Tuesday, 7 July 2015
Berlin Marathon: Running Conditioning PT
My fourth personal training session with Yasmine at 8am and as she put in her post-class email, it's amazing how the simplest exercises can sometimes be the hardest.
Walking lunges warmed up the glutes nicely and the lunges with an 8kg kettlebell lift made them burn like billyo straight afterwards. It's the combination of lifts, lunges and balancing that I find really testing.
My calfs were raised and my soleus muscles were teased before my introduction to the tippy-toe steps of ankling, all rounded off with some hop jumps - three times then holding on the tip toes on the third landing. I was teetering around like a doomed tightrope walker by the end of another enjoyable session.
Then there was a bonus: Yasmine had prepared a week-by-week long run schedule between now and the marathon on September 27. It looks great, similar to the Bupa one I've been using but with added value of target pace and negative splits.
If I can keep to a steady pace of nine minutes per mile I can get round Berlin in under four hours. Yasmine says that is very much achievable and I've got to start believing that too. Mind games.
The trick now is to figure out how I'm going to fit them all in to a summer of travelling and festival-going. This Sunday's 11-miler has already been replaced by my company-sponsored entry into the Great British 10k.
The 12-miler the following weekend should be fine but then I'm off to California for a fortnight. Jet lag and weather permitting I would love to do the half-marathon on July 26 around San Francisco, the 14-miler the following week around the rim of the Grand Canyon and the 15-miler in Yosemite before the flight home but that may be ambitious. I don't want to get eaten by a bear in Yosemite Valley.
I've found a decent-looking San Francisco route which traces part of their November half-marathon which I've downloaded to MapMyRun and a Google search suggests plenty of people have enjoyed the scenery of the Canyon and Yosemite with their trainers on and lived to tell the tale.
The fact that the Canyon is at high altitude fills me with trepidation but as Yasmine says, even if I simply power walk around the rim it will be a testing workout.
The 18/19 miler coincides with the Victorious Festival in Portsmouth so something will have to give. Like The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi, I'll simply have to discipline my body.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment