Welcome to our May edition of How I Work it Out, where we peek in on women from around the country to see a week in their lives and how they fit in their workouts. (Here’s Heather from April.) 

This month’s featured mom is Sarah Nemeth from Pismo Beach, California. Sarah is a safety engineer for rocket launches, mom to a fearless 12-year-old daughter, and caretaker of a full house that includes three dogs and a new pet corn snake. Her job comes with an unpredictable schedule—think nights, weekends, and plenty of last-minute changes—which means staying consistent with workouts requires serious creativity and flexibility.

A lover of long distances, she’s raced everything from marathons to 100-milers. But after a tough year and a stubborn case of plantar fasciitis (is there any other kind?), she was forced to rethink her go-to workouts. These days, you’ll find her in the garage on her bike doing Zwift rides, lifting weights to build strength as she gets older, and staying adaptable.

My favorite way to start on a Monday is with the live strength class with Brandi in Many Happy Miles. She always leaves me feeling strong (and usually a little sore) since she packs a great workout into just 30 minutes. Since I’m in California, the workout starts at 5:30 am, so I got up around 5 to set up and have time to foam roll my back and calves before getting started. Today’s workout was 2×45 seconds of conditioning followed by a 90 second strength move.  I worked up a good sweat with all the squats, mountain climbers, and arm work before getting ready and heading out to work for a long work day.

Today I was up at 4:40 am to fit in another pre-work workout. I started with my usual foam rolling just to loosen up and today added a little extra time on my glutes after all the side lunges from yesterday. Once I felt ready to go, I hopped on my bike for this week’s Zwift race in their Makuri May series. It was a 15-mile race and I felt pretty happy with my 43 minute finishing time. I cooled down with a slower mile to shake out my legs and bring my heart rate down a bit before hopping off for a shower.  

In my headphones was my latest read: The Book That Held her Heart by Mark Lawrence.  I’m a huge reader and almost always have an audiobook going when I am just doing cardio and also for all my commuting. I’ve definitely squeezed in a few more miles when I’m really into something or want to get to a chapter break before turning off my headphones.  

Most Tuesdays I fit in a strength workout while my daughter is at her climbing team practice. Today, though, we had the yearly Girl Scout leader-daughter dinner so I skipped strength and we had dinner and a movie with friends instead.

Another early morning wake up to get a bike ride in. Today my scheduled ride started at 5 am, so I had to move a little faster today to get ready and on the bike. This workout was a 45-minute group ride. This was just a straight banded ride, so you ride at your own pace with everyone else staying together regardless of actual effort.  I don’t often pick this style workout since it’s not as easy to measure your output for effort, but this was part of a fundraiser effort where every 500km ridden resulted in a donated bike through World Bicycle Relief.  This was a good opportunity to have a lighter effort; I stayed in my zone 2 for the full 45 minutes. 

Sticking with a theme of usual wake up time and hopping on the bike by 5 am to meet up for a workout. I am often awake before my alarm but today it caught me in a full sleep, so it was a little harder transition to fully awake.  

I thought about scrapping my planned workout in favor of something a little less structured but decided that with a busy day ahead, it would feel better to at least try to get through what I had originally planned: a Sweet Spot workout with Zwift’s Women’s Training Club. This workout is designed to get comfortable with being uncomfortable: 20 minutes of a steady effort followed by 5x1min at my FTP (functional threshold pace). Luckily, once I settled in, the time went by pretty quickly and I was able to hit all my goal power and cadence marks.

I’m on schedule to have a 3 am work start on Sunday, so I decided that I had time to fit in my planned Sunday Zwift workout today since I can be a few minutes late to work.  

I’m on week 5 of 6 of Zwift Camp and this week had a 60 minute climbing focused simulation to complete. The first half was two long 10-minute steady state efforts followed by a second half with short surge intervals. The workout called for a lot of low cadence and high power output pedaling, which was tough on my knees, so I kept the cadences a little higher than the workout called for and just focused on hitting all my power marks.  

Fridays are my daughter’s second climbing team practice of the week, so it gives me another good opportunity to hit the gym. My favorite machine to use is the assisted pull-ups and dips station: today I happily dropped another 5 pounds off the assist weight for both! I also did some squats with a high pull using a 40 pound kettlebell and sets of low rows to round it all out.  My husband stopped by after getting our daughter dropped off at her practice and we hit up the sauna and hot tub for a bit together before I was off to pick her up.

My first chance to not set an alarm this week. I didn’t plan a workout until after I got my daughter dropped off at her dance rehearsals. Right around the corner from our gym is an excellent set of stairs with beach access, so on the table today was 30-ish minutes of stair repeats.  

I ended up fitting in 6 full flights of stairs (my watch called it 48 flights of vertical climbing) with some gentle running in between each set, giving me a total of 2 miles for the day.  It was a typical May Gray day here, so the stairs were a little wet and very sandy, which meant I had to be pretty mindful and intentional with each step. I also find it difficult to pay attention to an audiobook when I’ve got workouts that require counting or concentration so I opted for my favorite workout beats playlist instead – mostly a mix of 90s and early 2000s Eurodance.  

With my cardio complete, I headed up to the TRX room in the gym. I did a few sets of pushups and bicep curls, then thought I was going to do a full 4 minute Tabata of planking with my feet in the TRX bands. After 2 minutes, my core was totally shot and I decided that it was plenty for the day and hit up the sauna to just sit in the heat for a little bit.

My early morning work got rescheduled for a few weeks, so my planned rest day turned into a really awesome walk on the beach with my daughter.  

It was an unusually sunny morning and super low tide so we did a lot of exploring in the tide pools and caves along the walk. I think we ended up covering between 2.5-3 miles total. As a treat, we made a stop at my favorite local coffee shops for iced coffee (me) and orange juice (her) on the walk home.