So, I’ve been training at Stenia since lat summer. We spent a few months fixing all my imbalances and breaking all my bad habits. Now we’re into the exciting stuff – all the heavy weights, challenging exercises, and intense runs. This is the stuff I love. Progress is incredibly exciting, and I’ve seen some pretty sweet improvements.

I’m working my butt off to conquer chin-ups. My goal: to be able to do 1 chin-up by June.

This is a very hard challenge for me. During this phase of my program, I am doing 4×6 reps of band-assisted chin-ups. Band-assisted chin-ups use a super strong resistance band looped onto the chin-up bar, and you put 1 or both knees into the band to support your chin-up. Last night, my very last rep on the 4th set was pretty sad – my trainer counts down to 4 to guide me to slowly lower myself… I don’t know if anyone has counted 4-3-2-1 so fast in their entire life as I essentially just dropped – haha – no control whatsoever. I will claim that I worked my ass off, and I was tired.

I’m enjoying and hating the running, too. The weekend is a recovery run – 10k @ 136-146 bpm, monitoring my heart rate (for reals this time – reporting back to my trainer actually makes me follow her instructions) makes for the slowest run ever in my entire life… which, in turn, makes it the easiest run of my entire life! Note: To survive 10k at extremely slow pace, bring on the Audiobook or bring the husband. During the week, I have a 5k run @ 171-181bpm, with the winter cold and my asthma, this has been a killer – pretty sure I sound like an accordion with all my wheezing; and then an interval run of 10 sets – 30 sec sprint & 30 second walk, this one is tough but it’s over in 10min – what a treat!

Tough Mudder is in my grasp. Holy shit, I’m going to do this.