Sunday, April 10, 2011

Vacation training = half training

So as you know now, I went on vacation for a week.  Not necessarily the smartest thing to do with 4 weeks left until the race.  But that's when the kiddos spring break fell and so that's when I took the trip to Jamaica.  I had great plans of running on the beach every day and doing my usual pushups, squats, jumps, and that type of stuff on the beach.  A funny thing about plans is that they don't always come to fruition. 

My first full day there, the Mrs. and I went to the gym on the resort.  I guess technically it was a gym but it was a room about 20 feet by 20 feet, had 2 broken treads, 2 broken but usable spin bikes, 1 elliptical, and 3 upright bikes for cardio.  For strength there was some funky ab machine, a chest press machine, and an odd looking lat pulldown/tricep extension/bicep curl.  Oh, and 3 medicine balls each weighing 8 lbs.  Needless to say I was extremely disappointed with these amenities but since this is where my wife wanted to workout, I would make do.  We did 5-4-3-2-1 minute sprints on the bikes with 10-8-6-4-2 pushups/situps with a med ball/squats.  Not too intense but simply something to get the heart rate going.  The sprints provided quite a jolt to the system so I was happy with that. 

My 2nd day there I did a beach workout with modifications.  I was able to run 1.5 lengths of the beach totalling about 3 miles.  That was great as I got a mixture of terrains from sand and water and running through some trees in the parts that the resorts weren't on.  Unfortunately though I didn't get my strength training because the beach was getting packed and it's a relatively small beach to begin with so I didn't have a whole lot of room.  But I did get a great run in and was pretty happy with that. 

The 3rd and final full day was a waste.  After 2.5 days of getting fairly intoxicated by noon, I simply didn't have much energy.  I decided to go for a swim since I did have the ocean right there.  Have I told you in the past how crappy of a swimmer I am?  Well let me tell you know.  I'm bad.  So bad that I've had people try to teach me only to tell me I need to stick to land.  But I took a crack at it here since the water was pretty shallow and wasn't too worried about drowning.  I tried the breaststroke but only did that for a couple of minutes.  I could've gone more but I didn't have goggles and this really sucked without them.  So I turned to my back and did a back stroke for a couple of minutes.  This just got me tired.  Did I mention I'm a bad swimmer.  Then I turned and did side stroke for a while.  This was OK and I was able to do this for about 4-5 minutes.  All in all it was about 10 total minutes of swimming.  Not bad but hardly a workout. 

So in my 3 full days of being there, I got 1 good workout, 1 OK workout, and 1 bad workout.  I tried to get back on track today with a 5 mile run.  Here's a math equation for you: very windy day + 1 week of intoxication in Jamaica + trying to develop a new stride = crappy run.  So I'll try again tomorrow and keep going until race day.  I'm excited to switch to the Mini marathon.  I"m confident I'll do well in that with my new running style. 

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