What a tiring week...

Since I was pretty lazy on Wednesday and Thursday this week (although I did play a bunch of disc golf), I started out Friday with pretty aggressive goals for the weekend (which is always three days for me). I ran three miles in the morning which were a real chore. I guess they can't all be great runs. I don't know if it was the cold or still being tired from lifting or from climbing trees to retrieve discs but my legs just didn't want to go. My pace wasn't much slower than it's been of late, so maybe it was just a problem of perception.

Then I got cleaned up, ate a second breakfast and headed out to run errands and hit the gym. For strength training, I try to follow a periodized system such as the one set out in the book Serious Strength Training. I really like the information in that book, although it can be kind of difficult to get past the pictures of ridiculously huge meat heads that adorn many of the pages. It's really targeted at people who want to compete in body building, but it has lots of basic info that can be understood and used by even beginners.

Right now, I'm in a phase called "Anatomical Adaptation" (AA), during which the goal is to gradually wake up all of my muscles, ligaments and tendons from their recent period of inactivity and get them ready for heavier weights that will be used in later periods of training. I hate this phase. It's when I experience the most soreness and am tired for the longest time after a workout. It's also the phase when I'm lifting the smallest amount of weight on many different exercises, so I look like a complete weakling to anyone else in the weight room. I challenge any of the muscle-bound guys in the weight room to do four sets of 15 reps of four different lifts, with no rest in between them and tell me it's not a more intense workout than what most of them do. It doesn't matter that the weights are light, I'm tired after two groups of four exercises.

Anyway, on Friday I decided to test for my max on several lifts, which is tiring in a different way. The book I mentioned above contains a chart that allows me to extrapolate my max from the number of reps of a sub-max load, which really saves my joints. I worked out pretty hard and am now paying for it with some soreness, but I found that my maxes aren't as low as I thought they would be after a couple three years of not lifting regularly. I have two more weeks of AA phase, and then I can move on to the Hypertrophy phase, where I look like less of a weenie.

Saturday, I went fly-fishing for steelhead on the Salmon River with Walkley. We left IF at about 4 am and got to the first hole sometime around 7. It was cold. I spent half the day with either numb hands or toes and we didn't find any proof that there are even fish in that river. It started absolutely pouring rain an hour or so before we packed up and left and our clothes were soaked when we got back to the car. Steelheading is everything I'd heard that it was. And I'm crazy enough about fishing to want to try it again.

So after all of that, I woke up this morning feeling like I have a cold coming on. I think I'll just hang around and clean the house today. I might go run later if I really feel up to it. We'll see.