Second Program: Week #8

Week 54: Second Program - week 8 out of 15

Week settings:

• Area of focus: Cardio-Strength
• Number of training days: 4
• Limitations: none
• Last week feedback: "Hard, but ok"

Training:

• Monday: High Jumps 100 (04:22* -First time) +Kronos standard (49:07*)
• Tuesday: Iris strength (41:10* -First time)
• Wednesday: Kronos standard (49:08*)
• Thursday: boxing training
• Friday: Hera strength (21:59* -First time)

Statistics:

• 3'003 points
• 165 minutes

Good thing that I didn't need an easy week, to recover from Hell Days last week. With 2 Kronos and 2 full strength version workouts, the coach was very generous with me...



I was a bit worried that the 100 High jumps would wake-up my tendinitis but since they were followed by a "no-jump" workout, I had no real issue. However, Kronos was a slap in the face. My completion time was more than 10 minutes over my PB... 
During the workout it seemed that I would never see the end of these 300 squats, but the real time wasters were pushups and pullups (I spent around 15mn on pullups alone).
I knew that I wasn't back at my peak on these exercises, but I had not expected such a time.


The difficulty of the strength version of Iris took me by surprise. I completed Iris (standard) many times in the past. The only change in the strength version is that climbers are replaced by froggers. And it turns out that, on Metis strength, I actually prefer to do froggers instead of climbers (I guess frogs are a French thing!)

I expected a nice little workout, under 30 minutes. Boy, was I wrong...
In Metis strength, we trade 45 climbers for 45 froggers. In Iris strength, it's 500 froggers. That makes a world of a difference.
They left me completely breathless. It took me 41 painful minutes to complete the workout (nearly 50% more time than the regular version!). Next time I'll know what to expect.


The main challenge with second Kronos this week, was that my abs were still on fire from the first attempt. The muscles didn't feel particularly painful over the past couple days, but it became noticeable as soon as I started the first set of abs. It resulted in a fairly slow pace, on abs and leg levers. However, I managed to go a (tiny) bit faster on pullups, so the overall time was only a second away from Monday's result. 


Last but not least, Hera strength completed my week. Interestingly, this was the opposite of Iris strength. I expected the training to be much more difficult and longer due to the high jumps, but it's not the case. High jumps require a bigger effort and bring more intensity to the training, but the extra effort is mitigated thanks to the 60 seconds breaks. As a result, for my first attempt at the strength version, my time was only 01:30 above my PB in the standard version.


My total training time this week was longer by nearly 40mn compared to the previous week and its Hell Days. Yet the app indicates that I scored less points (3'003 vs 3'184). As you know by now, I'm mostly indifferent points but I understand that they somehow abstractly quantify the efforts of workouts. Which means that it took more time to roughly generate the same output of energy.
Given the amount of time wasted on Kronos starring at a the pullup bar, I'd say that's a pretty good summary of my week. So the point system is probably not that far off the mark afterall.