Muscle memory

I’ve now had three solid days of training in a row. It’s not been easy; our youngest is cutting another tooth so sleep remains interrupted but I’ve committed and delivered. I mentioned my swim set on Monday which was great, I was even more impressed with my commitment yesterday.

I had one hour free all day at work that wasn’t full of meetings. I grabbed the opportunity and headed to the gym and did my new favourite treadmill session that I posted about previously. I smashed out a high intensity, high quality run session in 30mins with a little bit of timing for some stretching, a shower and then straight back into my next meeting, Right proud for taking the chance rather than saying it was too hard.

Today I pushed out another solid swim set and really feel the muscle memory coming back, both in terms of fitness and ability but also in physical sense; my arms, shoulders and torso appear to have bounced back in appearance as well!

Today’s sessions:

Swim today was just over 2km; standard 500m warm up set (150m/100m/50m followed by 4x50m drills). This was followed by 12x50m sprints leaving on the 1:05 breathing on the right side on the way out and the left side on the way in. These were hard, I finished all reps between 49 and 53 seconds but that rest period went so quick!

Finished off with a reverse ladder 400/300/200/100 leaving on 2:05/100m. All in all 2.1km done in 48 minutes. Challenge is now do I run tomorrow or take a rest day so as not to over do it – so hard when I finally have some momentum!

A treadmill session that almost killed me – but not of boredom

I regularly hear people complaining that if they ran on a treadmill they’d die of boredom. Today I did a treadmill that had me fearing for my life, but was certainly not boring!

It was a wet and cold Melbourne day today and I didn’t feel like a run in the rain during lunch at work so instead headed to the gym with a colleague who said he was going to try out a new treadmill interval workout he’d had a friend tell him of.

I was mindful that I didn’t want to over do things and considered instead doing a stock standard easy run but in the end curiosity got the better of me. Essentially the work out consisted of two minute intervals starting with two minutes at 12k/hr followed by two minutes at 13km/hr, 14km/hr, 15km/hr and a final two minutes at 16km/hr before dropping back down to 12km/hr and starting it all over again for a total of three sets or 30 minutes.

It damn near killed me.

My mate and I did it at 1% gradient and we got to the 15km/hr interval in the second set before we had to pause for a minute and stop our breakfast from surfacing. We then pushed through the second 16km/hr interval and got back up to 14km/hr before needing a minute break in between the next two sets. It was a real high intensity workout and felt great afterwards for doing it.

I think the fact that the intervals are only two minutes means your mind can’t wander and you need to stay alert, plus the speed meant that you were always engaged. Those paces were challenging for me but clearly you can increase or decrease speed to your skill level.

I still prefer getting outside to run whenever I can but this was one treadmill session I truly enjoyed. Let me know how you go!