Squats Felt Pretty Good Today Then Some Rowing

This morning I woke up feeling pretty good. It was much less humid, and it was nice to hear some light rain outside as I was drinking my coffee. It would have been enjoyable to sleep with the window open last night since it was cooler and less humid, but the fire pit half a block away was smoking us out yet again.

I did my normal bit of browsing on the web while I drank my coffee, but I was very eager to get out into the garage and do my squats.

Today they are light since I had lowered the weight after last cycle, but I was looking forward to just getting under the bar. The squats felt excellent, and I felt like I was moving well.

I took my time enjoying myself as I worked my way up in weights and rounding them up to convenient numbers during the warm-up sets.

The final AMRAP called for 3 reps and 230 pounds. Yes, I know it is a light way for me, but that was the plan for this cycle to get the hip moving and see how it feels. They felt great. I could have done plenty more. I wanted to do more! Somehow I managed to stick with my game plan and do only the three programmed reps. There will be time to do more and go heavier later.

I relaxed for a good while after I was done with my squats. Grabbed a shower and sort of vegged out on my tablet, enjoying the cooler air. It was feeling fall-like. The sky was neat this morning. It was dark and cloudy to the southeast, so the sun wasn’t shining, but to the north and west, it was bright and clear, so everything had a bright blue hue for a time.

I wanted to do something maybe a little longer for a workout today. I want to get a little more cardio stuff in. For today I settled on running 2000 meters, then rested 5 minutes and did it again.

Perfect weather for it! It’s cooler and less humid. The temperature was in the middle 60s. I even wore pants to do the rowing. Well, leggings, but those are what are very comfortable to me.

I took the first row a little slower than I needed to. It has been so long since I have done these longer rows; it is difficult to judge. It didn’t get my heart rate up that much. I knocked off about a minute from the second 2k row. Even with that one, I felt like I didn’t push it hard enough. Sure, I was dripping sweat, and my heart rate was a bit up but not near that death feeling that I can get when I really push it.

That will come in time. It’s better to udner do it now and finsh than hit that wall and fail. I managed to get better pulls and keep the stroke rate down somewhat. I have mentioned over the past few years that I have fallen back into the habit of rowing like a CrossFitter. That last time I had success with that was when I was rowing 10k at a time for longer stuff. The body finds ways to be efficient with something like that. I think a big part of my problem was the wrist cyst. Rowing bothered that a bit.

I had wanted to work up to rowing a half marathon last fall, but for whatever reason I didn’t. I am going to try to do that this year. I like rowing the half marathon around the new year, just like I like to max out my lifts then. Last year I never did it.

Music for today was Cathedral.