Day 72 - Breakthroughs in Fun

Today was another wonderful Sunday.  My brother-in-law got Michael this morning so that Steve and I could sleep in.  It was so amazing to sleep until I felt like getting up.  Of course, Michael had a strong influence on when that was.  Yesterday, he found some tokens for Chuck E Cheese in a cup in the garage.  So, today, he wanted to go use them and made sure we knew when they opened.  There was one particular machine he really wanted to play with.  He talked about it all the way there.  Of course, when we got there, the machine was gone.  I held my breath and prepared for his reaction.  I have to say I am so proud of him.  He didn’t fuss at all.  He was clearly disappointed, but he found other things to do.  And, he even got to play pinball in the ‘big kids’ section.  I think he really liked it. 

With sleeping in and our outing, I was late getting started on my exercise.  I decided to do a five mile video first just to see how moving felt.  It was great.  This was the first time that I did the video not praying for each mile to end.  By the end of the stretch, I was fully cooled down and recovered.  That has to be a first. 

I decided to the rest of the exercise on the bike.  I set it to level four and really wanted to see how close to 75 RM I could maintain.  Turns out, it wasn’t all that hard.  I was able to keep my heart rate in the low 130s and breathe through my nose the entire 45 minutes.  And, once again, I found myself enjoying the workout and recovering very quickly. 

There really must be something to this breathing through my nose thing.  I know it sounds like you couldn’t get much of a workout without breathing through your mouth, but you’d be really surprised.  The more I practice, the better I get.  In the walking video, my heart rate got to about 85% sporadically and I was still able to maintain it.  So, I understand from the articles I’ve been reading that it’s really important for maintaining the right oxygen levels in your blood and tissue, but don’t really fully understand the whole thing.  What I do know is that my workouts seem to be getting better the more I practice it.  If you know more about this whole idea, please let me know!