30-20-10

Bishop is on call this week. Don't get me wrong, 'call' in his specialty is relatively gentle. But it still makes for a crazy week full of crazy children and a very tired husband. Mercifully they only have call weeks their first year (only ONE MORE after this week!), but that doesn't seem to remedy the fact that we still have six more days of madness this time around. Oh well.

With Bishop being on call, my runs get relegated to the treadmill (as far as I know there is no such thing as a triple jogger; I guess very few would be willing to run while pushing three small humans). More often than not I end up just taking the week off running, but this week I was anxious to try out a run I read about recently called the 30-20-10. The article promises 'impressive results,' citing cases where runners shaved full minutes off their 5k times in a matter of 7 weeks. A MINUTE? That puts me tantalizingly close to my goal of a sub-20 5k. So off to the YMCA we went, with a gleeful S and E getting their stickers from the door greeter Marvin and baby B already starting to furrow his brow at me as I take him to the infant section of the child care. I really, really love the YMCA child care. 90 minutes of solo-time bliss, where I feel no guilt whatsoever exercising for the full time if I so desire as my children are well entertained. But 90 minutes wasn't the plan today; we had a lolly-gagging morning and didn't actually get to the YMCA until almost noon. Today I was doing the 30-20-10.

It kicked my trash. Granted, I added an incline just because a treadmill is one of the few places in Houston I can actually run an incline, and I did the 4 full rounds because somehow I always dub myself above beginner level, but still. It was invigorating. Basically, it's a really structured fartlek run where, after a short warm up of a mile or so, you jog for 30 seconds, run normal training pace for 20, then all out sprint for 10, repeat five times, recovery jog for 2 minutes, then repeat all the goodness to your heart's content. Or 4 rounds, whichever comes first. Interval training is awesome, at least when it comes to exercise. Mothering today sort of felt like interval training, but it didn't feel so awesome. I just finished my last 10 second sprint of the day and I feel less than invigorated. Maybe it'd be easier if someone could tell me how many times I'd have to run a 10 second sprint (not to mention provide ample recovery periods)...but hopefully, just like interval training, motherhood will condition me to be a much more effective person. And perhaps that will rub off on the three small people I'm in charge of raising.

Lest you think I could call in quits with exercise after just a 40 minute run (I haven't made the jump to a 60 minute exercise cap - I'm still working on my 90 minute one), I also did one of my favorite P90X2 dvd's today, the V Sculpt. Technically those workouts are an hour but when you fast forward through Tony's funny, but time wasting, jibber jabber it really takes less than 45 minutes. Time spent in that plank position (some even on a med ball! Very awesome.) doing renegade rows, curls, roman curls, etc. is just absolutely delicious. With time I hope to love the pull-up parts as much but I'm definitely not there yet. As Emerson said, 'That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased' whether it be pull-ups, motherhood, wife-hood...anything else I'm temporarily struggling with.

Currently that struggle includes realizing I have one more sprint before bed, so I'm off to clean up the shrapnel from this evening's mommy battle. Shouldn't be too hard since my favorite show, Bones, had its season finale last week, it's now after 9 so I can't eat anything (thanks, 8 week challenge) and Bishop is still at work. I best get to it, even if I'd rather go read Jane Eyre.