Monthly Summary – April 2016
Chase will be three months old in a couple days. Three months! It feels like I turned around and he’s all of a sudden a big (relatively speaking of course) boy who plays with toys and reacts to specific people and smiles and laughs (sort of).
These Monthly Summary posts are nominally about my training and racing, but that stuff plays far second fiddle to Chase, so here are some important photos from April:
One of Chase’s two month photos.
Chase’s first dinner out.
Flirting.
As for training, I ran really consistently in April. I think I ran 4 days every week – 3 runs during the week and one over the weekend. And even though I’m not training for anything in particular and my longest run of the month was 12.6 miles, I feel like I’m actually in decent shape. I’m regularly getting out for 9-11 mile runs with 1,200 – 1,500 feet of climbing. I ran on dirt a little here and there but all of my runs started and ended on pavement. Most weekends, I ran a few miles to Bronson Canyon, did a loop or out-and-back in Griffith Park and then ran home. I also found a couple short trails in the Hollywood Hills that I’ve incorporated into some weekday runs. Driving to the Santa Monica’s or the San Gabe’s for a trail run is going to have to wait until Chase’s sleep schedule is a bit more consistent.
In order to fit my runs in around Chase’s schedule and work and spending a little time in the evening with Elizabeth, almost all of my running is early early morning before or just at sunrise. At least twice a week I’m up at 4 or 4:15, out the door before 5 and home around 6:30. I do really enjoy that time of day (remember this?), but I miss running with a group and most of the time I really could use a bit more sleep.
I didn’t make it to the pool a single time in April. That hasn’t happened since some time in 2013. But it’s just too difficult to squeeze it in right now. The time it would take to drive to the pool and change and then swim just isn’t in the cards right now. And the other truth is that I’m prioritizing running right now, so even if there was a day I could get out for a morning swim, I’d pretty much always choose to run. Swimming, like trail running, will have to wait until we’re getting a little more sleep around here.
In my March Monthly Summary, I set a goal for April to do pushups, planks and bicycles every day. My goal was to average at least 50 pushups, 100 bicycles and 4 minutes of planks every day for the month. I thought those would be tough but achievable goals. But for pushups and bicycles at least, I set the bar way too low. I ended up doing an average of 70 pushups and 174 bicycles per day. My plank goal was pretty realistic, as I averaged 4:25 per day. On days that I ran I usually did pushups and bicycles right after the run and planks a bit later in the day. On days that I didn’t run, I did all three exercises together and usually added in some other things like bridges, air squats or lunges. I did pushups and bicycles every single day and there was only one day, early in the month, that I just forgot to do any planks. I noticed a huge difference in how I felt doing all three exercises at the end of the month vs. the beginning.
For May, I’m going to give my shoulders a rest from the every day pushups and work in scheduled lower body work. My goal is that every other day, I’ll do 75 pushups and 200 bicycles and on the other day, I’ll do 4.5 minutes of planks and some combination of 80 reps of lower body exercises such as forward lunges, backward lunges, squats, single-leg squat and reach, etc. I like having a daily goal. It really kept me honest in April.
I started Stephen King’s 11/22/63 at the beginning of the month and am still working my way through it. It is like 900 pages long but I also haven’t been reading as much as I’d like. There are a lot of nights where I fall asleep before I’ve even read two pages and then need to try to read those same pages again the next night! I’m really enjoying the book. This is the first Stephen King I’ve read in 25+ years, since the days of Cujo, Pet Sematery, Christine and Firestarter. It’s nothing at all like those horror novels and a bit more sci-fi/fantasy feeling. I’ve got about 200 pages to go and I’m very curious to see how it all wraps up. Connect with me on Goodreads!
Here’s April by the numbers:
Swim: 0 meters
Cycling (outdoors): 0 miles
Run: 157.3 miles
Total Run Elevation Gain: 19,517 feet
Strength Training/Yoga: 3 sessions
Approximate monthly total training time: 23.25 hours
Weight: No idea. Probably a few pounds heavier than I’d like, but perfectly fine for now.