Sunday, January 24, 2016

Winter Inconsistency

The biggest challenge for me with Winter workouts is consistency.  Both the weather, and my work schedule make it tough to maintain a normal regimen.

Take last week for example.  Part of my job requires me to speak to architects and engineers about new industry technology in an effort convince them to write my products into their project specifications. Typically, this happens at their individual firms with a group of 10-20 attendees being the norm, But one of my customers hosts large-scale seminars where many different firms are in attendance, and the groups are typically over 100 in attendance.  Last week, I spoke to three of those groups in Lincoln, Omaha, and Des Moines on consecutive days.  About 300 in total.

While it's a great opportunity to speak to such large groups ... as you can no doubt imagine, it's nerve-racking.  It's not like I'm lecturing school children, these are professionals, and my peers.  It takes a lot of preparation and energy to be on top of my game, and in the weeks leading up to the events, I'm typically very distracted during my workouts.  And while I've been very consistent in keeping up with my workout schedule, on some days, the quality of the workouts has lacked a little.  This was especially true last week when I'd skip one last set of a particular movement, or cut my runs short by a couple of miles.

Over all though, I've done a pretty good job this winter of staying on track and trying to gain strength and speed.  I'm 100% certain that I've gained considerable lower body strength and a little upper body muscle.  But I'm not sure about the speed.  I "think" I'm about where I need to be with my first Spring race only about five weeks away ... but it's just been difficult to gauge with most of my runs taking place on the revolving belt.

Hopefully, with the biggest speaking engagements behind me, and the weather warming a little, I'll get outside a bit more this week.  I really need to hit the pavement more often and begin adding as much speed as I have strength.  We'll see how it goes ... have a great week!

Be the fire.

3 comments:

  1. I think you're so disciplined all year round that you can afford to give yourself a little leave-pass on perfection when you've got real-life stuff that's taking up your headspace. You are human after all.

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  2. Agree with char here. The fact that you still get in something every week as opposed to skipping it all together speaks volumes.
    : )

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  3. That's a lot to deal with when trying to maintain any kind of running schedule, especially the travel part. It's always hard for me to get in a quality run while traveling.

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