Training Log Archive: Lori

Hiking up Freel Peak with Sam, Christy, and Presto! Woohoo! Super fun hike :-). This was a bit longer than we were originally planning because it turns out that the normal hiking trailhead is only for high clearance vehicles, but we left early enough that we were fine on daylight and the trail was pretty smooth, so all was well. Presto was thrilled with the temperature and the soft trail, so he was quite spritely for the entire day. The rest of us were feeling the altitude a bit especially after summitting, but the views of Lake Tahoe were fantastic and we had a great day!

Normal stretching.

Running with Presto after lab! It was a looooooong day in the hood today, and my shoulders were highly displeased due to some combination of hood time, masses of pipetting the past couple of days, and the pushups on Tuesady. I really wanted to get out for a run, though, so I attached Presto to a leash around my waist and headed on out. This was a fantastic decision. My upper body loosened up so much after only a few minutes. I also managed to run up *and* down the hill today without knee pain, so that was pretty awesome, too :-).

Towards the end of the run, we saw a skunk just chilling about 20 feet away from us with its tail up in the air. We all stared at each other for a while. I have no idea what the skunk was thinking, but I was thinking something along the lines of "Nice skunk, what a nice little skunk. We're just going to slow down and creep on by you" and Presto was clearly thinking "SQUIRREL?!?!? RABBIT!?!??! WHAT IS THIS EXCITING MAMMAL?!??!?!?!?!"

C • skunk 2

Normal stretching.

My knee was twinging a bit around lab today with slight pain at the base of the quad when putting force through the leg while bent (i.e., when lowering myself into a chair or something). I decided not to risk things and sadly decided not to go running. I have been avoiding the plyometrics since the knee started hurting in this particular location since it seemed like the plyometrics might aggravate things, but I decided to give them a go tonight. The plyometrics felt good, so I think this was a good decision.

Presto was pretty excited when I put on running shorts, but then flopped onto the bed in a disgusted sort of way when he realized I was just hopping back and forth. Sorry Presto!

I did the following:

Leaps into a 1-legged squat (10x3 each leg)
Double hops off of a stair into a 2-legged squat with stretchy band (10x3)
Pushups (10x2 - eep...it's been a while since I've done full-blown normal pushups...)
Normal abs
Stretchy band glute exercises

Normal stretching.

Red(!!!) at Calero with Presto! I wasn't planning to run red today, but they were out of green maps by the time I got to the start, and I thought brown seemed a bit shorter than I wanted to run, so I figured I could always quit if that seemed like the smartest move and set off on red.

First of all, the good things: I ran/slid on slippery ground/trudged up super steep hills/slid down super steep hills/minced my way through evil grass for nearly 2.5 hours without any knee pain! Presto had a good time and then was all sleepy and floppy the rest of the day :-).

That being said (and the no pain thing is huge!!!), this wasn't really my best showing out there. I made a bunch of mistakes which were particularly costly with the steepness, and was just generally sort of slow and wimpy with respect to the vegetation. I also was totally convinced that I should contour around things even after like 6 controls in which I started to contour around, only to discover that I didn't actually have enough traction to stay stuck to the side of the hill and needed to go down or up and around.

Anyway, I'm super excited about successfully being out orienteering for so long without pain, even if I made the fun extra long for myself!

Running from the finish to the cars.

Nice long stretch at home. My knee still feels pretty good, but I think I will be generally sort of sore (in a good I-did-a-lot-today sort of way as opposed to a bad I'm-injured sort of way) tomorrow.

Red - Splits