Hill Sprints - (or f***** b******s to normal punters)
Another early start. 6am training session in Richmond Park with client. Very cold this morning and no amount of Primark body warmers could keep the old chappy warm. Felt like winter's last throw of the cold dice. Get through this and spring will be on us. I love this time of year. Lighter, warmer and more hopeful.
It should be the time where you have done some serious mileage, where the long runs are being stepped up and training being fine tuned. 8 weeks until Marathon day today, and my training is only just beginning really.
I've accepted I'm not going to be in tip top shape to run it, as i still feel the injury and doing lots of mileage is not good for it at the moment. But at least i am training again and that is a positive.
It was a stunning morning, so i celebrated by hitting the hill in the park known as 'The Bastard'. A steep 200 metre hill by Petersham Nurseries. Long and steep and offering great views when at the top and knee trembling shits when at the bottom.
It is a tough hill and doing sprints up them makes you very tired very quickly.
There are two benches on the hill. 1st one is 1 minute sprint for short ones and 2nd is 2minutes. Today as it's 1st time back, i opted for the 1st bench.
I did 10 sprints and totalled 25 minutes on the hill in total. After sprint 4 you basically want to go home or immediately stop. It saps all strength and rips your lungs, raises heart rate like you've swallowed a case of Viagra and effectively makes you as disorientated as swallowing a load of nitrate oxide. It's a toughy.
You can go easy and cheat, but you have to go through it. I estimate you need to do it on 4-5 occasions before you get used to it and then you can really get stuck in and make improvements. This is my 1st time, so if i do it once a week, i have another 8 goes at it until marathon day. I will build up to doing the longer ones but it was a good start and mixes up training a bit.
Why do them? Well it helps to raise the heart rate, make you work at a higher intensity and mixed with longer speed work will raise fitness, lung capacity and ultimately marathon speed. Even so, i couldn't wait to have a smoke after it.
It really is a training technique where you notice smoking is not a good thing for your lungs. It's hard to do both, so you have to time it that you leave you're snout burning at the bottom of the hill, so you can have a quick pull on the way down before you tackle the hill again. I can get 3 sprints out of 1 cigarette, so if i keep training hard i will get quicker and can keep the snout burning for around 6 sprints. We all need goals in training don't we?
No chance of long one yet for a week or so. Shorter intervals will be the order of the day for next 2 weeks. Then hopefully injury would have healed totally and i will have 6 weeks to grind out some long runs. That's the plan anyway.
Then it was off to the gym, cycle, strength and sauna. No silver back today thankfully so i was able to stretch out and relax.
Aiming to eat clean today, after couple of days of Ice Cream and Chocolate munching and take things well easy. Mid afternoon snooze, bit of writing, watch the cycling on TV for Olympic test event which interests me, as they train like beasts to get maximum performance over a period of years. I'm pretty sure Silk Cut doesn't play any role in their stringent programme?
And that's another week done. Only 13 miles this week, but 13 more than the past month. Although i have been writing the blog when injured i haven't felt like i was training. So i feel i am at least back with some kind of focus and plan, so I'm really happy about that.
I write this at 5pm on a Sunny Sunday and it feels like spring is on the way, and that means Marathon is in the air. There is always a masochistic love of training during the winter. Cold and dark morning and evening runs and although you don't like them, when you emerge from Winter you look back on them with affection and pride.
I haven't really got that after being injured but i hope now to get back in the head space of training and put myself in a position to get a good time. Hopefully remain injury free and add to the whopping £30 i have raised for Action on Addiction so far.
Have lovely week peoples. My aim this week? 3 short sharp quality runs, 1 interval bastard workout, 2 bikram stretches and injury free please God.
Until the morrow le bloggers
xx
Now I kow this may sound a bit weird but have you tried thoses little magnets for your injury. They look like a little corn plaster and have a tiny magnet in the middle of them, you just stick them around your injury.they did wonders for me when I had a back injury and currently wearing one on my ankle as been aching after my last 2 long runs, now the pain has gone! Now it all may be just hocus pocus but you have only £7 to loose. Get them from boots hidden around the copper bracelets and deep heat;)
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