photo by Steve Penland

Friday, February 1, 2013

Roller Doom

I went to the Roller Dome for a little inline skating tonight.  Due to an unfortunate combination of circumstances I only got out on the long track once this week (although if you're going to miss a couple days of skating, the ones where the wind chill is -20 are as good as any).  So the Dome seemed like a good plan. For those who have never had the pleasure, in Minnesota we get to inline skate in the stadium where the Vikings play football.  We skate around the concourse, past the beer stands and condiment shelves.  It's a cool place to skate; they even have a marathon in the spring. Unfortunately, the dome will be torn down sometime next winter to make way for the new football stadium. Bummer.

Anyway, I skate in the dome every so often.  In 2008, when the thyroid problems began, I had a really hard time doing endurance work outdoors and so did pretty much all my endurance workouts that winter in the dome.  So when I decided to make up for Wednesday's and Thursday's lost workouts by going to the dome, I simply looked back at my 2008 workouts and picked one.  5x5 laps, or about 5 x 3K.  Seemed simple enough.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten something that I just reminded fellow middle-aged-lady-skate-blogger Sharon about.  Sharon has (in addition to her short track adventures) signed up to do a triathlon this year.  She's all kinds of crazy brave.  So today she posted about how she was a bit surprised, given the massive increase in workouts she's currently engaged in, to find that skating wasn't any easier.

I told her what I believe to be the (sad) truth: when you get older, there is no such thing as "in shape."  There is only "in shape for (insert your sport of choice)."  See, when you're younger, you can run or bike or swim or skate and all your muscles seem to benefit from that.  Then you can go out and play frisbee or mountain climb or ride a skate board, and you feel all fit and strong and nothing complains the next day.

Over 40, the situation is not so rosy.  If you bike, you can only bike without incurring sore muscles.  If you run, you can run.  If you long track skate, you can long track skate.  You would think that slideboard and dryland and inline skating are close enough to long track that there'd be some crossover (no pun intended), but no.  When I launched into my 5x5 laps tonight, not only did the skates feel funny and the floor slippery, but things started to hurt pretty quickly.  Which is why the 5x5 laps turned into 5x4 laps, and why I'm pretty sure I'll be feeling all 20 laps tomorrow.  And the next day.

Which should be interesting, because I plan to go to the dome again that day.

2 comments:

  1. How DID your legs end up feeling? I'm betting they'll be more sore from standing outside at the Jr.'s, than anything! ;)

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  2. They're not too bad; a little sore from the "trying not to slip" thing. It's actually my back that got really sore from standing and timing today; the 5-lap sets yesterday definitely didn't help. Tomorrow should be interesting!

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