Tag Archives: Cross-training

A few pictures from our favorite form of cross-training: skiing! We hit the road to Whitetail as soon as we woke up to fresh snow outside (and heard the snow-day declaration from Steve’s work). We volunteer there on the Mountain Safety Team every other weekend, and while we truly have fun every time we work, it was also cool to be on the mountain without any responsibilities at all. We left around 8:30 a.m., skied all day — including at least a dozen bump runs — and got home around 7:30 p.m., sore, tired … and exhilarated.

Next up: a Pacers run tomorrow night. Let’s hope the snow we enjoyed on the slopes has been cleared from the roads by then!

Wednesdays are cross-training days, which has come to mean a post-work date at the pool for me and Steve.

This week, our pool is closed for repairs, leaving me scrambling for a quick but efficient way to cross-train.

Steve recently started doing P90X videos with some people at work, so I decided to try my own plyometrics workout at home. Mine involved most of the exercises described here, plus some sets of push ups and regular, non-jumping lunges, broken up by two-minute spurts of running up the stairwell of our apartment building. I only ran into one neighbor on the stairs, making this not nearly as humiliating a venture as it could have been.

Here’s what was humiliating about this workout: I started out scoffing at the 6-inch cone suggested for use with jumps. Clearly, I thought, I could jump higher than 6 inches. Where’s the challenge here? I found a 5-inch tall tissue box and got to work. Roughly 30 seconds into the workout, I nearly fell flat on my face during the front-to-back jumps, completely crushing the tissue box in the process.

Here’s what was great about this workout: Keeping your heart rate up so high makes it really, truly possible to fit in a killer workout in 30 minutes, a claim I’m always skeptical about when I see it on workout videos and the like. I was literally dizzy at some points. I would definitely recommend this workout for days when you truly don’t have time for a workout, but want to do one anyway. A word of caution: Those nursing running injuries may want to proceed with caution, as my hip is feeling awfully creaky today.

I have a 10-mile run today, followed by an off day on Friday and a 10K in Alexandria on Saturday morning. I’m hoping to see some awesome Valentine’s Day costumes to make me forget about the blistering cold forecast for race day.

Just a quick post today sharing the swim workout I did this morning. Full disclosure: The way I train makes no sense (more on this later), but it works for me, and occasionally, I stumble opon what seems like a good workout. I did what was a long workout for me to make up for a total lack of activity yesterday. You can adjust the total workout length by messing around with how many repeats you do in the main set.

1,650-yard warmup

1 x 100 butterfly
1 x 400 freestyle
repeat five times … or however many times works for you

350 cooldown

4,500 total, unless my math is worse than I ever imagined.