Mid Week Break

It was a canopy of activities yesterday, workouts wise, since it was a public holiday for the Eid Adha/Hari Raya Haji. I thought of cramming everything into the morning so I could have the rest of the day off. I nearly succeeded but nearly is not the same as, right? Read on for the “reason”.

I emailed both Kei Ming and Aron earlier in the week asking if they would like to run in the morning and after some back-and-forth banter, it seemed I was going to be the lone ranger in Lake Gardens (LG) come Wednesday. Aron did suggest running in Desa Park City but I gave this a miss since I was not familiar with the place. I started the day with a tempo-ish 7km run (37:08 minutes or 5:18 min/km pace) before heading to the gym for a session with Michael. Yesterday’s functional training:

Supersets of:

a) Combo of jumping back-forth push ups and frontal overhead raise with the Bosu

b) Squats on the Bosu

c) Clean-and-jerk on the Bosu

d) Chin ups on True Stretch

Supersets of:

e) Bench chest press

f) Technogym cable dual lat pull down

g) Technogym cable dual chest fly

h) Walking lunges with the kettle bell

We finished off with three sets of abs crunches on the fitball. After that, I ran a couple of errands – changing currency and grocery shopping. Since I felt somewhat bad about ditching Kei Ming and since I was feeling strong (or thought I would feel strong after an afternoon nap), I asked him if he was still planning to run in the evening. So we set about meeting as usual for our usual adiNation Training Run.

Boy was I mistaken! It turned out that he wanted to do a long-ish run. Oh well, since I had promised him that I‘d show up, it was time to hold my head and chin up. Kei Ming wanted to do a slow and easy 15km double hill – 6 min/km pace compared to the 19km LSD-Hartamas of 6:30 min/km. Do-able right? Ordinarily it should be but not after a 7km tempo and functional training in the morning! Golly, my quads were even straining when I was mounting the stairs.

Hey, I am here now…alive and kicking…which meant I survived! In fact, I was surprised that I still had some in the tank when we got back to LG. Then my world “crashed” (albeit slightly) when I saw the Garmin only showed 11.63km. 11.63km completed in 1:08 hours for a 5:55 min/km pace. We saw Aron after a brief cool down and I suggested we do two laps to complete Kei Ming’s redemption run (the 15km was his own way of making up for missing Tuesday’s training). LOL! In the end, I outlasted him! Unfortunately it wasn’t pretty because my legs turned into jello after the cool down; hence the pace dropped to 6:30 min/km which more or less suited Aron since he’ll be pacing the Penang Bridge Marathon for 5 hours.

All in, it was fun and good! No, even better, the cramps stayed away during and after the run. I guess downing a can of 100Plus helped. Oh forget the calories from that…I just ran 16km! In the Bikilas…