Fish and chips
Eek! It’s been just a tad busy here with one thing and another. Christmas at the in-laws on Saturday, then beach lunch catch up with friends on Sunday – all takes longer than I expect with a bub in tow. Plus I did a little morning exercise each day and there went my entire day.
Saturday was the 4 week re-take of the fitness test and was supposed to be my mini-goal exercise. I had time to do the fitness test, but we ran out of time for anything else, so my “bush run” had to wait for Sunday morning. The fitness test was a bit of a mixed bag – I did amazingly better on some things and worse on others! Can’t work out why some would be worse when I’ve put in the hard yards over the last 4 weeks, at least some things improved to keep me happy. One of those as I mentioned before, were the ab test. I can actually do some now! The other, the big one, was the 1km walk/jog/run. First time around it was a bit of jogging and a bit of walking and took me a smidge over 8 minutes to complete. I was happy with that at the time as I hadn’t run for so long. This time I kept going at a steady jog the entire way and pushed a little harder for the last 100m and managed to complete it in 6 minutes 10 seconds!! Yep – nearly a 2 minute improvement. That absolutely blew me away – I don’t run anywhere near that pace while training on the treadmill and certainly not continuously for that length of time yet. This is the result that will keep me going.
My bush run Sunday morning, well, lets just say my legs were still feeling a bit worse for wear from the day before. It really didn’t help that it was already temps in the high 20′s and ridiculously high humidity down in the river valley – very pretty, but no breeze gets in down amongst the trees and it traps any moisture, so it was a bit like going for a run in a sauna… Not really my idea of fun yet. I ended up walking for the most part and took around 40 minutes to do my 4km, but my heart rate monitor assures me I burned off close to 500 calories so I must have done something right. Will have to do this one again in another 4 weeks and see if I’ve improved again.
What did you do for your 4 week mini-goal exercise?