Rut Tut Tut

I had a happy hour last night with some friends, which was a blast.  Because I was starving after work, happy hour turned into dinner, and lots of delish but not so healthy food was involved.  So bad, but so good :)  I wasn't all that concerned about it since I was planning to head to the gym afterwards, but being so full left me sluuuggish.  I was really tempted to just go home and go to bed early, but fortunately that wasn't an option to begin with, so off to the gym I went. 

Every day I tell myself that I'm just going to do a hard treadmill workout, but I end up getting suckered into starting off on a PRECOR elliptical.  I like to call this a "warm up" but it's really just a less painful way to start off my workout.  Not that it's easy -- I typically burn between 600-700 calories in an hour (or so the machine tells me) and I sweat up a storm.  There's just something more...civilized about working out on the elliptical.  It makes me feel more in control and like I can target what areas I work on versus just going into "survival" mode like I do on the treadmill. 

Any who, I've been doing this for a month or so now.  I do the elliptical for an hour, then hop on the treadmill afterwards.  But, after an hour on the elliptical, I'm pretty tired so I usually only do about a mile on two on the treadmill.  I feel like this routine isn't doing anything for my fitness level though.  I love the elliptical, but I feel like those 600-700 calories aren't really coming off... maybe I'm wrong, but it's making me frustrated and feel like I'm hitting a rut.  Last night was my first attempt to change things up in hopes of keeping my body guessing (haha, Dodgeball).  I did start off on the elliptical, but cut the time down to 30 minutes, and then hopped on the treadmill in hope of doing 3 miles in 40 minutes.  Eh, FAIL.  I pushed myself to do the first mile at 6.0 (10 minute mile) and then my legs just refused to do anything else.  I ended up doing 1.2 miles in 12 minutes.  And just getting to that point was a battle.  What's up with that?!

Today I'm super sore, which I actually don't mind because it reminds me that I'm working hard.  What bothers me is that the improvement process is so slow.  I guess I just expect to get back into the swing of things pretty quickly, versus having to fight for it.  Not sure how I'm going to run an 8k on Sunday.  There will be some serious walking breaks involved...

Sorry for the rant!  Hopefully the rest of the week at the gym will go better :-)

xoxo,
Olivia