Hill Sprints

"Happiness is a warm puppy."

- Charles Schultz

So, what's new since my last post? Hockey was good on Sunday. We had a big snowstorm in the morning, so I figured we might be short on skaters Sunday night. As it turned out, just about everyone showed up, we had 4 or 5 guys on the bench. I actually played pretty well; at least I felt like my "hockey fitness" was better than it had been all year. I don't know if it was the change in workouts or what, but it was good. The strange thing about the game was that I thought our side should have been much better than the other side (even though the best player was on the other side), but we got blown out. We had trouble breaking out of our end and we had trouble scoring, but in between, we were pretty good. ;) Our side did a lot of flying around and a lot of work, but we didn't really get much done.

Tuesday night was another strength workout. After doing only bodyweight exercises last week, I went back to using the weights some this week. No issues there, but the workout turned out to be longer than I like. It ended up taking an hour and 10 minutes. I prefer to keep my strength workouts to 45-50 minutes if I can. Workout quality can start to suffer if I go too long.

Last night I went outside and ran some hill sprints. I worked a little late, so it was dark by the time I got out to run. The road was a little snowy in parts, but not too bad. More distracting than the road was the German Shephard tied up at the top of the hill. He'd start barking like crazy every time I'd get up to the top. I ended up doing 8 sprints (run up, 15 pushups, walk down, immediately run up again). I felt like the running wasn't too hard (maybe the snow kept me from going full speed?), but the pushups caught up to me. Still, I was feeling pretty tired after I got home. I've also noticed a little soreness in my legs today, so I guess it was a good workout.

My upper body is not recovering from the workouts as fast as my lower body (probably because it's not used to being worked so frequently), so I'm probably going to give the upper body a break tonight. I'm not sure exactly what I'll do, go run or use the jump rope.

I start my Christmas vacation tomorrow. I may go skiing someplace local tomorrow (there are two small ski areas within about 15 minutes of my house). We'll see.