I surprised myself and stuck with my plan while camping even though I wanted to skip a few things. I was rewarded with a nice number on the scale. This makes me feel better about my planning workouts while traveling, but I still have to remember to stay conservative and not overdo it.
What Happened?
We had a busy week in the office with an audit. This meant I couldn’t work from home Wednesday and I was a bit more tired and stressed throughout the week. We also left Friday evening to go camping which made for a very late night. Because of this, I front loaded strength training and let some runs happen while I was out camping, this also gave me more gravel and trail experience, nothing significant but enough to ‘get my feet wet’ as I consider more and more trail running in the future.
What Worked?
The gates were broken at my apartment complex which allowed me to do nice laps with my bicycle as a practice ride to keep spinning, work on shifting, use my core more and make some seat adjustments. The adjustments to my workouts based on equipment availability worked well, using the strength training equipment when I had it available and running when I didn’t.
What Didn’t?
The bit of trail running I did, even what felt like uphill on the gravel road was mostly flat. It was still a good experience but not as much variation as I expected. I did have a lot of obstacles, running around rocks, webs, cacti, etc.
For my short Saturday night run, I ran off the beaten path including up and down some hills. There were a lot of obstacles to navigate around, though I felt like I did a pretty good job. I did pick up a cactus spine in my shoe. I could feel it on some steps but not all. I should have stopped to take a look, though I knew I didn’t want to take my shoe off during the run. In hind sight I could have easily pulled it out of my shoe.
A short Sunday evening run was a bit more eventful. I decided to take another trail, one we just scoped out with the UTV. I ran out with no issues, a few minutes after turning around, I stumbled upon a rattlesnake on the path. I managed to see it in time and stop approximately 15 feet away. It was close enough to make the snake ‘stand up’ and rattle. I backed up to about 50 feet, enough where I could still watch the snake to see what happened. After about 5 minutes he slowly laid back down and slithered off the trail, enough so I could get around and back to the trailer. I’ve spent over 14 years living in the Phoenix area, I’ve hiked just about every mountain in the valley, some of the several times and I had never seen a rattlesnake in Arizona, outside of the zoo.
I wanted to get some trail experience and while it’s not how I expected things to go, I can’t say I didn’t learn a few things about trail running. I don’t feel discouraged, but I am more hesitant to run on narrow Arizona trails for the time being.
What am I going to do about it?
Return to a normal training schedule now that I have 3 weeks at home without too many unusual circumstances. Work on putting in trail running again when I’m at Nascar by running up into the Gecko Trails campgrounds.
What do the numbers say?
I stayed within my WW points without any trouble, though Monday was a bit closer. I weighed in Tuesday because we were still camping Monday morning and got home Monday afternoon. This resulted in a 5 pound weight loss. It’s great to see these kinds of losses, that brings me back almost to my lowest (0.2 pounds over) after several weeks of up and down. Hopefully with another good week, I can be back into uncharted territory.
Summary
This was a great week following what I had planned and making progress because of it. There were multiple times I didn’t want to follow through and a couple unusual events crept in, but overall it was a good week.