Exercise Log 10.8.13 (Cardio only)

Well today was supposed to be a rest day, a couple days ago I fell down and hurt my wrists in a minor way, but I have a carpal tunnel problem that especially creeps up at night and the day after the fall I did a hard back workout requiring heavy weight lifting that no doubt put unnecessary extra strain on the wrists. So that second night after the workout when the carpal tunnel set in the extra swelling in the wrists made it just completely unbearably bad in the morning. My grip strength was so weak from the nerve pain that I struggled for 2-3 minutes to open a frail plastic container to unsheath my broccoli. So I felt that it might be wise today to call off my leg workout, take some rest.

Then I thought about it more and decided that rest days are for sissies! So I did an M100… and another one, and another one… and continued until I had done 5 in total! Yep, an M500. It was absolutely intense and ridiculous. For those who are not familiar, an M100 is a fun high intensity interval training workout that involves a sequence of 10 burpees, 10 mountain climbers and 10 squat thrusts. Repeated twice more than makes 30 reps of each exercise, finishing with 10 more burpees lands you at a total of 100 repetitions of the different exercises. You should attempt to do this nonstop, but resting briefly between reps as needed is normal. Normally doing one set of M100 is plenty tiring enough… but 5 of them in a row is absolutely ridiculous… that’s 200 burpees, 150 mountain climbers and 150 squat thrusts altogether. You all know me though, ridiculous is my middle name!

Here is how it played out. Around M100 I was doing good, feeling good that I decided to do something so at least I didn’t skip my daily cardio for my rest day, and I completed it probably in a little over 5 minutes. M200 was actually quite hard in comparison, I pushed myself to a similar completion time but I definitely was questioning whether M500 was wise. Around M300, I started to head off into a trance, my time went over 6 1/2 minutes and I was starting to sweat hard, turned on all the fans in my room (two blizzard fans and a dyson air multiplier) to create a wind tunnel vortex. It did not in any way help cool me down fast enough despite picking one of the fans up full blast and sticking it in my face between reps, so I kept pushing. Around M400 I was sweating so hard that my sweat had become misty and salty, it was hard to know for sure if it was sweat or blood from the taste but it mattered not, I had to keep going. Finally I finished my last rep of the M500 finishing that last 100 reps worth of exercises in probably 8 minutes.

So, an adventure that probably burnt I dunno, 600 calories? In probably 30 minutes, 35 including rest time. Better than running 5 miles hard, I figure. Anyways a fun day to turn a rest day into a hardcore workout day… hopefully one with less wrist stress than I’d intended with the leg workout.