The bad part of the storm is that my training appointment got cancelled. I hate taking off two days in a row. I considered working out at home, but I'm going to work out at Fitness Together both Thursday and Friday, and don't want to overdo it.
I read a really interesting article in livestrong, talking about the value of interval training. Here's the link:
http://www.livestrong.com/article/113860-interval-training-burn-fat/
The article talked about how you can train at higher intensity and burn more fat by doing interval training--alternating periods of very high intensity with recovery periods. It also talked about how you are less fatigued training that way. The timing of the article was perfect, because I had been puzzling about the differences between my training on Saturday and Monday at spinning class. Both days my legs were dead. I had had a really hard training on Friday which led to dead legs on Saturday. On Monday, I had done 120 squats, which resulted in my legs being dead Monday night. Saturday, Peggy led an endurance class where she was basically trying to keep our heart rates constant throughout the hour, with neither high periods of intensity nor breaks between songs. I struggled throughout the hour and couldn;t get my heart rate above the 140s.
On Monday, though, Peggy led us in interval training, and I was able to get my heart rate up into the 150s and 160s pretty quickly and return to that level regularly throughout the hour, even though my legs were very tired. As a measure of how much harder I was able to work out, I ended up burning about 75 more calories in the same hour time by alternating periods of high intensity with recovery. Again, this is something I wish I'd known when I was doing inline skating marathons. I would push myself to maximum effort for the whole 26.2 miles. I would get really fatigued and think I had no fuel left to burn and eat some caffeinated goo, thinking the caffeine and sugar would get me going again. I can now see that if I had alternated sprinting with recovery, I would have had more energy and probably would have finished in less time.
I really wish I could use this knowledge in another marathon. What I need is a long term goal other than getting in shape and losing weight. The North Shore Inline Marathon every September in Duluth, Minnesota has been that goal for many years. I've thought about whether I could have a biking goal--my brother Tom does the ride across Iowa nearly every year. But at this point, both biking and skating make me nervous. There are so many hills around here and I can too easily imagine hitting a bad spot in the road, a rock, or popping a tire and breaking a bunch of bones. Not quite the images I need to inspire me in a biking goal. Similarly, I've only fallen about 5 times in the 15+ years I've done inline skating, but all it takes is once.
Any ideas?
Hey, if you'd like an inspiring story of someone getting into shape, read this one. The before and after pictures are astounding:
http://www.livestrong.com/blog/blog/jacobs-success-story/
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