Born Again Gym Rat: The Cure to DOMS is More Exercise

Thursday, February 11, 2016

The Cure to DOMS is More Exercise

I wake up with unusual soreness in my quads. Not debilitating but it gets my attention. I guess taking a few weeks off in intensity and then jumping right back into 6+ miles was a surprise to those sleepy muscles? Soreness never persuades me to ease up. It just makes me work harder. The only way to speed recovery is to increase blood flow, and exercise is the best way to do that. I'm not a heating pad kind of person, although I do have a box of Hot Hands® near the front door.

I don't bother to sweep the snow dust off the driveway this morning. The weather is forecast to drop into the minus degrees. WTH? Wind chills predicted in the -30F. Minus thirty? What, did we suddenly transport to Everest? (Yes, we watched that movie a few weekends ago in front of a cozy wood stove fire.) Today I bring in several more armloads of firewood. A gal at the gym tells me she heard we should all leave our faucets dripping this weekend to keep our pipes from freezing. Seriously? I'm glad I got the goose down parka from LLBean, although I'm still partial to my beat up old Land's End looks-like-a-sleeping-bag down coat, in spite of it's finicky zipper. The pockets are bigger, and the coat is super lightweight. It's my go-to coat, unless it's a wet snowfall. It's probably not good in the wind either. I guess I'll find out. At least I have alternatives in case it fails.

Tomorrow my son's school is closed for Superintendent's Day, which means teachers go to school but students don't. So I'll have to take him to the gym with me. Which means I'll probably do a short workout, maybe whack the machine again, but pull my punches since my knuckles are still sore and red. My fingertips are also suffering, from winter air. They're split with fissures that are worse than paper cuts. There's no way to bandage them so I alternate between slathering them with Bag Balm, a wonderful petroleum jelly and lanolin mix sold to treat sore cow udders, and painting them with Liquid Skin, which almost hurts worse, but not quite.

My routine calls for cardio and abs, but I can't resist doing a few sets of push ups, and two sets of pull ups. I really enjoy the Intervals program on the Precor, and only pedal backwards for the last 2 minutes. My right leg is behaving mostly, except when I'm in the car driving. On the web, I find a discussion board where someone suggests sitting on a tennis ball while in the car. I'm willing to give it a shot, although I suspect it might be a tad big for me since I'm a lot smaller than your average person. I feel like I'm getting soft though, and that's not a good thing. The gym scale tells me 109.8 lbs today, but I also barely drank a third of my water. Hmmmm...

Thursday Workout
(6.5 miles cardio)