DOMS

But delayed onset muscle soreness isn't a bad thing.  In moderation, it indicates progress.

I'm rather tired today and there are a few factors, but I think they include DOMS:

1. DOMS (hilly run and zwow yesterday)
2.  Gluten exposure on Saturday. 
3.  Not enough sleep.  I took some ZMA before bed and fell into a deep sleep at about 11, but I got woken up repeatedly from 5-7 am due to courting birds and heavy artillery (the closest thing is a military training area, and spring is starting and this one hopeless lovelorn bird displayed his ignorance of Einstein's definition of insanity over and over and over again.  I think the pathos got to me more than the racket all of the other birds combined: I started imaging a scene in a small French village where a spurned young lover keeps trying, but the tanks are rolling in...).  Anyway, it seems that I need about 7 - 7.5 hours of sleep a night these days, and six just doesn't cut it.

It's kind of inconclusive to sift out DOMS from all that, but I took the dog for an hour-long hike and, at times, certain muscles protested more when they were required more.  This is somewhat uncomfortable, yes, but also much more satisfying than the constant soreness of gluten exposure.

During my healthier periods in the past, I had a regular cycle of sore/easy and not sore/tough days, usually 3 tough workouts a week.   This is what I'm hoping to get back to.   It doesn't matter that my hard days would've been easier in the past.  As long as they continue to feel hard, and I remain consistent with exercise and diet (mainly, avoiding gluten, that simplifies a lot), they will become more difficult. 

flying too close to the sun

Tues: just walked.  Tired!

Today, jogged for almost an hour.  We tried out a new loop and I missed a turn and ended up on a road I wasn't planning on running on--it was fine, and there were a couple of people walking on the shoulder so I wasn't way out there.  It was just a bit too busy for the dog's preferences.  He's gotten better about diesel trucks but...

Sad story time.  When we got this dog, he was about a year and a half old, and apparently his prior scumbag owners managed to find the time to cut his ears off with scissors and leave other scars, but they didn't walk him outside or socialize him in any way or even feed him regularly.  Basically, we wound up with a dog that flipped his shit over plastic bags, cars, cracks in the road, electrical boxes, leaves, etc.  My first couple of weeks walking him were just circles, ok, let's take another pass at this, see, no prob!  And he caught on but he just doesn't extrapolate very well (better than the koi, as it turns out).  So a black plastic bag was entirely different from a white plastic bag, and a diesel truck was a completely foreign monster.   The trick with many things is to make the very first time as pleasant as possible: unfortunately, when he saw and heard his first diesel truck, he panicked, ran into me, I tripped over him, and I yelled because I hit the concrete knees first, which rather hurt.

It took several years to undo the perception that diesel trucks are out to maul us, and we still have our moments.  So I try not to take him on busy roads.

Anyway, the run was tough but I think the magic is finally starting to come back: on the last big hill, I actually managed to push up hard enough that the discomfort went somewhere else.

And then I did zwow #47, which I'll be doing again.  It's simple and short and tough, and has squats.  The exercises are simply two alternating sets.  One is weighted squat jumps, the other is a combo of superman pushups and ab-splitters or whatever those exercises are called, I forget.  I am sloppy with exercise names.  I just found out that my favourite nautilus machine, the seated hip ab/adductor machine, is also called the yes no machine.  LOL.  Anyway, zwow #47 is a super workout.

The Triplet

Yesterday: walk
Today: 40ish min jog and zwow 12/pistol squats.  I feel much better already.

