800M - The Jump Start

This week I have covered:

Sprinting: 9 x 100 m
Cycling: 255 km
Running: 4 km
Basketball: 2 hours (Shooting Practice only)
End Weight: 80.5 kg.

Obviously most of my time was spent on cycling. Starting Saturday I got on my bike and did 75km for the first time since the first week of January, before which I'd been doing a lot of exercise. At the start of the year I was just knocking on 80kg's by the middle of February I was pushing 82kg's. Which is close to a record weight for me (I think, I didn't weigh myself at all in Morrah St).

Furthermore my metabolism slowed down. When I first started drawing I could not sit still for more than 5 minutes. Now I can sit still for 3 hours at a pinch.

So this week was all about throwing caution to the wind, and sending my body the message I expected it to act like the elite piece of machinary it always has been.
And the week was full of surprises.

Surprise one was my first sprint session where I managed to do 6 x 100 meters. This actually means I managed to do 4 x 100 meter sprints, probably losing around a second each time. The last third of any sprint session is merely you pushing your body through the motions.

My experience with long distance running is that after you have run enough, stretches more or less become irrelevant. You are far better off spending the same amount of time putting your socks on properly to avoid blisters than stretching extensively to avoid injury in long distance high impact running. I find conditioning has far more to do with injury avoidance than stretches.

That said, I do believe in stretches when it comes to sprints, because you are ask your muscles to do things you don't ask them to do for weeks...months...years at a time. As such you want them to get as much advanced notice that something is up as possible. Plus I've always had shitty flexibility. I have tight hamstrings when give me a -20 in the sit and reach test.

Today I did my second sprint session of the week which took the form of 4 x 100m except the last 100 was a non event, I petered out and left clutching my hamstring after 50 m. It was just knotted.

Surprise number 2. My gung ho attitude has failed to result in injury thus far.

I know as a cross country runner you can't get faster unless you do the fast running, that is - sprints. lacking a team to do continuous relay's with, I instead am just doing lots of near approimations of distance on a football field.

I will get down to Melb Uni ath track at some point to do proper controlled sprinting, but right now it is about getting the muscle development of my propulsion sets.

Here is the break down of my regeme so far good to have on paper because in my head it is a mess.

Cycling - Build Cardio and resperatory, aswell as developing injury prevention muscles in my knees, quads and butt. Endurance riding at 20 kph + speeds, minimum 75 km as set this week. Bit of fat burning too. Low impact sport.

Sprinting - Aneroebic fitness, develop strength and speed. Engage arms, core and back muscles. Looking to increase stamina through sets of high intensity running.

Running - Fat Burning, Aerobic endurance. I have only done 3km this week of running. It was hilly and felt surprisingly good. My heart holds up because of the cycling I guess, and my legs aren't as super tight as when I first started training for the half marathon a year ago. This year I intend to do the marathon, so I will begin now building up to half marathon distances. From my place this means to fed square and back.

I will be happy though if in the interim I do mostly 8-10km runs. I have an oviod gut at the moment that is probably 5kg's my legs don't need to carry 800m so the aim is to get rid of this.

Basketball - Anerobic, Aerobic endurance, fat buring, upper body and core strength building. Jordan had to rebuild his body on his return from baseball, he did it in the gym. Not being so dramatic I plan to just do it by playing basketball. I'm thinking of trying to target full court games. 40 minutes of running 30 m in either direction more or less continuously is the stamina I need. Even just running about a half court though gives plenty to worry about. It also gets me lifting arms and heaving a small weight repititiously and the act of boxing out and jumping for rebounds is also pretty intense. I remember when I first played again 3 years ago being amazed at how hard on the body it was, often pulling up sore for 3-4 days afterwards. If I play basketball once a week I'm happy. I can always do that old chestnut game - suicide to improve agility too.

At any rate I picked up from last weeks exercise profile:

Cycling 10km

To the regime above. Which I count as a jump start, I might drop back a bit next week, down the cycling and up the running, but long term I want to be pulling twice all those numbers above. Switching to sets of 8 x 100 to 4 x 200 to 2 x 400 to 1 x 800 and so on.

My theory is if I can get my 100m decent and my fitness up to marathon level it is then the relatively simple process of slamming the two events together to create critical mass.

Please don't point out how erroneous this assumption is.