Sunday, 3 August 2014

Week 1 - Thursday 31 Jul – Sprints



A few weeks ago Henry was off so me and Al went on an unsupervised run. All discipline went straight out the window, we didn’t do a proper warm up and no form drills or stretches. We went straight into sprinting the length of a field in the park. The idea was sprint down jog back ten times. I measure in later on Google maps (I hadn’t discovered the treasure trove of mapmyrun.com then) and it worked out as 100 metres even. So we sprinted a kilometre and jogged a kilometre.

It was such a good session I knew I had to incorporate it into the H&B plan but in keeping with pillar 2 I had to make it 25% harder at the start.

To do this I took a tip from one of the DCU trainers who delights in attacking the legs in class. I reasoned your leg muscles are barking at you at the end of the sprint, what if they were barking before the sprint even started?

I landed on the idea of doing a set of ten reps of exercises and then launch straight into the sprint. So I’d do 10 squat jumps and then leg it down the field, the jog back would be recovery time to get the breath back to normal then straight in again when I got to the top of the field.
I gave me legs one concession which, in hindsight was wise. Each alternating set would be core and not leg exercise. So jump squats x 10, sprint, crunches x 10, sprint etc.

As I was sprinting I sometimes felt I wasn’t pushing meself as hard as I could (no Al to set the punishing pace you see), when I felt like that I did seem to add an extra burst. When I finished I felt pretty good so I had the nagging doubt I didn’t push meself as hard as I should. Not so, when I went to jog back to the Sport centre for me Tabata I could barely move me legs?
I still decided to do an 8 minute core session instead of 4 so pretty good I thought.

I should add I had an unscheduled break in the middle when two dogs chased me. Proper little yappy bastard type dogs they were. The owner and her friend were very sorry so I popped over to them to show them there were no hard feelings and also to rub the dogs because I didn’t want this to keep up. The dogs were having none of it and as I jogged back for lap 5 they were yapping at me heels again. I let them get close then turned and jumped at them barking as loud as I could. The dogs made a sound I can only describe as Hwooourghh??? And legged it back, the two girls and meself were pissing ourselves laughing but it sorted the problem.

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