Motivation

I've been doing CrossFit, a sort of masochistic workout that includes high intensity, short duration exercises. It incorporates Olympic style weightlifting moves (yes, clean and jerk, snatch, split jerk, it's very entertaining) and other fun things like "burpees" (jump in the air and clap hands overhead, drop to your stomach on the ground, push up into a frog position, jump into the air and clap your hands overhead. That's one.), squats (stand with feet shoulder-width apart, squat as far down as you can go, stand back up. Can be done without weight, with dumbells resting on your shoulders, with a loaded barbell resting on your chest or back, or - the most fun version - holding a loaded barbell overhead), kettlebell swings (literally swinging a round handled weight from between your legs to over your head), wall ball (face the wall, throw a weighted ball - sort of a medicine ball - as high as you can and catch it on your chest. Repeat until your arms fall off.), box jumps (there is a box. Jump on it. Repeat until your legs fall off.), running (no explanation needed), pull-ups (and if you can't do a pull-up, you can do jumping pull-ups where you stand on a box so you can reach the bar and literally jump into a pull-up. These are worse, trust me. I wish I could do a pull-up.), toes-to-bar (hang from the bar. Raise your toes until they touch the bar.), and other fun forms of torture.

Usually the workouts begin with some strength, like doing only a few reps at a very high weight until you fail, with lots of rest. Then we get into the fun part, where I usually feel like my heart is going to explode and sometimes I have to lie on the floor to recover when I'm done. It'll be some combination of the above exercises, broken up so we get in a lot of reps but not all at the same time, and keep our heart rate up. Today's workout, for example, began with a single-arm kettlebell swing:

So you do one single-arm kettlebell swing, then eight squats with your arm in the air like that holding the weight. Repeat with the other arm. Then you move to a set of parallel bars and do dips until you fail (I could do two without cheating and was the only woman who could do any full dips at all), then you rest for three minutes. Three total sets of that. Then we got into the fun part: five timed rounds of a 400 meter run followed by 15 kettlebell swings (using both hands). I was the last one to finish, and it took me ~16 minutes, and I was huffing and puffing the entire time. There's a bit of competitive edge to it as well - we write our times or max reps on a white board when we're finished. I am usually last, and there are a few people who have taken it upon themselves to "cheer me on" as I finish my sets. This is both awesome and humiliating at the same time, but what I lack in speed I make up for in strength (at least compared to the women), so I don't feel all that badly about always being last.

I've been hitting the 6AM workouts because it's so much cooler, and I love getting the workout done first thing in the morning. The group of people at the 6AM class is really fun, too, but there aren't a lot of women that go. I guess weights are intimidating.

Anyway, after this triathlon this weekend I realized I needed to also be doing longer, lower intensity workouts. I've been wanting to get more involved in the mechanisms of training, and all the reading I've done mentions heart rate monitors as an essential piece of equipment.

So today I blew my REI dividend a bought this:

It's a Garmin Forerunner 305, and it has a heart rate monitor (not super excited about the heart rate band, but it can't be worse than a sports bra), timer, stopwatch (and all associated timing things), pace and lap clock, target heart rates, it stores workouts, it has a GPS, will store routes for you, will let you "race" against your old workouts (VERY excited about that!), it connects to your computer and will store your workouts on your computer where you can mess with the data, and you can even purchase workout plans (including an Olympic Distance Tri workout for $100 - tempting! Now I just need to find another race!) that you can download to the device and it'll "train" you.

Oh my gosh I'm so excited I want to go running right now! Gadgets are so motivating! I will keep you posted...