Workout:
CrossFit WOD: 15 min AMRAP: {15 overhead squats (40#), 20 kettlebell swings, 15 double-under attempts}
26 mile bike ride
I don’t typically go to CrossFit on Saturday mornings, but this week I made an exception. Since I missed the workout I was scheduled for on Thursday, I wanted to come in and make it up so that I could get my second one in for the week and redeem myself for Thursday’s failure. The heat finally broke today too and it was a gorgeous morning, so I figured I’d bike there since it’s only about a mile and a half from my house and it’s nice to do that when I can. The plan for the morning was to bike to CF, do the workout, and then bike to the Minneapolis farmer’s market to get some fresh produce, since one of my big goals for the week is to cook more and eat better.
First part of the plan went awesome. I was feeling great this morning, mentally and physically. It’s amazing how much being off Facebook has been doing for my mental well-being. I think I’ll probably go back once the prescribed one-week hiatus is done, because honestly I do miss the time-killing element of it and keeping up with people that I actually DO care about, and I think i’ll be fine once my head’s cleared a little. But I think some cutbacks will be in order, because it HAS been nice not being so dependent on it all the time – being able to live my own life without being constantly bombarded with everyone else’s. Like so many other things in my life, I need a good healthy dose of moderation.
I definitely felt like I redeemed myself on this workout. I went with a little bit lighter weight on the overhead squats, which I’m actually fairly comfortable with typically, just because I remembered how overwhelmingly heavy the cleans on Thursday were feeling. I think that’s what triggered some of the panic, and I wanted to make sure I was doing something I was comfortable with to ease myself back into things. But I felt good, strong, into the groove of the workout. I think maybe I’m returning to normalcy.
After the workout, I headed out to the farmer’s market. I looked on the map and it looked like it should be actually pretty easy to get to – just take the trail that I typically take when I bike to the lakes and keep going a little further east. I must not have been able to get off the trail where I thought I could though, and ended up going too far and found myself at Target Field. No big deal, I just got off there and checked out the map to reorient myself.
Apparently I did not reorient myself as well as I thought, because I was trying to get to North Lyndale and somehow ended up near the Basilica. This would have all been fine and dandy normally, but I failed to recall that Basilica Block Party was this weekend, essentially shutting down all the roads within a three block radius of the Basilica. So when I tried to go north on Lyndale, a really rude guard yelled at me, asking me where I was going and said I couldn’t go up there if I wasn’t a worker. I said I was just trying to get to the farmer’s market, and asked him how I could get there if I couldn’t go that way. He snapped at me and told me the farmer’s market was closed today, which i KNEW was a lie because they had said on Twitter this morning that they were open and had been tweeting stuff from there all day. But since I had already come all that way, I’d be damned if i didn’t get to a farmer’s market. It seemed like a losing battle to try and fight through all the BBP mess, but I knew there was another smaller farmer’s market in Northeast. Whipped out the handy dandy iPhone, googled the location, mapped it, and bam, new destination. It wasn’t too much further, and it was better than going home empty-handed.
So I made it (despite a super annoying ride down Hennepin through downtown Minneapolis where I hit like every single red light) and succeeded in my mission of getting fresh produce. Kind of a bummer though, because the NE one is much smaller than the Minneapolis one and seeing all the tweets later (from the OBVIOUSLY OPEN farmer’s market) it looked like they had a lot of good stuff. Going to have to try again next week (although maybe I won’t try to bike next time).
The whole excursion ended up taking me about 2.5 hours, which was a little more time than I intended, but it ended up being a nice long ride. I hadn’t been out on the bike at all since the tri at the beginning of June and I had been meaning to, so it was good to be back at it. It sort of made things feel more normal again – maybe I’ve just been missing the diversity of workouts that I got when I was tri training.
I also think that I just need to work out more than I am now, just from a mental well-being standpoint. I’ve really only got two workouts a week that are longer than a half hour at this point, and I just don’t think that’s enough for me. Don’t get me wrong, there is definitely something to be said for the short, intense workouts, and they will always have their place in my training. But the endurance athlete in me just needs to go long sometimes, even if it’s easy. And so if that means introducing a long bike and a long swim into my weekly routine just to allow myself that, I think that may help keep me on track mentally.
So overall it’s been a good day. I’m starting to feel like myself again, and it’s a good feeling. Hopefully this means I’m coming out of my funk and can go back to being the rockstar I know and love. Because damn, I miss her.
-a
