Week 4: Climb For Clean Air – Week of Recovery

Plan:

Monday: Long Cardio

Tuesday: Strength Training with Weston

Wednesday: Long Cardio

Thursday: REST DAY!

Friday: Interval + Strength Training

Saturday: Hike

Sunday: Long Cardio

Wow, it’s been a month since I made a commitment to do this journey and time flies!   I found out earlier on this week that I tore a vastus lateralis muscle, which is a muscle that attaches to my iliotibial band.   My trainer suspected this might have been caused by doing two days in a row of long cardio workouts.  Doing the same repetitious movement and somehow the way I moved my leg, put certain pressures on it and ended up injuring it.   The fact that I hiked for almost 7 hours the day after didn’t help either.   Long story short, I was ordered to back down, take it easy and really nurse it this week.   I learned a lot about me, my limitations and that my patience is really, really being tested.   The most important thing that I learned this week – it is okay to slow down and to take a break.  It doesn’t make me weak, it makes me stronger.  My body needs time to recover, build, and heal.

How it actually went down:

Monday:

I did not do anything.   I can barely move my leg, or walk.  Everything hurts.   My left calves are throbbing, since I literally put my whole weight to them when I limped my way down to the mountain on the Saturday prior.  My right leg, well, it has this sharp pain that keeps reminding me it’s there.    I decided to take extra rest day.

Tuesday:

I limp my way to see Weston.  He took one look at my leg, asked me to do a few things and told me that I tore my muscle.   He was pretty certain of it.   We didn’t really work out but he taught me a few stretching exercise that I should do.   I was bummed.   He explained to me in great detail on what he think the cause of the injury was.

Wednesday:

Long Cardio day.   Per Weston instruction, I did 15 minutes increment of the cardio with total of 1 hour with stretching in between each interval.   I went on the elliptical machine, crossramp 10 and treadmill on 15% grade.   I worked up a pretty good sweat and the stretching helped with the pain.

Thursday:

Rest day.  I almost didn’t want to take it, but decided to take it anyway.

Friday:

I did interval training on elliptical machine for 30 minutes, follow with my strength training.   I decided to avoid any lower body work out and did upper body work out instead.   I did a workout on the machines, Upper Back, Pectoral, Low row, and Chest press with 20lbs on each, three sets of 12 reps each.  I struggled a bit with the pectoral machine and dropped the weight for two reps, and the next day wondered why my chest hurt.  I also did core exercises consisting of plank, bicycle crunches, and bridges.   I did three sets and 12 reps on all routines.

Saturday:

Me at The Mountain

Hike day.   Well, this is actually the highlight of my week.   My husband surprised me for a weekend gateway for my birthday.   I didn’t know where we are going to go, until a day before.   Turned out, he took me to stay at this awesome cabin at Ashford on Friday, which is a town at the base of Mount Rainer National Park, with the intention of doing a hike out there on Saturday.     Weather wise, it was cloudy and foggy.   The sun came out only for a few minutes, enough to show the mountain to me.   It was cold, and windy, but as you walk, you can actually feel the sun penetrating the cloud.    The trail was covered with snow.   Usually, the trail to go to Pebble Creek from Paradise is all pavements and a lot of rock/steps but this time of the year, it’s nothing but snow.   We put our snowshoe on, and started to walk.   I noticed the thin air right away.   Paradise sits on 5,800ft so the air already somewhat thin there and try to walk, on a steep incline trail, with snowshoe, with somewhat limited lung capacity.  Yeah, it’s interesting.   My lung and I kept having a conversation as we went along, if you know what I mean.   We didn’t go all the way to Pebble Creek, and decided to stop at 6,200ft.   Due to snow, the switchback is gone, so the trail is on steep hill across Panorama Point (I’m talking straight incline for about 800ft) then it dropped down to the creek.   I didn’t feel like climbing that last hill and didn’t see the reason to do that other than a bragging rights, so we sat down, ate our lunch and enjoyed our day.    It was absolutely majestic out there.    My iPhone app shows that I hiked for almost 4 miles, for 3 hours.

Sunday:

Well, it was a gorgeous day today in the Pacific Northwest!  The sun is out, the weather is absolutely fabulous!  I was going to do a long cardio at the gym, but there’s no way I’m going to do any inside work out so I was planning to do another hike, but then we got home from church, and unpacking from our trip and before long, my husband was working on the yard and I’m cleaning up my car.   I didn’t get any work out done, but the yard is looking really good and my car looks pretty clean inside.   I am thinking to play some Wii Fit for an hour later after I finish up this summary, but it’s getting late, so that might not happen either especially tomorrow I have to get up early.    I guess it’s another rest day for me.

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