Week 4

This weekend, I was able to make some progress despite the inevitable food-fest that is Superbowl Sunday.

On Friday, I woke up to the sound of my phone that ended up being the call that started what will eventually become my practicum experience for the MPH program :). I felt pretty good after that, so before I headed out to HSA to meet with group members, I decided to go for a bike ride. I didn't have a particular destination picked out, but I ended up logging about 8 miles after about 45 minutes. After I got back from HSA, I felt like I needed to do some road work before the weekend officially kicked into gear, so I decided to go running late in the afternoon that same day. This casual jog turned into a solid hour run. I need to point out that it really sucked to smell people cooking steak in their kitchen while I ran through their neighborhood.

The next day, Saturday, I had already committed to going on another MPH hike to Echo Mountain in Altadena. Despite my exercise from the previous day, I wasn't feeling sore or tired at all, so I thought it would be a nice, fun change of pace to contribute to my conditioning. Others in our group told me that our planned hike was estimated to be a ~4 hour hike. It was a much steeper climb in elevation than our other recent MPH hikes, and since it was fairly sunny, we all really worked up a sweat by the time we reached the top. However, the hike back down, which is usually much easier than going up, ended up being anything but that. Long story short, the dude in our group who was "experienced" with this particular hike decided that we would make our way down faster if we took a "shortcut" which "didn't look so tough." The descent took almost 3 hours and I could barely walk by the time we got to the bottom. Our 4 hour hike turned into a 6 hour treacherous expedition. It turned out that the unmarked trail that we followed was about a 70% grade down the side of the mountain. That was Saturday. It's now Tuesday night and I'm still uncomfortably sore. That day was easily one of the most physically demanding days of my life. I'm sure that this experience has helped better prepare me for another 5-6 hour endurance test in the near future...

Anyway, since then I've gone through a 90 minute dim sum bonanza, 3 hours of Superbowl fatty cuisine, and more undisciplined consumption of deliciousness. I really want to squeeze in some weight training this week before the weekend comes up, but I'll really have to stick to some strict time management with schoolwork, practicum, personal stuff, etc. to get that in there.

look closely and you can see the others making their way down the mountain