I'm just not a kid anymore...

What a great feeling two days ago and such a lousy one today.  It always amazes me, even after 45 years of working out, how each exercise period can be so different, elicit such different emotions, and provide such different feelings.

Yesterday was a machine day, 64 minutes on the elliptical, all hard.  During our vacation, I kicked up the resistance and continued that resistance at home.  The increase is about 10 (strictly an estimate).  On my non-run days, I'll spend about an hour on the elliptical.  On running days, I warm up with anywhere from 16-32 minutes on the machine and then run.  Why the odd times?  There are 16 time gradients on the elliptical, and when you set the amount of time that you will be exercising, it divides that time equally among the 16 gradients.  Got that?

As I said, yesterday was a machine only day.  I ended up working out late in the day from 4-5.  This morning, Deb and I went up early in the morning, I did 16 minutes on the machine, and then went out to run.  Big mistake.  I felt sluggish and tired the whole run.  To tell the truth, I ran about half, walked for about 50 meters, and ran the rest.  RunKeeper couldn't get a signal from the GPS satellites so my pace wasn't tracked but I imagine that things were slow.

Lesson learned?  You've got it.  Rest.  Sufficient rest between workouts.  This isn't a new lesson but one that I've known for some time.  It just takes days like today to reaffirm why rest is important.

I'm just not a kid anymore...