An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

First day of biking to work this year. Took a chance, as I had snapped off the top of the pin on the valve stem of my front tire, but the pressure held for the ride out (I bought a replacement tube at lunchtime). As always, an enjoyable eight miles plus one mile of hell through the construction of Tysons Corner. Got to work and changed in the tiny temporary locker room they have set up while the regular ones are under renovation. A little weird sharing this small space with another employee who was quite nonchalantly totally naked for the whole period I was in there. Maybe I should report this incident to one of our senior HR people. Oh wait, he was one of our senior HR people.

Yesterday I read yet another article about High Intensity Training. The idea of HIT is that rather than exercising for a long time at a steady pace, you do a series of short, explosive all out bursts with cooldowns in between - intervals to the max. Well, that seems good to me; less time exercising, and really only a few minutes of pounding on my oh-so-fragile lumbar disks. So today I decided to try it out on the trail.  My target workout was five minutes of warmup, six intervals of 30 seconds all-out followed by a minute of recovery, then five minutes or so of cooldown - about 20 minutes total. My supposed max heart rate is somewhere in the 170's, depending on which formula you use. They say you shouldn't exceed 80% of that, or the upper 130's for me. However, my usual runs or erging sessions take me to about 145-150. Well, take a look at the accompanying chart. For the first three intervals not only was I above 80%, I was well above my supposed 100% heart rate (note the...

I spent Saturday building a retaining wall in my backyard so I could expand my vegetable bed. The previous day had been rainy, the yard was wet and so over the course of the day everything got muddy. I got muddy. My tools got muddy. David, helping me out, got muddy. I thought that Saturday was going to be my muddy day for the weekend. Sunday I woke up early to do my first breakfast paddle of the season. Sunday mornings when there's nothing else going on I tend to start my days with a jaunt up the river, usually pausing at my turnaround point to have a thermos of coffee and a snack - hence the "breakfast paddle" name. As always, I felt a wave of happiness as soon as I pulled into the marina. This was also the first day this year that I took out the Shearwater - my beautiful wooden kayak, which only made it more special. The water is still cold so I donned my drysuit. This suit is really meant for people who paddle with friends (actually not a bad idea when...