Challenge: Week 4
Chicago is a chilly 30 degrees today. Boston is a whopping 14 degrees. At home in Connecticut it’s 17. Here in Los Angeles it will be mostly sunny and 72 degrees. Yeah, I’ve got to say: I love living in Southern California.

Driving home from work the other morning all I could think about is how I didn’t want to drive across the valley (a whole 5 extra miles from my house) to go to the gym. I was looking out the windows of my car and it was beautiful outside. Then my brilliant idea. I will just run outside.

Chris and I used to run outside last spring and we had a few routes already mapped out, although I had never run them myself. Now that I am running more often, and it is coming to me with more and more ease, I was proud of myself. I’m such a go getter running alone.

As I ran down the street I found myself breathing a little deeper than I have been as I run on the treadmill. Ooh shit, now my shins are starting to hurt. Really am I already having to slow down? I’ve only been going for 3 minutes.

I barely treaded around a mile and a half long route and I was out of breath. Wow street running is 10 times harder than running in doors. Yesterday I went back to the gym and there was my nice pace again. I ran for 15 minutes straight before my cool down. I even went back to working on some machine weights and workouts I had done when I was in college. It felt good. I think from now I’ll stick to the gym, drive my butt the 5 miles to the gym and hop on a treadmill to do my running.

This week I completed my goal of 4 times working out. Next week I am bringing it down to 3 because we will be taking a night trip out to Las Vegas. Check back in later for a post about that.

Do you have any workouts you do using machine weights? Any suggestions to get my arm strength back?