By Wednesday morning, when the schools had all declared a two-hour delay, a thick quarter-inch crust of glistening ice topped every surface in the blazing sun. Pristine surfaces could be shoveled as the snow beneath created a cushion against the ground. Any place I had swept clear of snow the day before was now a solid impenetrable sheet of ice. Pretty and really slippery, because the only thing more slippery than ice is wet ice. And since temps were in the mid-30s, the ice was slowly melting. Shoveling ice is almost as heavy as shoveling wet sand, except it stays on the shovel. Mostly.
It takes me an hour to clear the walkway and driveway. The car is so iced over that I can't get the doors open, or rather, the front doors open a fraction, just enough for the dash to tell me a door is open. But not really open. Not open enough to get into the vehicle and put the key in. Luckily, I manage to yank a back door hard enough and I can crawl in over the seats. The car takes over 30 minutes to defrost enough where I can clear the windshield. So much for that idiotic advice to warm your car by slowly driving it. Can't drive a car if you can't see out of it!
I had planned to take Wednesday off to take my car to the dealership. My car is one of thousands subject to a front passenger airbag recall, but the dealership has run out of loaner cars. I have to reschedule for next week. I'm back at the gym today and start off with HIIT cardio. But I'm unusually tired. The cardio goes fine but everything else seems hard. I've done this routine before so I'm surprised. All I can think is that ice shoveling, which had me sweat through my clothes and left me panting halfway done, has taken a much greater toll than I anticipated. Oh jeez.
One of these days I'll ask a cardiologist if it's normal for a heart rate to go from 159 to 200 and back down to 129 in a matter of 60 seconds while keeping the same pace. I don't notice any soreness but I'm only comfortable with a set of 20 pull ups. Push ups, crunches, and planks are all routine. The Smith is available and RDLs are first on my list. These don't feel bad and I knock out my standard 3 sets of 12 reps for the heavy set. But when I go to the Lat Pull Downs, I can tell something is off. I'm off. My first two sets are okay, but the heavy set isn't pretty, even with reduced reps.
Knowing that I'm not as strong as I'd like, I revise my routine, deleting the T-bar Row and replacing it with One-Arm Seated Cable Rows. Those feel okay. Last are Reverse BB Curls, and then a high school guy I've never seen before gloms both the 30 and 50 lbs BBs. Ugh. I can either grab the 20 or the 40. I grab the latter, probably a mistake, knowing I can't do Reverse Curls with that weight. But I can probably do regular BB curls, so that's what I do.
It's then that I discover my forearms are sore, probably from ice shoveling! Only with the weight in my hands do I feel discomfort radiating from my elbows along the outer edges of my lower arms. I can bring the bar up from my thighs to 90 degrees (making it perpendicular to my body) but can't move it to my chest for that bicep squeeze. Yeah, the weight's too heavy. Still, I do 3 sets. Of course, if I'd been thinking clearly, I would've ditched the barbel and just picked up some DBs for alternating curls. But hindsight is 20/20...
Pull Valentine Thursday
Norwegian 4x4
5 min w/u (4 min on / 3 min off) x 4
5, 9, 12, 16, 19, 23, 26, 30, 33
Calories 281
Miles 2.62
HR 138-203 (109 / 89 / 114)
Cage Stretch
HGPU 20
Push Ups 50
Crunches 30/30
Scissors 50
Bicycles 50
Side Planks 2 x 60s
Bird Dogs 2 x 60s
Smith RDLs
Bar (30) x 15
80 x 12
100 x 12
120 x 12, 12, 12
Lat Pull Downs
85lbs x 12
100 x 10
115 x 7, 8, 8 barely
Seated 1-Arm Cable Rows
30lbs x 12 each arm
35 x 10
40 x 8, 8, 10
BB Curls
40 lbs x 12, 12, 12
Mat Stretch
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