Hitting the gym in Germany

All that sleep I got Monday night must have been stored up for future use: I couldn't get to sleep last night (finally forced myself to turn off the lights at 12:10 a.m.) then I woke up every hour! In fact, at 1 a.m. I didn't believe my clock - I had to get up and look at other clocks to be sure it really was 1 a.m. I thought it was time to get up already. At 5, I couldn't stay in bed any longer.

So I got 5 hours of broken sleep, but I actually feel quite good. At 6 a.m. I went to the gym in the hotel. I wanted to do some speed work on the treadmill, then lift weights, but I had a feeling it wasn't going to happen that way - and it didn't. My legs are still very sore. All the pain is in the muscles, though, not joints, so I know it's just going to take some rest to fix this, and I do feel fairly confident that I will be ready to ride STP on Saturday.

So I ran for 15 minutes at 10.0 on the treadmill. Yeah, that's kilometers, not miles, but it made me feel good anyway. :-) Then I did most of my normal strength training routine, with the exception of any lower body work - I skipped lunges and squats for obvious reasons. I also spent about twice as long on really good, deep stretches, and now I actually feel great!

However, my hamstrings and hip flexors are still tight and my quads hurt if I make them work hard. I was happy to see, though, that despite my extremely limited weight lifting over the last few weeks, my arms still have the right stuff.

Oh, one other funny thing! The weights are in kilograms, not pounds. It was pretty fun trying to remember the math - is it 2.2 kg = 1 lb? (I'm online, I could look it up...ah! I was right. So where I normally use 12 lb weights, I did 13.2, and where I normally do 10, I did 8.8.)

Anyway, no meal tracking, but I did eat fairly healthy yesterday, with the exception of an Apfelstrudel (yum!). I am in Germany, after all...