A Week Of Quality Training

After my appalling result at last week's Parkrun (by my usual standards) I decided to give myself a hypothetical kick up the arse and get back into serious training.  So, Tuesday morning I took myself off to Coldham's Common to re-start my interval training.  I decided to start by running six times two minute intervals, with a two minute resting recovery.  I did this whilst a group of footballers from Cambridge United were also using Coldham’s Common as their training ground.  I’d like to think that I was working far harder than they were.  For those into stats, my best mile pace for a 2 minute interval was 5’26”, and my worst was 5’49”, with an average of 5’39”.  This isn’t great, but it’s also not too shabby given that I was running on reasonably long grass.  I’ll have to see how much I can improve on this over the next few weeks.

Wednesday was the usual Sweaty Betty night, which gives me the opportunity for an easy running night whilst putting the girls through their paces.  This week I made the girls run five sets of 3 minute intervals.  During the course of the running club evening I ran a total of 5.2 miles.

Yesterday was kettlebell day.  I teach three classes on Thursday, and I try to make sure that I do at least half of each class.  I figure that this must give me a reasonable amount of cross training on my day off from running.

Today the weather has finally turned spring like, so I donned a pair of shorts and headed to Magog Down.  I decided to run a few laps around the perimeter of the Down.  Now this isn’t the Lake District or the Yorkshire Dales, but there is a bit of a slope to the Downs.  Each lap is approximately 2 miles and is rectangular shaped.  Starting at one corner, it is all downhill to the opposite corner and then it is pretty much all uphill again back to the start.  So it’s almost exactly 1 mile down, followed by 1 mile uphill.  I aimed for three laps of steady running.  The aim wasn’t to attack the hills but to just get round at a reasonably consistent pace.  The path was incredible muddy almost all the way around.  It was mostly thick, claggy, strength sapping mud, with the odd patch of wet, slippery, “I’m gonna make you land on your arse” mud.  All good fun and akin to a great bit of cross country running, which should be great for building strength in the legs.

Tomorrow I’ll be heading back to Parkrun to see if I can improve last weeks time by a few seconds.