Another Lunch-Time Workout: Road Biking in the Suburbs

Posted on May 27, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

For as much as I complain about my job, one thing that I really appreciate is the upper-management’s support for lunch-time fitness. I suppose if your senior scientists are taking an hour for lunch to do yoga, to hit the gym, to go road biking or to go running then I’d say it’s fair game for me to do the same. It also helps to have locker rooms with showers so that a lunch-time workout doesn’t have to turn into a smelly and uncomfortable afternoon for you and your coworkers. I have many friends who don’t have such luxuries with their jobs and are thus required to do workouts super early in the morning or late at night (or just be smelly at work which is also an option, albeit an undesirable one). It becomes complicated and difficult to stay fit if your job doesn’t support an active lifestyle.

Today I went for a bike ride during my lunch time. Thankfully I work outside of the city so biking becomes a much safer and a more pleasant experience overall than trying to bike downtown. Biking downtown is less of an exercise and more of a survival experience. I’ve biked to work from my apartment downtown on several occasions but I’m doing it less often these days due to a number of close calls (car doors opening, MAss-holes driving, and complicated intersections with people who run red lights, ugh). Suffice it to say that biking in suburbia helps me get a better workout on my bike and not having a car to drive myself there, I resort to keeping my bike at work and just doing trips from there.

My college graduation present to myself: a new Trek 2200 bought on ebay for 50% off.

I bought my bike as a college graduation present to myself and I’ve got a lot of good use out of it. I bought it new on ebay for 50% off the retail price (score!) and putting it together was surprisingly easy considering most of the components were already in place before shipment. Having only raced on my bike once in the past few years (25 miles during a sprint triathlon), I’m kind of a n00b when it comes to pushing myself while cycling, I’m not quite sure where my limit is.

Today I pushed myself pretty hard but ended my workout not feeling that tired or winded (min/max/average heart rate = 89/170/129). My bike computer told me I averaged 17mph which my friends tell me is decent but still fairly slow for a 45 minute ride. I’m sure I could push myself harder but like I said, I’m not sure where that line is and what it feels like to be there. I’m sure that will come with time. Perhaps I can get into a few road-biking specific races this summer. I know there are many group rides that go in and out of Boston but I generally get home from work late and spend the weekends in the mountains so I frequently ride alone. Pushing yourself against yourself is a hard way to get better, I think spending some time riding with actual cyclists will help me to improve.

I really like biking but I also realy like friendly competition so I think I’ve got to find a group to ride with in order to improve my cycling skill and bring myself to a level where I can get a really killer workout. Until then it’ll be a mixture of survival biking in the city and lunch-time cruising at work.

Pickup Soccer with Friends on Saturday Morning

Posted on May 5, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

A group of my friends (and my friends’ friends) get together every saturday morning to play a two hour game of pickup soccer in a nearby outdoor athletic complex. I had all the intentions in the world to attend these games when the Facebook event was emailed around. However for some reason I never managed to be in town or when I was in town, I never managed to be motivated enough to take the T out to the field to play. So this was the first game I had been to. I probably would have stayed at home again had I not made the fitness goal this month of one new form of exercise per day. It really forced me to actually get out there and do something I wouldn’t normally do: play soccer.

I’m glad I went because it ended up being a total blast with a great mixture of good players and not so good players. The better players would put sick moves on each other but then pass it off to the less talented players for a failed and halarious attempt for a shot on goal (goal = two cones 15 feet apart).

A quick snapshot of pickup soccer before I jumped into the game.

I played forward for most of the game and had many opportunities to score but when I got the ball I got so excited that I messed most of them up. My intensity for competition certainly conflicted with my skill level. I never grew up playing soccer so most of my sports involved hand-eye coordination and as a result, my foot-eye coordination is nothing to write home about. I can certainly play reasonable defense with good body positioning but when it comes to controlling the ball while running I’m pretty useless. Regardless of the talent level, the game was a lot of fun and a great workout. I played for about an hour with an average heart rate of 136, peaking at 179.

As playing sports tends to do, I hardly noticed that I was working so hard. There’s just something about competition and team sports that help me block out the physical strain I’m putting on my body, a physical strain that is very obvious when I’m out for a run. For example, when I go out running, my heart rate is still relatively low (unless I’m racing) but in this game my heart rate went through the roof a few times and I didn’t mind because I was competing with other people in a friendly sport. The combination of exercise and camaraderie is definitely something that’ll bring me back to play again.

