Category Archives: Fitness

I’m going to do the Tri the Illini triathlon on Oct 2. The only reason I haven’t signed up yet is because I need to time myself on the swim so I can tell them where to put me in the starting order. (For some reason, they don’t want a bunch of collisions in the pool.)

300 m swim – short, but the pool is only so big
14.5 mi bike ride – ugh
3.1 mi run – ok

The bike will be the tough part. I’ve been biking farther than that most Saturdays with the bike club, but at a slower pace than I want to be racing at. If it ever stops raining so we can ride to work again, I can use those to work on speed a little bit. Racing stoplights, for example. Or going out of my way a bit so I can hit the street with fewer lights.

I’m following, sort of, the 16 week sprint distance plan from Beginner Triathletes. Sort of because I’m sticking with my usual swimming and running schedule, which calls for more time than that plan does until mid-August, and my long bike ride with the club is longer than what’s on the plan, and my short bike ride is replaced by whatever commuting I do. But other than that I’m following the plan.

And also taking tennis classes. Fitting all this into any given week required extensive plotting out with a spreadsheet. 

Last month I was looking for ways to add variety to my morning exercise routine (weights and yoga/core on alternating days, plus the jumprope I talked about earlier). I ran across a mention of FitDeck, which I’d heard of before but never tried. They make “exercise playing cards” where you shuffle a deck of, say, dumbbell exercises, draw a card, and do the exercise it says.

I checked it out and discovered they have a deck for swimming. Since my speed drills and technique drills were getting boring–I don’t know that many–I ordered it. It’s made my drill workouts a lot less boring. I’m still just going back and forth in the pool, but at least every workout isn’t exactly the same.

The cards include maybe a dozen technique drills, which include the small number of drills I was already doing, plus a bunch of new ones. There aren’t quite as many speed drills, and I find the sprints a little long–I can only sprint one length of the pool, or a length and a half, so I run out of steam on those. But it’s good to push myself, since on my own I was only doing that one length at sprint pace.

I also got the pilates cards out of curiosity. I’m not impressed–the cards are fine, they’re well done, there’s 50 of them (more than the swimming cards) and after a few weeks I still haven’t done all of them, so it’s a nice variety, but pilates itself just seems weird. It’s like someone stuck various abdominal moves and yoga poses together. Most of them don’t even seem to work the core muscles very much.

Apparently the original pilates uses equipment, and of course at home I have none. But “mat pilates” does seem to be a thing. Have any of you tried it? Do you find it worthwhile? Is there a good source for learning the exercises other than classes? I’m tempted to just stick with various crunches.

I never did get the bodyweight and dumbbell decks that I was originally looking for, but I’m keeping them on my wishlist for the future.

Jumping rope was easier when I was eight.

I wanted to mix some cardio in with my weights in the mornings, and doing random aerobics moves wasn’t all that appealing, so I got a jump rope. A nice beaded one, which was easy to shorten.

Beaded ropes, by the way, *hurt* when you mess up and they slam into you.

It also occasionally hits the ceiling, because my workout space is in the basement with its low, oppressive ceiling. But otherwise it’s going well. After a few weeks I got enough coordination to do 20-30 jumps in a row. Hooray.

I found a 10-min jump rope video that’s pretty basic but gives a good idea of what kind of jumps can be done aside from just up and down (age 8 was a long time ago). I haven’t actually done the video yet, because I usually don’t do a 10-min chunk of cardio in the morning, and because I trip myself up in much less time than her jump rope segments take. But I’ve borrowed the different jumps (side to side, split jumps, etc) that she does to give my practice more variety.

Aside from the lack-of-coordination issue, it’s a really good aerobic workout.

Pulled my bicycle out of the garage this weekend for the first time since November. I’ll probably never love biking as much as I love running, but the wind on my face on the long downhills is freeing. (The wind blowing into my face on the long uphills is just annoying. At least, this being Illinois, “uphill” and “downhill” don’t mean much.) And I get to see different things than when I run, and it’s not all different corn fields.

Also, I did my final test for the One Hundred Pushups program a few days ago, managing 61 pushups. Which, while it’s a long way from 100, is much higher than the 8 I could do when I started. There’s probably a writing metaphor in there somewhere, but I’m leaving it as an exercise for the reader. I’m going to keep working on getting up to 100 for a while. Not bored yet.