30-Day Ab Challenge, Week 4

First off, I left replies to all of your comments on previous posts, if you care to check back. Second, I will be posting my race report and weekend update later, after I upload the pictures from my camera. I'm going to try to do it at work, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to. If it doesn't work, I'll have to wait until tonight.

About the Ab Challenge, I can't believe we're heading into Week 4. It doesn't feel like a habit yet, and I still have a hard time with scheduling the workouts. I haven't quite found that routine yet. It's not like it takes very much time, because I usually just do a bunch of different crunches, but if I don't get it done in the morning, I totally forget about it at night. And I really do forget. Once I get home, there's so much going on with trying to figure out what's for dinner, and then spending time with the Hubs before I go to sleep, that it just doesn't come up. Doing a longer workout is easier to remember, because it's a bigger chunk of time. So maybe that's the problem- because it's such a small fraction of the day, it just doesn't carry as much weight (since I'm such a math nerd, I calculated the percentage of a 24-hour day, and if I did 10 minutes of abs, that's less than 0.5%!!)

I will confess that last week was *almost* a success. I only did 2 ab workouts- on Tuesday and Friday. However, Friday was pretty good because I actually did 3 sets of my usual routine, instead of just 2. And when I did my abs this morning, I could feel a definite difference in strength. I was able to increase my sets to 25 reps, instead of just 15. So at least there's progress, right? I will try to do better this week. My plan is to go back to the Mon/Wed/Fri ab workouts. I will run Mon/Tues/Thurs (with Thurs being around 5 miles- the others a little shorter), and then of course another 10k race on Saturday. I will do an elliptical workout Wed, and rest from running on Fri (and maybe have pizza for dinner, since my body seems to run so well after eating it ; P). 

This morning's run was nice. I just did a short run on the north end of my loop, that I haven't done for a while. There were tons of people waiting at bus stops and quite a few kids waiting for what I assumed was a school bus. I kind of felt like I had an audience, and sub-consciously I think I ran a little faster when there were people in view. The best part was that I modified the usual route a bit so that I would be going up the hill from my 5k back on July 4th, instead of going further down before turning uphill on a different street. Ever since that race I've wanted to do better on hills, and I think I've been somewhat successful with incorporating them into my runs. So I wanted to test myself and see if I could do better on that particular hill. I had run the entire way up to that point (other than a few steps where I had to walk while I took off my outer layer shirt), and I'm proud to say I ran up that entire hill. If you remember, I also "ran" up the entire hill during my 5k, but my pace was very slow (remember the stroller-pushers passing me?), and the hill started only .3 miles into the race. This time, I had already gone over 2 miles, and my pace up the hill was much faster. So I was quite proud, and next year there's a good chance that I'll be able to run that race a lot faster (unless of course I'm pregnant, or recently delivered- no news yet on that front, in case you were wondering).

So that's all for now, but I promise the race report is coming. Just check back later.  = )