Day One - back to training

So the struggle has begun. Catherine and I went to the gym this morning to clear the cobwebs out of our lungs. I hadn't trained in a week, so I was expecting it to be a bit hard on the breathing, boy was I in for a surprise. It wasn't a little hard to breathe, it was painfully hard. The kind of burning pain you experience when you do sprint training in rugby or football or during PE at school when you were a kid. Or when you are recovering from illness and haven't done anything in a week, lazy!

Our workout began with a ten minute warm up on the spin bike, followed by ten minutes of fairly straight forward intervals. Now these intervals weren't Tour de France speed intervals, but more post man pedaling up a steep hill intervals and I was dying. My chest was burning and I felt like I was breathing through a straw (I wasn't), but I guess I had to start somewhere. The annoying thing through this session was that Catherine was uber sprightly and keen, having been ill and weak the day before. I guess I shouldn't expect anything less from the human Duracell bunny, she loves to train!

After the "casual" warm-up and intervals on the bike we decided to do a little strength training. Not wanting to strain Catherine too much I suggested we keep things simple and do three rounds of four exercises. The round went like this:

1. 45 secs of squat and press
2. 45 secs of pull-ups
3. 45 secs of push-ups
4. 45 secs of bent over row

After each round the time was reduced by 15 seconds, again this was to accommodate Catherine who had been sick the day before (I'm all heart).

The results of above workout were as follows:

1. I became more out of breath than a fat man chasing an ice cream van
2. After the second exercise of the second round I thought I was going to barf and had to rush off to the toilet
3. On returning to the gym (where Catherine was continuing said training) I had to sit down and have a "breather"
4. I stopped my training at this point, before someone died.

So my thanks go out to Catherine for thoroughly destroying me on my first session back. I hope that my cobwebs have been thoroughly blown away. After this training session I can confidently say that the "little one" is no longer sick and has some sort of super human powers. Dammit.

Tom :)