On a misty and cool Saturday morning, I laced up my running shoes and went outdoors for a walk. The plan was for a 1½ to 2 hour jaunt around the neighborhood and I hoped to test the right calf and see if it can withstand 1 minute pickups in the process. I started with a 10 minute warm up but when I got to the end of that, instead of walking at a brisker pace for 1 minute, I began jogging for 1 minute. So far so good with no pain felt so I just kept doing the 1 minute jog and 1 minute walk intervals and maybe make it to an hour. There were times when I was tempted to do a 2 minute jog but I stayed conservative and kept it at 1 minute. Everything went along swimmingly until the 55 minute mark when I started to feel a slight shooting pain at the injury area. Not wanting to be set back another few weeks, I ended the jogging part of the workout and kept walking the rest of the time until I reached 1½ hours. The way I walk briskly sometimes, does not look like the swiveling hips of racewalkers but rather like a furless, thin and ravenous gorilla about to grab a low hanging fruit from a tree, hence the title (besides, I couldn’t think of anything better, so apologies to Dian Fossey). At least I can walk for that amount of time so that has added to my repertoire of workouts in addition to stationary and outdoor cycling and the elliptical machine. I don’t know when the next trial walk/run will be because I’ll have to give the calf time to recover since I feel some tightness on it. I was very reluctant to restart running because the injury I suffered on my right calf is alien to me, meaning it has never happened to that part of my body. To strengthen it, I’ve started doing calf raises, and hopefully that helps. Otherwise, it’s day to day.
Going back a few days, I did my usual 25 mile bike ride at the usual area. The GPS watch consistently measures it at 25 miles which is a surprise to me. Not 24.9 or 25.1, but exactly 25. There were no sights and sounds to be observed last Thursday morning because there were few runners and cyclists, no volleyball players on the beach, and even just a few people waiting at the dock of the Catalina Express. The only thing I saw a lot of was horse poop on the riverbed bike trail, more than I usually see. Otherwise, it was a good workout because I was able to push the pace most of the ride which endorphinized me for the rest of the day.
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