(September 7th – 13th: <10 mins read)
TL;DR:
– 🧗 Holding up so far wrt daily climbing gym visits
– 🏃 Thus going to start ramping up to daily runs
– 🧗 Preparations for a first day out ‘on the rocks’
– 🧗 Climbing gym has a 4m / 15′ slackline … let’s gooo 🥳
Milestones (click to collapse)
| WK47 | Milestone / Significant Event |
|---|---|
| D-1 | 🏃 ‘Hill climbing’ run: 5k / 8 circuits – 32:38 / 6:32min/km / 132 avg. pulse 🧗 Day 12: a bit of climbing, buuut … – this time concentrating on PT exercises |
| D-2 | 🧗 Day 13: climbing with J n S n kids |
| D-3 | 🧗 Day 14: PT visit / chat with R |
| D-4 | 🏃 ‘Easy volume’ run: 15k (trail) – 1:39:49 / 6:39min/km / 140 avg. pulse 🧗 Day 15: climbing with J n S n kids – J has found a route where she tops out 👣 30k daily steps |
| D-5 | 🧗 Day 16: climbing with S |
| D-6 | 🧗 Day 17: PT + 3 easy routes alone |
| D-7 | 🏃 Runathon starts: easy 2km + leg unit 🧗 Day 18: S ‘back on the rope’ 🥳 👣 47 weeks / approx 15k steps per day |
< Note: For a list of milestones click <here>.
Real-world exercise (& movement)
One of the highlights of the week was seeing S being belayed by trainer R. She had a horrible experience over 8 years ago, where the person belaying her deliberately let her fall several metres ‘as a joke’; thanks to that arsehole, she ‘hung up her climbing belt’ on the spot. Now, with a bit of encouragement, she re-started on the auto-belay a few weeks ago and is climbing stronger than me already, which is great to see … so it was even nicer to find her gathering the courage to be belayed by a person again!!
< Note: For my physio protocols click <here>.
Running
Monday was ‘hill climb’ day again – this time 8 x 500m circuits (always an even number in both clockwise and anti-clockwise direction) … building slowly with actually running up hills (which I won’t do on the ‘easy volume’ run for a while – some years ago I injured the glute on one side doing exactly these circuits with a bit too much ‘oomph’, so getting into it nice’n’easy):
Another 21km stretch was planned for Thursday … climbing session with S n J n kids planned for Friday. Plans changed short notice on Thursday morning 😅, so I ended up cutting the route short, with the first 12km or so being the same as for the 21km route; on top, I also realised I was taking ‘too long’, so turned up the pace a bit heading down from my local ‘training mountain’:
Not sure where the high pulse around 11km came from, sure wasn’t actually that high as far as I noticed, so I can only assume the relatively fast downhill pace led to some buggy behaviour of the in-ear headphones-with-pulse-sensor 🤷.
After a pleasant exchange via Reddit with a poster who’d just run at least 5k a day for 60 days in a row, I decided towards the end of the week that I’d ramp up the running to a daily thing, the same as climbing. I mean, I say ‘daily’ … this currently means my target is to run every day, but other than the regular Mon/Thu runs, I’ll be keeping it to about 2-3km at a VERY easy pace.
A driving reason for this is actually not the running itself but getting a ‘slot’ for a small PT unit in the middle of or at the end of the run, such as the bulgarian split squats and box steps I’ve been doing too irregularly; going forward, I’d like to get 2 or 3 different, small units which I can alternate from day to day.
Climbing
So far the ‘transfer’ of my daily PT unit from home to the climbing gym is working well – managed it almost every day this week; the ‘climbathon’ side of things also seems to be bearing fruit … I mean, it’s a bit too early to be sure that a small handful of tendon niggles (left elbow since ages, ditto the second joint of each middle finger) might be improving; at any rate, they’re not getting any worse 👏 💪.
Either way, I’m keeping the volume and difficulty of the climbs low – maybe 3-5 routes spread across a couple of hours, max. difficulty VII (5.10c) and generally a grade or 4 lower; the boulder routesetters have been on holiday for 3 weeks, so I’ve not been tempted with any new hard routes there either 😅!
I also figure it’s a ‘good excuse’ to start practising slacklining on a daily basis, what with the climbing gym having a 4m one permanently set up inside – after watching a good video on YouTube, “Beginner Slackline Course Part 1: The Basics” (what did we ever do without these kind of ‘immediate’ resources?!), I figure it’s got to be pretty much exactly the same as juggling: take a few simple hints and then practise, practise, practise.
