What Was Your Work Out Today?

I had a list minute scuba dive last night. We booked it last night. It was 8.30 ropes off, from Portland, Dorset. So I left mine at 4.30 a.m.; standard faffing meant I got home at 9.30 p.m. I am getting old; I found this hard work.

The dives were lovely. We did a 30m wreck first dive. I've wanted to do it for years; I've done the seabed near it 3 times. (All of these were on our club rib. So the issue was with our shot line incompetence.) It is a massive wreck; we had a 48 minute dive on her

The second dice meant my dinner was fresh scallops. Nice!

Busy weekend with quite a bit of activity. Did a short easy lake swim early yesterday then packed up the kayaks to join a dozen friends for a scenic paddle then an ocean front happy hour to celebrate a few birthdays in the group. It was a fun way to spend a hot humid day.

Today, I kept a promise to several friends to join them for long rides as they prepare for fall races, specifically, Challenge Mallorca and Ironman Chattanooga. This means they need both significant climbing and heat acclimation work. So, today five of us signed up for the "Tour of the Litchfield Hills" ride in support of cancer research. There were 30, 55, 75 and 100 mile route options. We signed up for the 75 mile ride.

This was one of the toughest days I've had on the bike in a long time. The air was VERY humid, dew point around 70 degrees at the 8am start. We had some clouds at first, then it cleared and temps rose rapidly into the mid 90's by 1pm. The course is beautiful, but very tough: 4500ft of elevation gain over 74 miles. Despite a modest pace and stops at every aid station for fluids and electrolytes, there was no keeping up with the fluid losses. This caused one of the guys in our group to quit at miIe 30 and hitch a ride back to his car. I went through roughly 9 bottles during the ride, plus two more dumped on my head to cool off, and I still could not fend off the heat.

I reached a point at mile 55 during a long ascent in full sun where I thought I was not going to be able to reach the top of the hill. I was showing signs of heat exhaustion- flushed face, chills, etc. Luckily there was a popup aid station at the top where I was given a bag of ice, which I dumped in my helmet, down my shirt, in my mouth and in both bottles. After two minutes spent in the shade, drinking a Coke (an instant shot of sugar, carbs, salt and stomach soothing bubbles!) and distributing the ice, I was ok to continue. The jumpstart gave me 4-5miles of relief, enough to get me over the near "bonk". We finished the ride in just under six hours, but it took all I had in the tank today.

Hot humid weather forecasted for tomorrow, so an easy swim will be the recovery session.

A 14 mile walk, followed by some lifting:
Hangboarding 10 second repeaters on my littlest ledge
Bench 3 sets of 7, 50 kgs
Deadlift 2 sets of 6, 110 kgs.

In a moment of insanity I decided to double up in my workouts tonight and then some misplaced sense of duty or loyalty or whatever made me stick to my original plan. I am beyond tired.

I did 30 high kipping knee raises, 4K on the assault bike (7:29 was my time), 30 ring rows and another 4K on the assault bike (8:48 time) for time. It took me 25:40.

Then I did the gymnastics class, which was a 16 min emom. 4 rounds of 1 min 3-5 beat swings into kipping pull, 1 min what was supposed to be dragonflys but ended up as alternating V-ups for me, 1 min of bent over row and 1 min of rest.
Then the strength work was a ton of banded lat pull downs on our knees and L-sit holds.
I didn't know how to physically do a dragonfly and due to that disaster my confidence was kinda down so I had no expectations for the L-sit hold but somehow I succeeded at doing 7 seconds of them. Just being able to hold my whole body in the air with just my arms is surreal to me and on par with how I felt when I first hung off the pull up bar.

Nada today. I was camping in the Santa Fe National Forest over the weekend and had a pretty gnarly hike on Saturday with about 1800 feet of accent over two miles and lots of clamoring and then a more gentle but longer hike on Sunday. My legs are jello today so I'm planning on just playing in the pool this evening with the kids provided the rain and lighting hold off.

Just got back from a long road trip. Most of the exercise consisted of easy walks (i.e. tide pooling) or short hikes.

A couple of notable exceptions:
A visit to my in-laws had me running up and down their long hill of a driveway (the cows watched me go up and down repeatedly and really looked like they thought I was nuts). I followed this up with a modified version of my typical full body strength training. I didn't have any weights with me so I improvised by lifting grocery bags full of canned goods.

Yesterday we went hiking for most of the day - 1 easy hike, 1 difficult. The first hike was about 3 miles and had a similar difficulty to the neighborhood hikes that my kid and I take. Basically, my typical walking workout. We finished that, had some lunch, and then my kid wanted to try another popular hike that involved going to the top of the major mountain in the park. The round trip journey is about 5 miles, and involves an almost 2000 ft. elevation change. Did I mention that this is also at high elevation? It starts around 8000 ft. and ends at ~10,000 ft. We did great until about the 9500 ft. mark. My kid and I both zonked out entirely from the elevation. But, we persevered (with many breaks) and made it to the top. As you can imagine, along the way up my heart rate was WAY UP. In the 3 hours it took to complete the round trip, 40 minutes of it were in HR zone 5. My polar watch says my heart rate hit a max of 183bpm!! That probably happened when I had to stop because I started to feel dizzy.

@mtaratoot -- that's very lovely!

Doing my 30 X 5 (X 3 body parts -- compound body parts -- shoulders, chest and legs). I really do these in sets of 20 and 10, can't usually do 30 in a row of the same movement and I'm at the point now where, unless I'm doing KB swings with the 25kg KB, that I can't rattle 30 in a row off.

I was doing mostly a combination of 150 of heavy KB swings with the 32kg (70 lb) KB and Deadlifts (around 150 lbs, not heavy), but I've mixed in weighted squats now -- also not that heavy, around 50 lbs -- and even some weighted Bulgarian Split Squats.

For the shoulders, it's 150 reps (mixed of different things) - lateral raises, with around 20 lbs in each arm, lightly assisted pullups and fairly heavy military presses.

For chest, it's chest flies, pushups and I've recently got the bench out and doing incline presses (with just around 100 lbs or so). 150 reps combined.

I'm adding more bulk when I actually thought I wasn't able to at my age (58 this year). I am a bit surprised by it, because even though I've always been a bit of a "easy gainer", I thought I had reached the max bulk that I could get for my age range -- without steroids, of course.

Pull Day in the weight room... pulldowns, machine rows, T-bar rows, DB shrugs, preacher curls