Morning Exercise

Four days after the half marathon in Hadano, the leg pain was almost gone, so I decided to go for a short run in the morning. I stuck to my regular forefoot running to continue to strengthen my calves. There's a small park about 1 k from home. I dropped by there to do some lying chin-ups. The main muscles involved in that exercise are lats, forearms, and bi-ceps, and they are not significantly relevant to running, but I did it to quickly elevate my heart rates, and to use up the glycogen stored up in my body, so that it would tap my fat reserve in order to create energy to sustain the running.

When doing lying chin-ups, I extended the concentric phase over four seconds in order to make it more challenging. I originally planned to begin with 12 reps, and then to progressively decrease the number of reps to ten, eight, and eventually to six. But after doing twelve four-second lying pull-ups, my lats were pretty exhausted, so I had to reduce the number to five in my second set, to four in the third, and three in the last.

Quite satisfied that I was able to exhaust myself in a short period of time, I hit the road again and jogged for a while until I reached a slope, where I was going to do hill sprints. It is a pretty steep slope of 200 m. I did five sprints there, and was completely beat after finishing all five.

I, then headed back the same route to home. Instead of going straight home, though, I dropped by the park again to do more lying chin-ups. I did thirty reps in a row, and failed. After that I just slowly ran home, hit a shower, had a piece apple, had a cup of warm soy milk, and left home for work.

I felt great during commute, having a minor dopamine rash.

The exercise took me 36 minutes 18 seconds.
I am planning to combine this type of short by intensive running training consisting of slow jogging and intensive sprints mainly for cardio and for improving on recovery speed on the one hand, and slow and long (10 k～15 k) jogging for endurance before my next race in January. See how it goes.