grinding out the murph workout

I may not be a football fan, but I am Philly born and raised. You can take the girl out of Philly but you can’t take the Philly out of the girl. This opinion piece in The Washington Post aptly describes the pugilistic yet honest plugging of the Philly sports fan. Philly may toil away in obscurity at times, but when she succeeds, it’s like the prodigal son has come home. So, I’ll be rooting for my hometown tonight, praying the Eagles win another Super Bowl.

This morning, I ground out almost a full Murph workout! I made it to 18 rounds, plus I ran both 1-mile workouts.

Yesterday, I needed to run 5 miles for my long run, however, I didn’t want to spend 2 hours away from home. We had plans to work on our breakfast room. We removed the wallpaper in January, and now we needed to wipe the glue residue off the walls. I decided to try something different based on an article I read recently in trail runner magazine. An ultrarunner, Camille Herron, had stopped doing long runs, switching instead to cumulative mileage and running frequency. Obviously, I’m not an ultrarunner, but her premise (supported by studies) that spreading the impact of running over a day with 4 to 8 hour breaks between sessions helped strengthen the bones. According to the article, this benefit also helped tendons and ligaments.

I found running on the treadmill to be a bit of a long slog though watching a show on Netflix on my iPad helped. I did not feel sore today when I did the Murph workout. When I did my runs yesterday, I had a break of 2 to 3 hours between each run – 2 miles, 2 miles, and 1.5 miles. Next time, I would run through my development. Hopefully, the neighbors wouldn’t notice my loops over the course of a day, though who cares if I’m outside getting exercise!

For today’s Murph workout, I decided to focus on endurance and trying to beat last week’s 15 rounds of pullups, pushups, and squats. I did 18 rounds at 1.21 minutes per round, down from 1.36 minutes per round. Since I wasn’t sure how my legs would feel after yesterday’s all-day running session, I stuck to a slower pace for the run. My goal next week is to complete the full 20 rounds of pullups, pushups, and squats, and run both 1-mile runs. Then, I’ll add in the weight vest starting with the squats which will slow my time per round down which is fine with me.