Optimal Life Fitness, for health, fitness and a new lifestyle outdoors.

It's that time of year again the London Marathon is only a matter of months away. Alot of you will have clients who have entered and you may have even entered yourself.

I have my own theories and ideas of how you should go about training for the marathon, but as yet they haven't fully been trialed or tested. However they have been partially tested by some of my clients with good results and they basically follow this framework:

1. 1 hill or interval session each week
2. 1 Fartlek (various speed session) each week
3. 1 longer run varying distances each week
4. 2-3 resistance training sessions each week (obviously including Olympic Lifting and Kettlebells!)

Most individuals when training for the marathon spend too much time weakly plodding around with poor posture and compounding poor running technique. This leads to pain, injury and a poor marathon running time. By sticking to one longer run each week and keeping the other sessions shorter and more intense: technique, strength, speed and fitness will improve whilst allowing the body more time to recover.

Anyway the meat of this entry and what you can take away from it is the following couple of ideas for some of your fartlek or interval sessions.

These sessions are known as 'Marathon Appreciation Sessions'. I got this idea off a client and friend. Basically they are farltek or interval sessions where you spend your work time running at or as close to the speed run by Haile Gebreselassie in World Record Marathon time.

On the 28th of September 2008 Haile Gebreselassie at the Berlin Marathon broke his own world record and recorded a time of 2hrs3mins and 59seconds. This is where the concept of the marathon appreciation session comes in. The idea is that you perform your intervals or work periods at the same speed as Haile! Now for a very small percentage of you this might be easy. For the most of us however this will prove extremely difficult.

Doing the maths: The World Record Time is 2;03:59, that is near enough to 124minutes. Now to convert the distance to an athletic track, 42.5km (42500m) divided by 400ms, this leaves us with a total of 106.25 (106 and a quarter laps) consecutive laps.

Basically Haile runs 106.25 consecutive 400ms at 70seconds per 400m!

In the 'Marathon Appreciation Sesssions' the aim is to run at this speed (70seconds per 400m) or as close to it as you can.

A start may be to (after an appropriate warm up) try multiple 400m sprints with 2 mins rest and see how close you can get to 70seconds. You may try 5*400ms with 2mins rest.

The next step is to put this into a continuous or Fartlek session. This is where you perform 1*400m at or close to 70seconds and 1*400m at a recovery pace (as slow/fast as you are comfortable) and repeat this as many times as you can. I'm doing 6 of these with my work sets ranging from between 1:12 and 1:19 (72, 79) - I haven't been timing my recovery sets but they are slow! I'm not a runner at all but I'm really enjoying these sessions- they are tough but enjoyable if you know what I mean ie, bring a bucket! Including a warm up and recovery lap I'm done in 30minutes.

There are other ways that you can appreciate Haile's achievements. You can try and hold his speed for 100m, 200m, 600ms or 1000ms. His marathon time works out to a 1000m run in 2mins and 54 seconds, I'm not sure if I could manage one 1km at this speed!

Let me know what you think and what results you and your clients have with this session if you give it a try. If you have any other ideas for sessions please share.

All the best

BJ

Labels: fartlek, intervals, marathon, run training

Regardless of your sport, physique or fitness ambition running/ sprinting hills (doesn't matter too much the type) are hugely beneficial for you getting fitter- faster!

Percy Cerrutty (a mad professor type) who trained Herb Elliot to 1mile and 1500m world records and gold medals was an advocate and even moved his home and where he trained his athletes to where hills were prolific. I was introduced to them by Paul Watson (former NRL club and Australian National Team strength

Kurnell Sand Hills, Sydney

and conditioning coach) who uses them as a weekly staple with all of his athletes. The Kurnell Sand Dunes are even given names: Main face, Mexican wave, K2, Fish bowl, Road to nowhere and other descriptive and often humerous names. Seb Coe's father thought hills were so beneficial he apparently used to get Seb to run the hills and he would meet him in a car at the top and drive him back down just so he could run up more!

Everybody from tennis players to marathon players, football and rugby players to office workers, and from dancers to boxers and wrestlers can and will benefit from running hills. Some of the reasons as to why running hills is so beneficial:

• increases anaerobic/ aerobic power


• improves running posture and technique


• improves strength and strength endurance


• improves ability to deal with lactic acid


• hugely metabolic= Fat burning!

As well as the benefits listed above, I'm a big fan as they achieve alot in a very little amount of time. For example I aim to get a hill session in at least once per week. Depending on the incline of the hill and the length I'll aim for between 5-10 sprints up the hills with walk or jog/bounce back recoveries. The hills can generally take between 30seconds and a minute. This whole session including a dyanmic warm up and a cool down to get rid of some of the lactic build up takes 20-25minutes tops. Talk about efficiencey!

Primrose Hill, London

Primrose Hill between 30-40 seconds of lung busting, heart pounding sprinting to the top! Give six a go and tell me how you feel. The views from the top and the satisfaction of getting there on the last one give you a real Rocky moment.

So go on you've heard about the benefits, go find a hill and sprint up it a couple of times.

London Hills: Primrose Hill, Parliament Hill, Greenwich, Muswell Hill, Little hill a the back of Finsbury Park track.

If you know of any other hills let us know!

Enjoy

BJ Rule

Labels: conditioning, fitness, hill sprints, intervals