Workout Update - Wednesday

Wednesday, 21st July

Supposed to meet the girls for dinner after Sumi finishes her class at 930pm. I finish work at 6pm. 3 1/2 hours to kill before I meet them. Instead of heading off to the gym immediately after work, I stayed on in the office till about 710pm. Smugly I thought I can definitely avoid all the usual traffic jam. How wrong I was. The roads were still full of cars even then!

Anyway I reached gym at about 8pm. Just right, 1 1/2 hours to kill. After changing, I did my usual routine. Gym was unusually empty. I suppose the rainy, damp weather isn't very appetising to be held in the gym. My Sun salutation routine was longer this time. I realised that I have been so complacent in doing this routine that I haven't been paying attention to the progress, IF ANY. I still couln't have my feet flat on the floor when I am bending front for one. I was more focussed this time. The entire stretching area was MINE :)

I stretched my head-knee as well. My head should be touching my knee once I have mastered this pose. And everytime I do it, I should aim to achieve a smaller degree. I am still at about 35 degrees angle with my knee. I am determined to achieve this. I realised that by breaking down my goals to smaller chunks as such, it is more satisfying and attainable than having a general big picture such as I want to do 10 rounds of yoga or loose my baby fat.

I stretched my time for staying in the pose from 3 to 5 minutes. I am sure I can achieve the final goal if I keep raising the bar each time. If I stay at the same pace, I can be doing it for the next 4-5 years and nothing would have changed.

As for my running, I decided to follow VJ advise on a technique he proposed. He asked me what's my pace the other day. I was blur. My pace.. as in my speed or my time or my distance or a division of either or?
What do you mean? I gave him an idea of how my speed increase would correlate with my feeling, if I feel like running faster, I would increase my pace. Usually I would hit 9.0 and start panting for breath before I reduce my speed. And then I would maintain at that. I have written previously that I increase my speed gradually but this wasn't tied to a specific time. So he told me his technique and asked if I wanted to try something different. I agreed. So this time, I started at 5.0 with brisk walking, increase 0.5km every 3 minutes at first till I started to run at 7.0. By then I have walked about 600m.

As soon as I started running, I kept tab of the time and every 5 minutes, I increased my speed by .5. This way I was not concerned about stopping in 30minutes alone. My challenge was to keep going. SInce there is no hard or fast rule to this, I also did maintain at 7.5 for more than 5 minutes.

I stopped at 30minutes at 9.0km/h speed. And the only 2 reasons I stopped was because the machine reached its maximum time and i had a runny nose. As I was telling Sumi and VJ, i start having my phlegm running down my nose after a certain time while running. I thought that this must be because of the blocked nose I had some days earlier. It was worse initially that it just flows down like a broken tap even 10 minutes into my run. This time it was after 30minutes so it wasn't so bad. But i'm not too sure about how to deal with it. Perhaps I should try taking anti-histamine? I don't know.
Let's see it another day.