Today is Not That Day

Up, and up, and up (and repeat)

Today's strength training assignment: a Lyon St. Stairs workout! I was excited and a bit nervous to see how out of shape I've gotten since I haven't been running (nor doing hills on the bike.) So far my piriformis and hamstring have been behaving so I was ready to go.

I headed out wearing my lovely new Saucony Kinvaras. Don't you like how matchy-matchy I am with my pink top?

 

I'm fortunate to live near one of the best outdoor fitness areas in San Francisco. After hiking up 3 blocks of 12% grade, then back down a block of 15% grade, you arrive at the top of the stairs. Ignoring the recent graffiti, the view is magnificent. A lot of boot camps set up right here as it's on a low-traffic court lined with lovely mansions like you see here on the right.

  

If you come for a visit, you'll run down these stairs, through the semi-private gardens of another mansion with a $20m view (owned by one of our liberal elected officials; go figure), down a few more stairs, cross the dead-end street where rich daddies play basketball with their kids, and then you hit the lower set of stairs. These are a lot steeper. Where you see the guy in the white shirt is just a landing, not the bottom:

So... assignment was to see how many reps I could do within 30 minutes without running (to keep piriformis happy). The answer is: 6 in 28 min, plus 2 min to climb the hill at the top to head back home.

I should have worn my HR monitor; this is a killer cardio workout. Especially the lower (steeper) set of stairs. Since I'm working on my base aerobic capacity right now, I slowed things down by rep 3 and took stairs 2 at a time. My quads were on fire for the first couple sets of faster cadence; I've been ignoring them so that I could build up my glutes, and they need a lot of attention.

So the good news is, this didn't bother my hamstring or piriformis. Bad news is that I felt my knees crunching. Knee problems were the first symptom of biomechanical misalignment back in March. When I took it slow, did 2 stairs at a time and really focused on activating my glute and turning out my knee (as much as that's possible for me) then the knee crunch went away. So this is probably a great exercise; I get real-time alerts when my form is off.

Urban Adventure Race

This weekend was the 2nd annual Urban Adventure Race with SF Tri Club. My friend Matt recruited me to be his teammate, and we came up with the rockin' team name Wabash and Lake. Gold star to whoever knows this obscure movie reference :-).

Check in at 7:30 am on Saturday morning... here we are picking up our race packets with maps and assignments. The co-ed teams ran and kayaked first, which ended up working out well because the run + kayak took a lot of time!

 

The run was close to 8 miles through the city and down the Embarcadero to the kayak rental place... (my blog is cutting off the right side of all the pics so you can click on the image to see the whole map).

Kayaking was a blast, except that I didn't heed the advice of putting my male team-mate in the back seat. I thought it was a sexist comment and I really wanted to steer! But it's better to have the greater weight in the back, plus I haven't steered a kayak since I was 12... now they have these new-fangled paddles that are curved and definitely don't work like I remembered them. Needless to say, it took an eternity to paddle around the piers looking for our assigned tasks (like finding painted letters in a tunnel underneath the baseball stadium). Kept going off course and my retarded steering almost had us going in circles. We got an additional 30 points for trading places while we were on the kayak course, and after that it was (literally) smooth and fast sailing. Lesson learned.

Ok... run back to the start, with a detour at the Mechanical Museum to press a penny with the image of Rosie the Riviter, 20 points. Actually it was more of a hobble than a run; I've been having a ton of hamstring pain. Happy to be back at transition and onto the bike! Bike course was through the Presidio, which I ride through all the time. But due to my slow hobbling on the run, we had just over an hour to do the ride route, so we weren't able to complete all the mandatory tasks (one of which took us down to Golden Gate Park.) Here's the route we did:

Here's the start of the route (I love San Francisco...)

It took us to the infamous sand ladder (point A), which is a place I need to revisit and start training there! Gorgeous view, killer leg workout:

A few more tasks and then raced back to the finish. Since we missed our GG Park task we weren't qualified to win a fabulous Mr. Potato Head as a grand prize (darn), but I did win a large box of Gu in the raffle. I'm going to be very tired of Strawberry Banana, but hey, free Gu. 

Then the BBQ!

Team Wabash and Lake, now satiated after a large burger... (note to self, remove hat when getting photos taken outside...)