Catching Up

I've been way too busy to post much lately.

Tuesday evening I played my first match of the season with my 7.5 ladies combo team.  I played with Lisa, who is a 4.0.  The weather was horrible, with a lot of rain, and Lisa arrived 7 minutes late, so we lost 2 games off the top.  My playing was all over the place - I'd have three games in a row that were really great, and then some games where I couldn't keep the ball in the court.  Very frustrating to screw up simple shots.  We ended up losing 6-4, 7-5.  I think we should have won, but such is life.  Fortunately our team won the other two courts, so we won the match overall.

Wednesday morning I did my agility workout again, but instead of X2 Ab Ripper, I did the original Ab Ripper X for variety.  It pretty much kicked my butt - I hate ab exercises!  I burned about 180 calories in 50 minutes.

Wednesday evening, I had a practice with my team.  By then, my legs were really sore from the lower body workout I did Tuesday morning, and I just played horribly.  I had no energy.  In the first round, my partner, Jo, and I lost 6-4.  In the second round, my partner Lindsay, and I won 5-0.

Thursday morning, I did my upper body workout pretty much like I did a couple weeks ago.  I don't recall now that I changed any of the weights for any of the exercises.  I burned about 145 calories in 55 minutes.

Thursday evening, I had a match with my 6.5 ladies combo team.  My partner, Lindsay, and I won 6-0, 6-3.  One of our opponents is a 3.0 that I've played before, and she's really just horrible.  Very nice, but makes lots of errors.  We found out after the match that our other opponent, a 3.5 player, was playing her first match after recovering from a broken ankle.  So our very dominant win had a little bit of help!  I did enjoy playing a lot at the net - good practice.  Fortunately our team won one of the other courts to win the match overall.

Friday was my rest day, so I did my shortened version of P90X2 Recovery + Mobility and burned about 80 calories.  I didn't do anything active the rest of the day - in fact, I drove up to PA for my sister's baby shower.

This morning, I went to the Oil City YMCA to do the next run on my training schedule.  It was supposed to be 3 x 2 mi at 6.7 mph, alternating with 3 x 5 min at 5.0 mph.  This turned out to be really, really hard.  The first 2 mi at 6.7 mph was pretty much OK - I took 3 - 4 breaks.  But the next 2 mi at 6.7 mph just got harder and harder, and I had to take longer and longer breaks on the rails.  I knew there was no way I could do the last 2 mi interval, not without spending more time on the rails than on the belt.  So I changed to 5.4 mph and just ran 22 min (2 mi) at that speed.  During all of this, I had a bunch of problems keeping my Kindle propped up on the treadmill to watch and kept accidentally hitting the emergency stop button.  As a result, I wasn't certain what my overall time and distance were.  I think it was about 6.8 mi in 68 minutes.

I'm not sure why this run turned out to be so hard.  It was a probably a combination of things.  I definitely haven't been getting as much sleep as I should be lately.  And I haven't run since last Sunday.  I hit a wall pretty fast in my effort, so I'm also not sure if I bonked - I didn't eat breakfast before I ran.  That's pretty typical for me for morning runs, but I don't usually do race pace intervals.  So I'm not sure.

A nice surprise when I started up Runkeeper today was that it now can connect with my Basis Peak and record the heart rate from the Peak.  This is something I've tried to do in the past, but they haven't been able to connect.  I'm not sure if this was fixed because of an update to Runkeeper or the Peak.  Either way, it's nice.  Ironically, though, I am sure the heart rate my Peak was recording was way too low in the race pace intervals - I'm panting and getting lightheaded, and it's saying my heart rate is like 90 or 110 BPM.  No way!  Usually it doesn't have that problem for so long, but I saw it pretty consistently.