Wed. Morning Sports Conditioning: 2/9

Sports Conditioning Class ends at 6:45am, which means that I need the car after my workout if I am going to make it home to shower and eat before I got to work.  However, Hiroko needed the car to get to work at 7am.  So I left the car for Hiroko and ran the roughly mile and a half to the gym for my class.  After class, I ran to Hiro's work, which is only a few blocks from the gym and got the car.  I really enjoyed the way that this worked.  I go a nice warm up in before class and neither of us had to mess up our schedules to accommodate the other.

The run was very nice.  It was around 24 degrees ans still dark when I left the house but there was little wind, which makes all the difference.  As I have said before, I love to run in the pre-dawn hours, and his morning I was feeling what Hiroko calls "genki" meaning, "enthusiastic, energetic, or lively" in Japanese.  I did the first mile of my run in 9:38.83 and the last .64 in 5:31.76, which is a 8.37 pace.  I did the whole 1.64 in 15:10.59 at 9.15 pace.

The class in and of itself was one of the best classes that I have had in a long while.  Lisa was the instructor and we did stations and intervals, but since we had the whole gym to work with she was able to do both stationary exercises like jumping jack and push ups, as well as more active exercises like sprints and Carioka's that take up a lot room.  I have taken other stations and interval classes, but they were always in smaller class rooms, which limited what we could do.  Having this class in the gym makes a world of difference because it gives the instructor a lot more options.  Also it allowed us to workout in groups of three or four instead of one or two, which I thought enforced the idea that this was still a group workout rather than just a bunch of people doing their own thing in the same room.

  


Carioka

1. Stand with feet shoulder-width apart.

2. Lift right knee to waist level at a 45-degree angle.

3. Keeping your knee high, rotate your hip so your knee is straight in front of you.

4. Step your right leg in front of your left.

5. Step to the left with your left foot.

6. Step behind your left leg with your right.

7. Step to the left with your left leg. Repeat the sequence for 20 yards, then change directions.