Today is the day after Christmas. I did not walk or even do the stretch from the Southern Utah Hiking Mini Series. I thought about doing the stretch, but it just never happened. It was Christmas. I deserved the break. I'm going to torture myself for the rest of my "vacation" though. Since I won't be working, I have no excuses and can do 2 mile walks every day. I don't have to walk fast every day, but I do need to suck it up and do two miles. Back in July, I started doing the iFit 2 mile challenge. It's 30 or 31 2 mile slide show walks. They take two mile stretches on Google Earth and you get a new image every 5 or 10 seconds. I've never really counted them. There aren't any trainers. I didn't finish the series yet for a variety of reasons. Some of them legitimate like packing up the house or having Shingles. Some of them were less legitimate like I just didn't feel like doing two miles so I didn't do anything at all. This two mile thing is hard when your feet go numb. I think I've done twelve so far. Oddly enough, I've done two of them twice even though I haven't even done some of them once. Although, there are so really hard looking ones. One of them has over 1,300 feet in elevation. That one might have to wait for awhile.
Today, I experimented with my Gym Boss Interval Trainer App. I knew that I was doing a 2 mile walk so I needed to have short work intervals and long rest intervals. I set it up for 1 minute of work and 5 minutes of rest with 5 intervals. I realized that I had my intervals set up wrong and had to fix it while I was on the treadmill. They start you off with a countdown interval. That interval does not repeated. I you don't want a countdown which is basically a warning that your first interval will start in x number of seconds, then you set the countdown to 0. I had their countdown as my first interval so it was only going to make me do one minute of work and then just round after round of five minutes of easy for me. I got that fixed and started the timer at about 4 minutes into the walk. I had already warmed up for about 2 minutes.
The timer worked find, but the screen kept going dark, so I'll have to figure out how to fix that. Also, the sound wasn't very loud for the rounds. It also didn't count down the 3, 2, 1 warning that I thought it was going to do. It did flash the screen though so I had that as my warning. I thought it would be awkward or cumbersome to have to change the speed at each interval, but it really wasn't that bad. I just need to make sure I hit the second number a little faster because there were a few times where I was going 2.5 and then I was going 2.0 because I was too slow hitting the 8 to get to 2.8. The intervals ended too soon. I should have done a sixth or even seventh working interval so it would have ended closer to when the walk ended. The intervals did help me keep my mind engaged. The last 15 minutes sucks because there wasn't much changing other than slight changes in the elevation so there wasn't anything to keep my mind off the fact that my feet were numb. I'm not sure if I mentioned it yet, but my work intervals were 2.8 and my rest intervals were 2.5. I'll probably do this again tomorrow, but make my work intervals 2.5 and my rest intervals 2.2 and see how that goes. The major downside to that is that I'll be on there a lot longer. I might change up the times and do 2 minutes of work and 3 minutes of rest if it I the 2.2 and 2.5. I might also do progressions like Zac Marion had us do during the Southern Utah Hiking Mini Series.
This walk was relatively flat. It only had 54 feet in elevation gain, but it really did kick my ass. I was thinking it was going to be my fasted 2 mile walk, but it was actually 4th! I have a couple with 46ish minutes and one slightly faster than this one in the 47ish minute area. My left pelvis area hurt early on and so did my calves! At some point everything seemed to just be numb and nothing hurt anymore, but I was definitely breathing heavy! My heart rate got up into the 160s. During the cool down I was trying to get my heart rate back down into the 120s, but that never happened. I slowed the pace down to 2.0, then 1.5 and then 1.0, but even with a four minute cool down, I was still at 131. I just could not get into the 120s so I just gave up. My feet weren't number anymore though after the cool down. Not sure if it's the speed or the slight incline making my feel number. I guess that will take some experimenting to find out. I've rambled on enough at this point so I'm going to wrap this up.
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