I wanted to make a post about my 'Burbathon' idea a multimedia affair, with photographs, video, maybe even maps so that I could really communicate the concept and have it be well-understood enough that other who wanted to give it a try could implement a comparable workout. Time has been very hard to come by this week, so I think I'll try and keep it short, with a promise of follow-up posts in the future.
I've often said that I seem to have fitness-ADD. Once I had started running (and liked it), I worked my way up to the half-marathon level, and after having explained that I only did a HALF marathon for the umpteen thousandth time, I worked my way up to the full 42.2km. While I'm proud of the accomplishment (if not my finishing time), my big problem with the whole experience: TOO MUCH RUNNING. I love running, but following a marathon training program is about 6 days a week; and to me, it just got monotonous. You can break some of those running sessions up with cross-training, but what if the cross training, was the sport itself? Enter triathlon, and I've never looked back.
Fitness ADD could be renamed to a more politically correct Multi-sport Mind; since I made up both terms, why not? I guess I'm always wondering what else I could be doing. Once I was swimming, biking and running, adding strength training to the mix was inevitable. There is a school of thought that treats strength training as a sub-optimal distraction from triathlon training, but the multi-sport mind simply ignores such opinions. So, when you add in the occasional strength exercise into a run, you're starting to get the right idea; I had discussed this over twitter with Andie 'The Fit Geek', and she says she does this in what she calls 'fun runs'.
You see a park bench, a picnic table, a fence, do squats so your butt touches the bench, or decline pushups.
But that's not all! I'm also attracted to trail-running for the simple reasons that I like the outdoors and forest environments especially, and trails (being softer) have lower impact which is nice to keep my Achilles tendinitis at bay. I'm lucky to have the Etobicoke creek near where I live, and part of the trail is very rough and wild (suitable for mountain biking, if only too short, I believe). So leaping over the bumps and jumps, hopping over logs, or balancing on them adds to the fun. It's like 'Parkour Lite' - since I'm too old and have too many injuries to try the really crazy stuff. It's largely inspired by events like the Spartan Race, Warrior Dash (which I did in July), and the Men's Health Urbanathlon.
I think I've given you some idea as to the general gist of this kind of a workout, and I promise to elaborate in future posts. Anybody else have fun things that they do while running to work on strength, agility or balance or just to break up the monotony?
Labels: burbathlon, cross-training, multi-sport mind, training