Week 7: Shifting Gears

So far, everything is going good with my workouts, and I don't feel so sore. But let's wait for the end of the week for the final judgement on that.

When I was cycling yesterday, I focused on sitting in the seat and shifting gears so that I wasn't pushing a high/hard gear going up hills or an incline or pedaling with no resistance on the downhills. I'm practicing the coordination needed to for gear shifting with both hands and I haven't quite got it down yet. This was one of those serendipitous discoveries that I made that my web search later showed was the right thing to do.

I'll be shifting gears in other ways. For my online class, we’re supposed to read anywhere from 75-178 pages a week and the instructor suggested that class participants to allow 6 hours a week for reading. Hahahahahah. I've never thought of myself as a slow reader, but it always takes me longer to read, process, and remember material. I am so very thankful now that I spent the summer reading, highlighting, and taking notes on most of these texts. If I had to read everything beginning now, I would drown. My focus will be on reviewing and remembering, rather than just trying to do a first read. I'm frustrated, though, because we did a practice test and I'm still had difficulty with many questions--even those that were more fact-based. And then there's the questions based on the reading and I can't recall where I read it. Yikes. It's not enough to read something and vaguely remember it because the test involves knowing details. One also has to know what is on a particular form--and what is NOT on that form.

The class is going to take a lot of time, and I think that as a compromise, beginning in September I'm going to move my running back to the treadmill in the predawn hours. It takes less time to go from my bed to the treadmill, and it frees up valuable time in the late afternoon and early evening.

Week 7 went out without event. I went for a 7 mile long run on Saturday, but ended up doing about 7.75 miles because I miscalculated the distance around the park when using the IronGirl route and making a complete circle. Lesson learned: it's actually closer to 8 miles and this knowledge will come in handy for my two 8 mile runs coming right up. All seems well on the running front.