2010 Gym #9: Pushing past the limits…

I was warned.  At work today, PW told me that I could expect 20 minutes of cardio tonight at the gym.  When I got there, he was on the treadmill and already had a sweat going.  He stopped his treadmill and told me “I have a challenge for you tonight.”  He then told me we were going to run a 10 in 10.  That’s 10 laps (a mile) in 10 minutes.  And there would be some sort of penalty for not getting it done in time.

Now, up to this point I was happy to get 2 miles in in 23 minutes and that was without a marathoner “motivating” me.  So he ran pace for me as we went, and I made it through the first half fairly well and had plenty of time to spare.  My lungs were screaming, especially my right one.  Paul wanted to teach me the technique of negative splits, where you start slow and gradually ratchet up the pace.  He said another way to do it was run a certain number of laps, then walk a certain number of laps to achieve the same thing.

I got it done, however I was beat and looked like a half-boiled chicken for the rest of our workout.  We continued to blast the legs for the rest of the workout, which also included sets of chinups and 15 dips.  I was happy to have pushed past my limit, but its not something I want to do every workout.  My lungs really hurt during the run, and my lack of lunch was readily apparent as we got into the weights.  It felt like I hit a cement wall about halfway through.

That’s all for me right now, I’m going to install Windows 7 Ultimate on my Eee PC.  Hopefully I’ll use it a bit more with a good OS on there.