I’m back in the Vegas oven after a lengthy but mostly uneventful day of plane travel. I slept okay and decided to beat traffic this morning with early morning coffee before work.
In general my plan going forward is to beat traffic each workday morning with an early visit to the gym or early coffee across town. My typical commute routes got kind of clogged in recent weeks. I decided it made little sense for me to wait until it’s time to go to work to leave if I can make better use of the time while skipping the traffic. This multi-leg morning commute actually would feel a lot less stressful than battling traffic at 8am.
Today is a scheduled full rest day. I felt fairly tired after the plane trip, and scuttled any notions of an evening workout last night. I had a meal and just went to bed. I feel okay this morning, though I’m starting to notice the ham pain has become more like a hip joint pain. I want to see what a day of light activity does for it, after a long weekend of long walks.
I decided during the long week to make some training changes going ahead.
Air quality permitting, I want to start working on easy intervals in the early morning. I wouldn’t have a ton of time so I’d probably stick to 3-4 1K-intervals in the morning. These are light effort M-pace-effort type intervals, so it wouldn’t torch me much at all to knock these out.
I also decided to stop running on work breaks. Along with these runs being on paved sidewalks, the weight of items in my pockets combined with being 10-15 lbs heavier than when I ran regularly in Chicago leads me to think my ham pain is in part a product of the extra load and stress of running heavy and on sidewalk pavement. Doing all my running in the morning in running gear, on nearby asphalt trails, might lessen the impact and contribute to healing.
All my strength training will be on weekdays in the morning before work. It was more challenging and took up valuable aerobic training time to do this in the evening, so I’ll save the evening gym sessions for elliptical work. This will allow most if not all of these elliptical workouts to go an hour or longer, instead of being henned into 45-60 minutes.
I’ll also skip workouts on Friday nights, to better load up for any long workouts I want to do Saturday morning.
Saturday long workouts will be easy/steady longer runs, with tempo surges here and there. This will be the only workout I do Saturday. I’ll rest the rest of the day.
Unless I’m out of town and this is infeasible, Sundays are double days. I do a regular easy-interval workout in the morning. Later in the afternoon, I do a longer elliptical session, probably 75-90 minutes. If I’m nowhere near a gym, I won’t worry about doing this.
Diet wise, I’m going to focus on low oxalate foods, which reportedly will help reduce overall inflammation. I want to also see if cleaning up my diet not only helps with recovery from workouts but also with recovery from the ham issue. My diet could have been better the last few months, and perhaps this is a factor in why the ham issue isn’t healing more effectively.
I still have scheduled rest days (1-2 a week) interspersed throughout the schedule and those will be strictly enforced. On weekdays I’m allowed to walk on work breaks and that’s it. On weekends I do no exercise.
Meanwhile, today, I have a rest day, and will be taking it easy. Until tomorrow….