good to work through the stomach ailment instead of giving in to it.  There will be time to visit the sidelines, but that is a few months from now.  I’ve got work to do.

Survival Workout:  60 minutes.  Bike duration:  Two hours and 5 minutes.  Track/bleacher workout: 15 minutes.

Training Heart Rate:  100-150 bpm for SW and 120 bpm on the bike.

Calories burned during workout:  600 for SW, 1750 on the bike and 150 at the track.