Training on a Plane. Kind Of.

by angierunsboston

 

First of all, thank you to all of my heroes of the day for helping me meet my goal of raising $2300 for the American Medical Athletic Association by the end of 2012. I will write more about this later, but it was truly amazing to see hundreds of friends, acquaintances, and strangers step up and make a difference. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

So now, onto marathon training. 

First off, I would like to apologize for the lag in posting. I have just begrudgingly begun to admit to myself that – despite all the denial I choose to pile over it – I am still injured. This means that I have not been running as much as I had hoped to be by this point. Because of this, my mother has made me start jump roping for a solid cardio workout. This is nothing like the school yard double dutch jump rope games some of you may be thinking of right now. Think…insanely sore calf muscles and unstoppable sweating by the end of 60 seconds of this activity. My goal was to be able to get up to 15 minutes of continuous jump roping in the two weeks I was home. 

I made it to 5 minutes.

Either way, I’m hoping to kick off some marathon training while I am in Singapore and Dubai for the next few weeks. Stay tuned for posts on how a semi-injured, semi-out-of-shape me navigates 80+ degree weather and new routes in the next coming weeks. Training officially started with my 28 hours of flying, which because of the international dateline, resulted in me arriving in Singapore TWO days after I left Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I don’t know about all of you, but usually when I think about running and airplanes, I think about running to catch my flight like these people.

Whether it be Chicago O’Hare or Charles De Gaulle in Paris, I am not ashamed to admit that I get a fair amount of high level interval training while running to catch my flights. More than once, I can recall stepping into the airport to hear my name being paged over the loudspeakers because I was the only passenger yet to board on my flight.

This time around, though, I got to all of my flights early (weird), and so I had to fit in a bit of plane exercise to make sure my muscles wouldn’t wither away over these 2 days of traveling. Normally, I get all of my plane exercise by walking to and from the bathroom to brush my teeth between meals (airplane food + the tendency to fall asleep on flights = gross). This time, I added some calf raises, lunges, and stretching into the mix while I was on a 15 hour flight from Atlanta to Tokyo. 

Despite getting some weird looks from the flight attendants, most of the passengers on the plane didn’t notice because they were either sleeping or engrossed in the over 600+ movies Delta apparently offers now. Not only was I not a social pariah after my plane training, I stepped off the plane feeling refreshed and stretched.

On the way from Tokyo to Singapore, I even added some upright planks in while I was waiting for my plane buddy to get back to his window seat (burdens of sitting in the aisle). Next time, I might just offer to help the flight attendants push around the beverage carts to get some more exercise. Just kidding, I think.

Now I know the workout I just described does not come close to the workout needed to run a full marathon – but hey, it was a start. And you know what they say, right? 

From humble beginnings…

(If you don’t know the end of this one, just Google it)

Thanks for reading. Happy 2013 to you all!