No Thinking, Please

It’s been an interesting week for me.  To recap:

Sunday – migraine

Monday – migraine – stayed home from school

Tuesday – workout with a trainer and an almost-migraine

Wednesday – quizzes and still a headache

Thursday – stayed home with a headache in the morning; not quite a migraine, or maybe just a mild one

Friday – crappy morning, tension headache all day, kids’ school thing, early bedtime and my mom visited

Saturday – got to sleep in until 7:30am (with a 6:30am wakeup by my daughter), daughter’s hockey, daughter had birthday party to attend (she had tons of fun), daughter got her ears pierced (!), son’s hockey (he seems to want to play in net?), and then my mom took the kids back to her place = time to myself!

Knowing I had a little time to myself, I had a grand vision of working out, making a shopping list, doing some homework, taking a nice bubble bath, and going to bed early.  You know how they say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions?  Well, I’m pretty sure that the road to poor fitness and weight gain is.

After my mom left, I was thinking I should maybe hop on the bike for a 20 min ride and then head outside for a run in order to enjoy the relatively warm weather.  And then I realized that I was really hungry and should probably fuel up before working out, and I might as well have supper since it was 5pm anyway, and while I was eating, I should watch a movie and relax a little.  And then partway through the movie, my husband called and I chatted with him for quite awhile.  And then I finished the movie, and then thought I should call my mom and see how the kids were doing.  And then I chatted with the kids for awhile, and threw in a load of laundry and put on some workout clothes while I was in my room.  And then I found my workout shoes and put on my Garmin, but wasn’t sure what workout to do, so I spent some time looking through the workouts my trainer has given me.  And then my husband texted me that he wanted to Skype, so we did that for awhile.  And then I finally worked out! Please, someone tell me I’m not the only one who does this sort of thing.

I’ve been indecisive about my workouts lately.  In dealing with my IT band injury, I have reconsidered my original race plans for the year, but haven’t really decided what races to do yet.  This has resulted in a lack of focus in terms of my workouts.  My solution tonight was to pull out a DVD workout and just not think.  I haven’t used a DVD for, oh, over 1 1/2 years.  I’ve been following the workouts my trainer has given me and that’s been great, but I felt like I needed to shake things up a little and totally not think at all: no counting reps, no checking what comes next, no decision as to what weight I should use, even.  I just followed along.

I wasn’t looking for a long workout, but I wanted something fairly intense so I went with Jillian Michael’s 30 Day Shred.  I did level one, which used to totally kick my butt almost 2 years ago.  And tonight I found that  it was a solid workout, but very doable.  My heart rate got up to 175 bpm, with an average (including the 2 min warmup) of 143 bpm.  I was able to use heavier weight than I did in the past and felt like I got a decent upper body workout, but the lower body stuff was maybe not quite enough for me.  And I could definitely have used more intense ab work.  Time for level 2, I guess?  It’s nice to know that even though my fitness is not what it was at the beginning of the school year, it’s still better than it was in spring of 2009.

My 2011 race plans are still in the works, but I think I should make some decisions soon so that I can up my motivation a little.

I plan to get another workout in tomorrow.  Unfortunately the temperature is dropping, so I really should have taken advantage of the near-freezing temperatures and gone for a run outside today.  Oh well – another time.  I think I’ll stationary bike instead, using an iTrain workout to stay in the “no-thinking-workout” groove.  And now I won’t spend so much time trying to figure out what to do, right?  Right.  🙂