on the edge

On the edge of beginning a new semester (tomorrow I begin teaching), today is a last chance to get a triple workout in.

I ran on the treadmill, hopped onto the Spin bike, and finished with a 2 hour table tennis training session all in one evening after work. I'd probably be lucky to get a single short workout in every other day once things are in full swing around here.

On my previous blog entry (natural training), I mentioned that now that I can knock out a 10K run comfortably, it was time to bump up the speed and see how far that can take me.

It was time to put my money where my mouth is.

I began with a 10 minute warm-up, basically walking at 3.0 mph to get the circulation going but including a 2 min 7.0 mph rev up of my cardio engine.

Then I bumped the speed up to 8.0 mph on the treadmill (1.0 mph more than I've been running at recently). The Nike+ download reported an average pace of 7'13" min/mile but as you can see I didn't quite manage to complete mile one.

Adding in a 5 minute cooldown, with the warm-up that's a 20 minute workout. Very short, but since I went anaerobic, it's not wise to push it.

The HR graph tells the real story.

The average HR was 154 bpm (a fairly low number, I sustained an average of 161 bpm on the comfortable 10K workout) but this is totally misleading.

By minute 6, my HR had busted through my comfort zone. As you can see, I hit 169 bpm and the pace felt unsustainable. In the discomfort zone, I probably could have pushed it for a bit longer, but since I'm following the natural training method, I shut it down.
(The idea is that without forcing myself to follow a formula, I should be able to naturally adapt and delay the onset of unsustainability significantly by simply repeating this 8.0 mph workout once a week.)

However, since I only burned 99 kcal in 6 minutes, it was onto the spin bike. So I tapped out an extra 458 kcal in just over half an hour under the video guidance of the ultra-cool video dude with hair gel who never seems to sweat during the ride:

After that, I managed a good 2 hour table tennis training session. And the luxury of this third workout of the evening was only made possible because I shut down the 8.0 mph treadmill workout before I managed to tire out and trash my legs. As Dave Edmunds sings (see YouTube):

Midnight, I'm a-waiting on the 1205
Hoping it'll take me just a little farther down the line
Moonlight, you're just a heartache in disguise
Won't you keep my heart from breaking
If it's only for a very short time
...

Like that orange Nittaku training ball in the first picture (which incidentally came to a rest of its own accord in that position), I'm living on the edge hoping it'll take me just a little farther down the line...