Had the day off yesterday, watched worlds for most of it.
Today was:
10x20m on grass
Felt great. The volume is just good enough that its pushing my capacity, but the grass is ensuring that I don’t fry my CNS in between days.
I can already feel this type of work is greatly beneficial. I’m getting winded and fatigued but its mostly muscular. My muscular fatigue has typically weakened my high intensity work because I have a tough time handling low volumes and long recoveries.
Tempo work tomorrow and then maybe some hills on friday.
Workout today:
3x4x60m with 20m intensity limit so 20+maintain to 60m on grass
This is the first of what I’d call a core workout in my GPP. I’ve never done anything like it before. This was truly an awesome workout. This is real base work.
The grass and intensity limit work perfectly, I’m just barely taping into my CNS, running just enough to have an effect on the CNS but not too much as to wipe me out completely. All fatigue was local. Kept recoveries at around 2 minutes but didnt follow it strictly. Took Charlie’s advice and didn’t try to fight my strides a let the frequency and rhythm occur naturally.
We were a little group of us training, me and 3 canada games athletes,1 discuss and 2 shot putters. On a side note, the CIS shot put record holder showed up and threw a bit, he was thinking of making a come back. Him and my weights coach were old training partners.
There is a hurricane headed our way for sunday so that might mess up my training schedule a bit.
I’m probably going to do some tempo tomorrow as I’ll probably be quite sore. Take sunday off and then hopefully run either monday or tuesday again depending on how bad the hurricane hits.
Bit more than 5 minutes between sets, not strictly monitored. It was pretty liberal.
I felt good throughout. Felt close to recovered by the time I was ready to go.
High volume of lower intensity work, but remember that 20m hard then maintain is still very intense. At this point i’m mostly trying to condition the muscles to be prepared for sprinting. So when I go to really intense stuff, they’ll be good to go.
Today I did:
5x12 med ball lunges
10x overhead med ball toss
10x med ball jumps (pretty much just messing around dunking the 3kg med ball)
4x150m walk back recovery. Just testing out the 150’s with walk back to see how much difficulty I would have with them. One set was enough.
Wednesday:
4x12 med ball lunges
3x10 kneeling jumps squats with 25lbs
3x10 deep squat hops 25lbs
2x4x100m tempo
Been having a weird issue with my acceleration mechanics since I did hills yesterday. I think I’ve realized a better acceleration position while running hills. It happened on tuesday, mid way through my hill session I realized that I was hitting a certain position half way through my hill runs naturally. I could then do my full runs with this technique when I applied it.
Its a strange feeling, I feel like i’m leading more with my torso falling forward and my legs pushing out further behind me. From what I know of acceleration, I think this is a desirable position, it certainly feels like im pushing an object. Instead, my old technique felt more like my torso was sitting back and trying to reach forward and low while my legs stretched out and reached.
I can’t really judge from feeling, I’m going to try and get some video footage and see what it looks like. For all I know, it looks rediculous. This may be a significant technical change that hills has given me the proper feel for. My last major technical change resulted in a 10.9-10.7 change.
Had 2 days off since the last training session. I’m starting my planned workouts starting today, the past 2 weeks I was mostly unstructured easing in type of work.
Today: 3x4x60m with 20m intensity limit on grass.
4x8 front squat
3x5 hamstring curls
All this work on grass, my hamstrings are getting incredibly stiff. Within a week there is a noticeable stiffness difference and a whole bunch of soreness to accompany that. I’m going to spend some quality time on my softball tomorrow loosening up some tight spots.
2x4x100m tempo walkback recovery
Actually have a training partner now and this is much easier with the added distraction. 3x4x100 wont be bad at all.
ab circuit with the medball
Focused on stretching after the workout today. My hamstrings are incredibly tight from the grass running, so I dug in with a softball and loosened it all up, feels great now. I’ll have one more softball session tonight along with a hot bath and some magnesium and calcium.
Sort of a messed up workout today. Wanted to try out the new sled today. Its a tire with a rope and we were on the grass. Well because of the attachment of the rope(low to the ground) and the bumpy grass the tire was flying everywhere, so mechanics were incredibly difficult to keep consistent. We did 2 of those before putting a shot put inside the tire in order to keep it from flying around, well that made it much too heavy, too much friction, and form was impossible to maintain.
Today:
2x20m sled that flew around
2x20m with sled that was way too heavy
3x4x40m grass hills (so much better)
Had a training partner, ex football player, 7.2x 60m runner last year, great power but lacking in the top speed department. I contrast the intensity from these hill runs with that of the intensity of my last hill session alone. There is a pretty big difference psychologically since we were running them together. The first set I ran them pretty much equal pace, maybe I was slightly faster(he would start us I would make up the difference). Second set I started getting a decent lead on him by 40, and on the last set I was gone. I say this is psychological because I wasn’t increasing my effort on purpose it just sort of happened. When I’m alone I’m usually running them at the initial pace, I’m guessing this is the difference between my 95%and 99%.
3x5 power cleans- not particularly heavy and I was supposed to do 4 sets but I was so wiped I said screw it.
Today:
supposed to do 3x4x40m hills but cut it at 2x4x40m. I was wiped with absolutely no energy left. I think I caught my girlfriend’s cold and its zapping my energy.
In the gym I did 2x8 stiff legged dead lifts, again it was supposed to be 4x8 but I cut it short.
Next two days are off, hopefully I shake this cold in that time and then back on the grass on sunday.
Solid workout today, just getting over that damn cold I had.
3x4x20m tire sprints (roughly 20lbs) +2x20m unresisted all on grass in spikes
We worked out the kinks of the tire, its a little bumpy at times and looses resistance once in a while but it was pretty solid for the entire workout.
The first set felt odd, like I was fighting to get into a good drive position. On the second set I relaxed and told myself not to fight for frequency but to get into a rhythm and it worked very well.