Spring Training and Some Humbling

It's March 2, and as far as I'm concerned, it's Spring! Forget the fact there's probably still a foot of snow on the ground, not to mention the mountain bike trails will likely be snow-covered into April. It's now or never and time to kick it into high-gear for beefing up the fitness for summer's events. All winter, I slugged it out on the trainer, did some weight-work at the Y, stuck in a wimpy run or walk every now and then, and basically kept it low-HR to keep and build the endurance. Today, I'm switching things up. I'm going to be running at work two times a week during lunch since my time is pretty much taken in the evenings with gardening, biking, kayaking, and cooking. But one night a week I'm going to squeeze in my hill intervals in the backyard or next to my house on the road while the snow melts in the field. the road hill takes 4 minutes to run up and the field hill is a little steeper and takes 2 minutes. Both are perfect quad-building for steep hill climbs. My 4:00 am routine (when I can role my ass out of bed) was expanded a bit to add push-ups and an extra exercise with the 10-lb medicine ball. It's only an extra 10 minutes or so, but will really add on some fitness with that little bit of added strength work. The bike will build into more tempo and higher-HR stuff. Probably an hour or two in the week of high-HR, and one long tempo ride on the weekends. Oh, the weekends -- one day is a long run and the other day is a long ride. Maybe I'll combine the two if I feel up to it. Long is runs going from the current 50 minutes to eventually 1.5 hours (?) and the bike from the current 3.5 hrs to 5+ hrs so I can do the Rattling 50 in August and the Ironcross in October. Yup, I'm a dreamer, but we gotta have dreams, don't we now?! I sure hope I can stick with it. I gotta drop 10 pounds and running really boosts the effort of weightloss. But then again, all the above is nothing compared to this video. My dear hubby spied this while he was purusing kayak videos. This video makes everything we do very, very humbling. It's a video of a kayaker who broke his neck 30 years ago, and every day he goes to the spot where he broke his neck, and paddles. It's the effort it takes him to get there... he's in a wheel chair.