I've mentioned the triplet before: it's three steep hills in quick succession.  It was rather brutal the first few times I've ran it, and still is, but I've gotten more into the spirit of it.  I run it the hard way (net uphill) because that's the way my loops go, and the first hill is the worst one because the footing is loose pine needles, a bit slippery even when dry, and I really have to focus on keeping my stride rate quick instead of trying to dig in.  Maybe this is why I don't run the other way!  And then a quick short downhill, just several flying steps, and hill #2 is half swallowed-up with momentum, but it rears its noxious bulk in time for several seconds of scramble, and then another downhill, a bit longer and less steep where I stretch out a bit more, and finally #3, which curves slightly and coyly, and by this point, I'm breathing exhaustively and I have to remind myself again to keep up my stride rate, and the flood of endorphins helps, not only with hill #3 but the trail beyond it, which is an immediate and additional uphill, but longer and more gradual, and I'm getting better at catching my breath on this.  That's when it's time for the period!  Not before.  The triplet goes by that quickly.

I am getting better with my modified pistol squats too.

So we went out for a nice dinner last night

And now I'm paying for it!
It was still a really nice meal, and it would've been nicer without sore guts and a sore right shoulder--this is referred pain and has actually nothing to do with my shoulder: it hurts because of whatever went down below.  It's been a while since it has hurt this badly.

I'm disappointed because it was even printed in the menu that the chef could accommodate allergies.  The only think I can think of is that my bison burger (no bun) was cooked on the same surface as someone else's bun.  Do they heat up buns in this fashion?  I really have no clue because the few food places I worked at didn't do hamburgers.  There was also a piece of bread on the side of our mussels, balanced on top of a few shells--usually I don't eat anything that has touched bread, but I figured that since the bread was just touching those shells, I'd leave those for my husband and be fine.  Maybe they dropped it into the bowl!  I should have sent it back but I hate to be that person.

Anyway, now I'm having a day of ginger ale and lots of water and tea instead of a long run.

I do want to go back there because the food was tasty and they get their products from local and/or humane farms.  I thought I was putting the poor server through the inquisition, but I guess I'll need to ask even more questions next time. 

Short and sweet

Zwow #56 is only 8 minutes long.  I don't have a jump rope and my dumbbells are still in a box somewhere in the garage, so I guess what I did was a dummy workout, like calling a cycle with an empty chamber a dummy load.  Dunno!  Anyway, my dummy workout was still tough enough.  High knees are still high knees and I'm still breathing kind of hard.

Before that, we hit the roads and it was great running weather, about 4C and sunny.  I enjoyed the run more than I thought I would: I'd assumed that running down spread-out residential streets would be boring, and it was to a certain extent, but the pines and the dormant grass make this seem like another place.  Parts of it looked sort of like Calgary, other parts looked like Northern Ontario, and sometimes I could imagine I was in Colorado.   And then we passed by some goats.  Very cool.

I diverted from the plan a bit: I got bored with the residential streets and decided to stay on one of the main roads.  The speed limit is 45 versus 35 miles but the shoulders are considerably wider, not to mention that drivers seem much more attentive (we've already seen one woman driving in our neighbourhood in the middle of the road completely turned around in her seat--I think she was feeding her kids, but YIKES!) and I was in the mood for some straight lines.  Pining for the Midwest?  There were a couple of loose dogs but they didn't come after us nor even close to their bounds.  Maybe they have underground electrical fencing. 

This was the first run I've done totally off trails here, and it went better than expected.  I'm going to be exploring some loops.  There were a few long hills, including one I ended up walking a portion of, but the terrain is a smooth break from the trails. 

Total: about an hour.  I'll be taking some more ZMA tonight for sure.

Summing up, a break from Eucledian n-space

Sat: walked for a while
Sun: ran for a 1/2 hour, walked for a couple (to-from town).  It was a clammy day and I had breathing issues during the run and had to cut it short.  And then I had a bit of SVT after it.  Not a good day.
Mon: walked for ~1 hour
Tues: nothing except for some yoga at home.  !  It was raining

Wed: ran for almost an hour.  This was a much better run, and I would have gone for longer except that I ran out of road.  And then I did zwow #12 and my modified but still killer pistol squats--now I'm able to focus on proper breathing, and hopefully proper form will follow.   And, more importantly, I wasn't kept up during the night with muscular cramping.   I'm not sure how much I've mentioned this, and it's gradually snuck up on me during the last year or so: the tougher the workout, the more likely I am not going to sleep much or well that night due to aches and pains.  Last time it happened, sometime last week, I think, I gave up sleeping and googled from about 3 to 6 am and found out that this is not an uncommon problem.  There are a few solutions, including ZMA supplements (zinc, magnesium, and B-6). 

