Tonight was an interesting night. I have had a bit more tightness in my calves then expected from my run a few days ago, combination of staying on the mid-foot, virtually eliminating my heels from touching the ground and doing more sprints than I’m used to. I began the night with 35 minutes of ripping apart a a few stumps that I collected over the summer with one of my close friends, Mr. Axe. When I work with the axe currently I do not try to break all the way through the stump, since my resources are slightly limited, I do what I can to make the stumps last. My favorite thing about working with the axe is alternating main arms and secondary arms. I don’t only swing lefty (which I am), I swing righty, overhead, with a slide technique, without the slide. I switch my swing up to make sure I’m targeting as many muscle groups as possible.
After the 35 minutes of dancing with the stump, I dropped the axe, pulled up RunKeeper on my iPhone and took off on a quick one mile run. I completed 1.06 miles in 7:56 at a 7:31 pace. Not too shabby given the calves cramping up.
When I got home I spent an additional 15 minutes swinging the axe and then I grabbed my buckets of gravel. Yesterday I picked up a pair of painters buckets, and 50lbs of gravel as well as 50lbs of sand. The sand will be used soon once I get myself some burlap sacks for them. So I evenly put 25lbs of gravel in each bucket tonight and took off on a jog….well when my body allowed me to. With the two buckets I ran one mile. The entire time I would hold the buckets in a few different positions, overhead on my shoulders with arms extended, curled like a bicep curl, or hanging at my side. I also toyed around with a spinning technique that utilizes momentum to get you moving faster. The biggest trick is to avoid getting dizzy, I tried to focus on spotting (much like ballet dancers do) but I was still finding myself quite dizzy after traveling across the field. So while this trick did help me to cover more distance at a faster speed, I had to waste a few seconds recovering from dizziness after each trial. I do plan on revisiting this technique, it’s very efficient just needs some perfecting. After finishing the first mile my ass had been sufficiently kicked. I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel for the night though. I combined the gravel into one bucket and set out on mile number two. More of the same with this one except I was able to switch back and fourth now and work both sides of my body one at a time. I completed my two mile “hike” using RunKeeper which kept pausing (definitely need to turn the auto pause off for these exercises from now on) in 41:26 at a 20:36 pace.
I know that this is an area I can definitely work to improve on. I look forward to even more evenings with my bucket friends.
Total workout time tonight was approximately 1hr and 45minutes. Now excuse me while I go douse myself in Tigers Balm.