The hair of the dog that bit you...

Way back when I did my first run in Toulouse, the dismal state of my body was brought to my attention not so much through pathetic gasping attempts to pass enough air through my lungs to stay alive (although there was a bit of that), but rather through a nagging and persistent pain the next day when I got out of bed.

My Achilles tendon was not happy at all.  In fact, it seemed to have shrunk by about an inch in protest at my mishandling of its emotions.  I actually limped for the first five minutes I was up.

I mentioned it in passing to the sports doctor who told me to lay off the running for at least a week and let the inflammation die down.

The pain, however, did not go away after a week.  Although I was fine during the day, the tightness remained every time I stayed immobile for some time.  I began to wonder if I didn't have a "chronic" injury.  The sort of thing that really scares me.

I remembered after a while a theory put forward by an old rowing coach that muscles heal and strengthen in response to the demands placed upon them, and so if I wanted something to get better, I had to - gently - let it know that it's services would be required in the future.  I checked online and indeed, light exercise is recommended for Achilles tendinopathy.

So yesterday, as part of the gym routine, I did some gentle lower leg resistance exercises.  And lo and behold, this morning, the pain and tightness were much reduced.

Colour me relieved.

More exercise, less detail

So I'm trying to do the HIIT on the indoor bicycle at least 3 times per week, but I'm going to stop blogging it every time I do it because frankly 8 minutes of exercise do not a blog entry make.

I'll summarise everything I do on a calendar page.

One of the frustrating things is that I'm not really losing any weight.  The general trend is down and so is the body fat measurement, but not by much.

An effort in honesty, this is probably caused by :
- Not having reduced my alcohol consumption
- Occasional food excesses being too frequent

Nevertheless, I eat very healthily compared to your average diet, salad every day for lunch, very few carbs, lots of fish in the evenings and no high-sugar drinks at all.  I've done obsessive calorie counting before and it's helped me understand where calories are coming from, but I've done enough reading to know that not all calories are created equal, and that upping my exercise regime is going to be better for me in the long run than trying to lose weight by starving myself.

Effort is really only one third of the information - there's also diet and results, I'm putting the results on another page.  As you can see, my weight and body fat are heading in the right direction, but not as fast as I'd like.

Summary for this week's effort : 3 trips to the gym, HIIT each time.

 

HIIT Tabata Protocol

Tabata protocol, indoor cycling again, adjusting for the poor performance of the Garmin last time, this time I used the built-in intervals function to see if I could push the device into making more pertinent heart rate recordings.

Much better, with accurate readings that somehow fail to convey the excruciating pain, the bulging eyes and the strange, concerned looks from other gym-goers.

The first time I got HIIT

I mentioned a couple of articles ago the inclusion of the Tabata Protocol in my workout.  Today was the first time I tried it.

The basic principle is that you do 4 minutes of very hard work and it's somehow equivalent to an hour of cardio.  While initially somewhat sceptical, I found it hard to turn down such a huge potential improvement in training efficiency.  If I can do this in four minutes (eleven once you include warm-up and cool-down), then that leaves a lot of time afterwards for weights and strength training.

There's indeed a compression effect going on : 1 hour of pain in 4 minutes of time.  Efficiency has downsides.

Gym - Rowing: Masochism part deux

Finding it hard to believe just how painful the return to rowing was on Monday, and in denial about it, I tried again on Wednesday. I thought that perhaps I had remembered it poorly and I had inflated the amount of pain and effort in my mind.  Just to prove to myself that the pain I experienced was real, I re-tried the experiment.

On the bright side, it appears that my memory is working fine.

Near-death indoor rowing experience

When it comes to rowing, I have a little history, because I rowed in a team (let's not say "competitively", we weren't that good) back in 2003-2004.  My training speed on an indoor rowing machine was 2:00 per 500m.  I could keep this speed up for quite a long time, but typically I rowed segments of 2k and then rested.

My 2k in the gym today ended with the last pathetic stores of energy just barely allowing me to cross the finish line in under 8 minutes.  Then I sat on the machine and waited for my head to stop spinning and my heart rate to return to normal while feeling the heat come off my body in waves.  Clearly things have changed since 2004.

The Tabata Protocol

I'm all for efficiency, and there's a theory that's been doing the rounds for years that you can cram an entire cardio workout into a few short minutes.  Sound realistic to you?  Then there's a really nice rug I'd like to sell you.

Nevertheless, not one to turn down an opportunity to increase efficiency, I looked into it, and the more I looked, the more it seemed that there was some sort of medical/research consensus around the fact that HIIT (Thats High-Intensity Interval Training to you and me) actually works.  It came with warnings about how hard it was - the phrase used by researchers was "elevated levels of discomfort", which doesn't sound too bad when you say it quietly.  So I did more research, and here's what I found.

First run in Toulouse

So perhaps doing my first run in 30°C of heat was a little ambitious, but I'm very happy that I managed over six 6 km.

 

My indoor training routine before I stopped training (back in November) was to do 6 km at 12kph which gave me exactly 30 minutes of treadmilling before other gym-goers started giving me dirty looks for monopolising the machine.

 

Clearly my pace has not improved during my months of sloth.  That was perhaps to be expected.  This is also my first outdoor run in a long time, which is my excuse for returning home looking like I'd been boiled alive and then painted red for good measure.

 



Gadget motivation

Nothing motivates me to go do some sport more than an expensive investment in a piece of sports gadgetry that will be utterly useless unless I actually go and do some sport with it.  It's like the reasonable person holding the recalcitrant lazy guy to ransom by spending all his money.  I don't really have dual personalities, but that's kind of what's going on.

Since I'm somewhat obsessive-compulsive by nature, my choice is something that provides lots and lots of data on the exact source of the pain in my thighs and the degree of effort that resulted in seeing double around the second mile-marker.  Then I can play with the data for hours.  Then - so the theory goes - I shall be motivated to go get more data, which involves doing more sport, so that I can track improvements in performance to seven decimal points.

My choice of expensive gadget this time around is the Garmin Forerunner 210.  Partly because I want to measure my heart rate and recovery time because without some sense that I'm improving my health I'll give up; and also partly because... well... it was right there in a case in the shop, looking at me.

Total cost, around €200.  I could have ordered it by mail and had it cheaper, but it was right there...

 

The gadget also has a built-in GPS (hence the price) conveniently increasing the amount of available information for me to obsess over once I stop hyperventilating after exercise.