Flab Surfing
After the blood pressure scare of late last year and the indolence of Christmas and New Year, I went into the gym today to start the fight back towards the fitness I had when I ran the half marathon back in September. I had no intention of maxing out, just gently reintroducing my muscles to the concept of exercise. Given that relatively straightforward aim, the session was successful.
I based the session around three sets of twenty lateral pulldowns with a hard ten minutes on an exercise bike and ten minutes on a treadmill in between. The time on the treadmill was mostly running but also with some walking and a final sprint. A final wind-down was on the exercise bike.
I had mixed feelings at the end of the session – partly pleasure at getting back into the gym again but equally in part trepidation at the effort which will be required to get up to my previous fitness again. I do, though, have a hard target in that I am entered in the Edinburgh Half Marathon on 23rd May!
My aim is to condition the muscles again and then retake to the streets to run at lunchtimes and weekends. Running outside is much better than inside for many reasons. One is, of course, the fresh air and the feel of the breeze/wind/rain on your face and another is that you do actually feel that you’ve been somewhere even when you’ve just done a big loop: on a treadmill you stay where you are staring at the wall for the whole time!
By happy coincidence I found the attached in this morning’s Guardian – http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jan/18/running-brain-memory-cell-growth . As ever the comments are as entertaining as the article and the serious ones make some valid points about exercise in general. The basic principle seems to be reasonably well established, though, and it all adds to the motivation to keep going even when there is a little voice in the back of your head trying to persuade you to stop.
The photo is a grab shot taken on my mobile phone on the way to work this morning.
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