Miscellany

Ignore any typos you might encounter in this post--I'm having trouble lifting my arms to the keyboard without getting all trembly. I did an upper body weights thing this afternoon, and went a little buck wild with the arms. And shoulders. And possibly abs, though I don't really feel those yet.

Today is a rest day on the schedule, so that's all I'm doing. It's been a while since I did much upper body work, so I am seriously weak. Mostly 5-lb weights today, though I did some body-weight/gravity stuff (tricep dips, pushups). I did go up to 8-lb dumbbells for the chest exercises and deadlifts, because I couldn't really feel them otherwise. (I may feel them later. :P) I tried to do at least 2 sets of 12 on every muscle group above my waist, and with a 10-minute warmup walk, I was in the gym 40 minutes. Not bad.

Last night was my hills ride, the hardest part of which was finding a satisfactory set of hills that I could both drive to and complete 11 miles on before dusk. I ended up driving into the Woodlands, parking at the Kroger, and doing some looping (map from that awesome gMaps Pedometer). Flintridge had some decent inclines going southeast from Kuykendahl, and I had my fill of hill work by the time I got to Gosling. I still pushed the intensity in intervals on the way back to my car, but there weren't any significant inclines once I left that stretch of road. I hope this hill workout gets easier as time goes on, because the hills in Montgomery (where the century route will be) are going to kill me if it doesn't. They're not really much steeper than the ones on Flintridge, but they are longer. Or, at least, I remember them being longer when I did the 40-mile course last year. Eternal, even. :)

Per the bike computer, the total distance was 11.15 miles, which I completed in just under 47 minutes. My heart rate stayed within my acceptable ranges...I think the highest number I saw was 174, and my average was 153. Cadence was 65-85ish rpm. On the steepest of the inclines, it slowed to around 55, and stayed in the low 60s for about half a mile afterward while my legs recovered. I think my gear was too high...I'm still having a hard time knowing when to shift, especially with mild rolling hills. I feel like I'm shifting all the damn time, so I don't shift for a while and wear myself out. I also forget to drink anything for up to 30 minutes at a time, which isn't the best. Both those things will come with practice, I guess.

Speaking of HR, though, I've been taking my resting rate in the morning these last couple days. I was surprised to find that it's higher than I thought it was. I had estimated it at 62 because I saw a low of 64 when I left my monitor on all afternoon at work a few weeks back. I figured my morning rate would be slightly lower than that. It's not, though--yesterday it was 70 bpm, and today it was 72. It doesn't make a whole lot of difference to my target ranges, but it still puzzles me that my HR would be lower in the afternoon than when I first wake up. I guess, from a cardiovascular perspective, I work harder when I'm asleep than I do in the office. That's my work life for ya--just a big ol' desk slug. :)

Not yesterday, though. The server that has become the bane of my existence crashed again, and I spent most of the day in a mild panic, restoring it to other hardware. Not from backup, though...oh, no, that would be too easy. Despite personally taking half a dozen additional backups of this server in the last 2 weeks for another project, I did not think ahead enough to actually keep any of them once they were no longer needed for the project. The official backup on tape didn't have the data I needed, either. Outdated documentation caused me to have to dig through help desk archives on the off-chance that I may have written one of the 20-odd printers' IP address somewhere in the notes. Luckily, I rock the keyword search, and everything was mostly fine by noon. I've spent most of today updating documentation, so it's never that hard to rebuild a flippin' print server again. (Paragraphs like this are the reason I don't talk about my job much here. Even the crises make snoreworthy reading.)

So anyway, nothing else to report. Eating has not been exceptionally bad or good, and water consumption has been lower than I'd like. I'm hoping to lose about a pound at Friday's weigh-in, but the numbers have been falling damnably slow this week. I'll take whatever I can get, I guess. With 3600 calories in exercise alone, though, I'd better see something.