Day 388: Conquering the "Unbreakable Hill Climbs" WOD
Though I only slept for a total of 6.5 hours last night, it was restful sleep and I woke up feeling refreshed.
My body was sore after yesterday’s workout, as I expected it would be, which made me happy. If I had more time I would have pushed myself even more to see how far I could have actually gone.
Don’t get me wrong, I was completely wiped out, but I could have gutted out more even if it were additional burpees, bodyweight squats or some other exercise.
After the craziness of yesterday it was nice to have a day that, while still busy with meetings, was edging back towards normal - whatever “normal” means in my work week.
Today’s Spartan WOD called for interval hill running with progressively steeper grades. It dictated running 5-10 minutes with increasing the grade every minute on the minute.
I chose to make it harder by wearing my GORUCK pack with the 20 lb ruck plate and adding a 1% incline to each set. So, my workout looked like this:
Warm-up
- Dynamic warm up
- Cycle - 5 minutes
Main set
- Run 5 minutes on a progressively steeper grade. Every minute, increase the grade, starting at 1% and gaining to 5%.
- Walk 3 minutes to recover at previous lowest grade (e.g. end of first set was 1%).
- Repeat hill interval 2 more times with each time starting from the next grade (e.g. 2nd set started at 2%) for a total of 3 sets, totaling 24 minutes of climbing time.
Cool Down
- Stretch
The workout crushed me, leaving me dripping in sweat - just what I want from a hard workout.
Tonight I spent some time searching for a December race. I want to have a race on my calendar every month, if possible, so that I’m constantly training for another race.
With the Spartan Super next June I will have to work my way up to half-marathon distances, something which I have never done.
The most I have ever run is 4-5 miles so I’m going to shoot for a 10k in December and then we’ll see what I can schedule into the beginning of next year to help me train.
I also plan on acquiring more training gear for home to specifically help me train for my Spartan races (e.g. bucket filled w/rocks, sandbags, etc).