My feet are much better today after last night having thrown them into a vibrating foot massager with hot water… I topped the water up (to make it hot again) twice and by the end my feet were like jelly :)
Today I went off with a vengeance again. First, off to get my hair cut (north towards the city), then east and south to Moore Park shopping center (I’m after a particular computer component – and decided specifically I was going to let my FEET do the walking, not my fingers*). I had spurts of jogging in there, nothing too great, but enough to get the heart rate up.
The better part of the journey was the trip back to work (I wasn’t working, but went to the work gym to jump on the rowing machine). What I did was alternate my walking and jogging such that I started jogging for 30 seconds, walked for 30 seconds, jog 45s, walk 45s, jog 60s, walk 60s, jog 60s, walk 45s, jog 95s, walk 45s… Then continued off in some arrangement like that until I got to the gym. It was good cardio work and got me working hard.
Once at the gym, I jumped on the rower… Normally I’d do 2km in around 10 minutes. The next setting up was 5km… Hmmm… should I do it? YEP! I decidedly slowed the pace a little (from 32 strokes per minute, to around 29 spm) and that did help. I started with the resistance on 6, but soon put it up to 8 after about 1000m. I took a 30 second breather about the 2.7km mark and got back into it. For the last 1000m I thought I’d try a little harder and got the spm up to about 35, but soon died in the ass. I slowed back down again. Then with 200m to go I really put in. 39 spm and then I thought I was going to die. I didn’t make it 100 metres before I had to cruise in the last 100. All in all, a GREAT workout and I completed the 5000m in around 27 minutes. I forget the exact figure, but it was well under the half hour.
Then, when I was happy with that and about to go home, the gym instructor came over and we started talking and he ‘convinced’ me that we should do some abdominal work. I’m sure they get off on pain, and having someone there watching you does give you that little bit of incentive to really put in and “be tough”. I was tough, but not before failing some of the exercises miserably. Ahh well, I have no idea what you would call half of these, but they were good. And most of them I can do at home. So I probably won’t. :-)
* There was a television commercial in the ’90s that promoted the public telephone system, and the yellow pages. It’s slogan was “Let your fingers do the walking, not your feet” or something similar