Weekly Rundown- It’s Fall! (Florida Style)
Hooray! I always say we have a change in our weather by the third week of October- and this year was no different. It wasn’t cold, but we had some cooler mornings. Instead of 90s, we had highs around 80, and I’ll take that! Thanks as always to Kim and Deborah for hosting this rundown- let’s see how the week went. Sunday Ah, Sunday! I had such a great trail run! It was in the 70s and cloudy for most of this run, and the whole thing felt easy. I ran 8 miles and really enjoyed it. Monday Alright, back to the hard stuff. It was Day #10 in Caroline Girvan’s Iron Series, back and biceps. My biceps were so trashed by the end, I had to go down to 5 pound dumbbells for the finisher (how embarrassing.) Tuesday In the morning I did Day #11 of Caroline Girvan, which was legs. This was a Lunge-a-Palooza! Other than some squats in the beginning and some calf work at the end, it was all lunge variations. Ouch. In the afternoon I got out for a quick 3 mile run. Luckily, I got this run in just in time before the DOMS from the morning workout set in. Wednesday Day #12 of Caroline Girvan, which was chest and triceps. Doing her workouts three days in a row insured that my entire body was sore. Fun! Thursday AH! It was our coldest day of the week- 61 degrees when I went out for my run. Brr! I ran 4 miles, and forgot to take a picture. I’m kind of mad about that because I was wearing my favorite “winter” tank top. Ha ha… yes, I have summer tank tops and winter tank tops- you can tell I live in Florida. It actually stayed in the 60s all day and was overcast and rainy. I was able to wear my long sleeve fall shirt- wearing a long sleeve shirt in October doesn’t happen every year! Friday Caroline Girvan Day #14- posterior chain workout: glutes, hamstrings and back. Then in the afternoon I got out for another 3 mile run. It’s kind of ironic that I wrote a whole blog post about how much I love my morning runs, and then this week I ran twice in the afternoon… it’s just the way things worked out. Our weather warmed up a little and it was 80 degrees for this afternoon run- but cloudy and breezy. It felt good! Saturday OFF! This is the second Saturday in a row where I took a day off, and I’m liking it! Again, I slept for eight hours. After work we watched Baylor win their Homecoming game, yay!!! We’ve had a couple tough games lately, so it was good to see them win again. Sunday On tap- a run to the beach! It’ll be 9 miles, unless I decide to add a little extra and make it 10. I haven’t done this run in a while and I’m looking forward to it. One other thing I added this week was a tiny bit of plyometrics. In this post I talked about the things I learned from Stacy Sims’ book, Next Level, and one of them is that plyometrics are really important for keeping muscles and bones strong after menopause. I have to be really careful here because of my “difficult” foot (wait- you didn’t think my plantar fasciitis was gone, did you? No no no… I still have that.) I just did ten jump squats after my runs- baby steps! If my foot can handle it I’ll progress to a more advanced plyometric routine, eventually. What’s your ideal running temperature? – In the winter we’ll get down to the 50s (sometimes) and I enjoy that, but I think my favorite is low 60s, like we had on Thursday.