I take a few supplements already, what's one more?  LOL.  Seriously, I've tried to get everything from diet alone, and I hope to in the future, but malabsoption is a wrench in the works and I'm stuck with iron pills at the very least for the present.

Anyway, I figured that if I made maple butter instead of honey butter (we tend to eat fresh-baked cheesy puffs for dessert a few times a week), that would add some magnesium and zinc to the mix, and I could see how it went.

Turns out that my husband has ZMA pills and I took one last night and slept for a solid 7 hours without even waking up at 3 or so as usual, which is excellent.

Today: walked for ~1 hour.

Yesterday's events also included clipping the dog's nails for the first time in over 5 years.  Usually the pavement grinds them down, but we're almost always on trails now--even when we run on the roads, we're often on the soft shoulder (no sidewalks here).  I'm slowly figuring out which of the roads are safe and more interesting--not that kind of interesting!--to run on, but I had to clip the dog's nails down a bit so that he wouldn't be too uncomfortable with a road run.

!!!!!!!!!!!!PISTOL SQUAT BREAKTHROUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No, I can't toss them off as quickly and deeply as Z, BUT I have just discovered, after umpteen months of wavering dedication and mixed results, the missing key to that treasure chest of lactic-acid burning and actin/myosin-tearing delight:

I hold onto something on the way down so that my crappy sense of balance does not tip me out of my descent prematurely, and then, once I'm set into a solid single leg squat, I relinquish my armature and power up cleanly, though painfully, though thrillingly.

My problem has been that I'm too wobbly on the way down and, though I still get a workout, I'm perhaps not targeting the right muscles and definitely not getting as much as I could out of it except a possible injury.  I just don't have enough strength to stabilize as I'm lowering into the squat and I end up doing shallower squats that aren't as satisfying.  There is something about powering way up out of a deep squat that releases so much tension and negativity but I just couldn't get into that range on a single leg.

So, shortly after embarking on this pistol squat journey sometime last year, I figured that---

argggh--we are now living in not-quite-absolute-nowhere and I'm trying to remain positive (denial's not negative, is it?), but if this crappy internet craps out once more on the best ah.fm episode I've heard in a while (Kiholm/Globetrotter, props!), I might toss something--

--anyway, I figured that if I held onto something while performing the squats, this would be a good intermediary stage, like doing pushups from knees.  NOPE!  It ended up being a shoulder exercise, no matter what I tried to support myself with.  I couldn't find anything the right height, nothing to help me exchange wobble for a raw true squat.  There seemed to be no way to break this exercise down.

So, for many months, I wobbled in and out of shallow unsatisfying pistol squats and eventually got to the point where I could perform one or two near-perfect ones (late at night at work usually--standing on a contaminated floor increases focus dramatically), but we then moved around for a month and I got out of my routine, got glutened, sick, etc, and now I'm rebuilding muscle once again.

Today, I was giving zwow #12 another whirl in the bedroom and I looked at the bed footrail and thought about resting against it only on the way down

:) :) :) :) :) : ) : ) : ) : )  : )  : )  :  )  :  )  :  )   :   )   :   )

Before that, we jogged for about 62 minutes, same route as last time, although I walked up a few hills this time (not the thrilling triplet--those hills are considerably higher than I remembered, but I couldn't miss out on the fun), and my energy level was low and I couldn't get my breathing to settle on the flats and downhills.  We saved time because the dog didn't take a dump, and maybe we were moving faster than I realized, I guess.  So-so run, but the pistol squats totally pumped me up after that slog (hence the parentheses and general grammatical spewing, so sorry!)