Bouldering Pyramid Workout at the MetroRock Climbing Gym

Posted on May 5, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

The climbing gym is the only place where I’ve ever had a membership. I like rock climbing as exercise because it builds functional strength in ways that is hard to replicate in a traditional gym. There’s no machinery to help you get to the top, it’s only your body and your mind that will help you up (and a decent pair of shoes). Also, it’s an ever-changing workout because routes in the gym change almost monthly, so with dozens of climbs available it’s hard to get bored. In contrast, in a traditional gym, the rowing machine will always be a rowing machine and I tend to lose interest pretty quickly.

On Friday night I headed to MetroRock with my buddy Tony to do a Bouldering workout. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, here’s a decent definition of Bouldering that I found on a MountainProject.com forum: “Bouldering is climbing without a rope near the ground on boulders or at the base of a cliff. You never climb farther than you are willing to fall. Falls are usually broken by use of a padded “crash” pad. Helps build finger strength, power and footwork.” Bouldering is fun to me because it can have complicated technique and problems (read: climbs) that are short and discrete. I find them to be like a puzzle that you have to use both your mind and your body to solve.

A picture of a V3 having it's way with me :(

Some of my friends are pretty serious climbers so I reached out to them for a typical Bouldering workout that I could in the gym (instead of simply climbing for fun). What I eventually chose was called a pyramid workout where you ramp up to your toughest climb and then go back down again to where you started. Boulding problems are ranked from V0 as the easiest to V16 as the totally unreal/elite bouldering. Considering I’m climbing at a V3 level I built the workout with that as my peak. Inside of 45 minutes I climbed 4 V0′s, 3 V1′s, 2 V2′s, 1 V3, 2 V2′s, 3 V1′s, and 4 V0′s.

The workout lasted about 45 minutes and I climbed 19 boulder problems total, some of them I down-climbed as well instead of simply jumping down from the top. My minimum heart rate was 65, my maximum was 155, and my average was 114. I think the average was fairly low because a large part of gym climbing is actually sitting down and talking about climbing, in reality it’s probably a larger part of climbing than climbing itself. Suffice it to say, I had a great physical workout but a pretty low-key aerobic workout. It certainly worked my forearms, shoulders, back, and core but not so much the lungs over a longer period of time.

I’ll leave you with this sweet home bouldering video. This would be a great way to stay in shape if the only way to get to my computer were to boulder across the house:

Pickup Broomball

Posted on May 1, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

What is broomball? Wikipedia describes it as a recreational ice game originating in Canada (no surprise) and played around the world. It’s a lot like ice hockey in that it’s on a sheet of ice and it’s 5-on-5 with goalies. However, it’s unlike hockey in that you don’t wear skates and you use a broom instead of a hockey stick, hittng a ball instead of a puck. I’ve played in two broomball seasons in Boston with Social Boston Sports (league champs both years). It’s a really fun sport but it’s incredibly awkward due to the fact that you can’t slow down or change directions, lest ye fall on yer arse. Walking away with a limp and a dozen extra bruises isn’t uncommon.

Sarah, Michelle, and I cruising pickup broomball at the Veteran's Memorial Rink in Somerville.

I heard about this group who plays pickup broomball after work one once a week. It’s $5 and you get to play for an hour with whoever shows up. We had 6 players per team plus two goalies and it was the first time I’d ever played broom ball on the full length of the ice, what a workout! In the SBS league we play sideways on the rink so there’s much less running around. I wore my heartrate monitor for the first time and I was shocked to see that over the 45 minutes of broomball (including breaks) my heart rate averaged 147bpm with a minimum of 85bpm and a maximum of 187bpm! My competitive side definitely came out and I ended up scoring 2 out of the 4 goals. It was definitely comparable cardiovascularly to how we played during the SBS leagues only less resting today because we had fewer players and an entire sheet of ice to cover instead of just between the sideboards. After having sweat through both my fleece and my jeans I’d say that it was a great workout, and an absolute blast. I should definitely try to work this into my weekly fitness routine like these guys:

I wish I were this cool.