Most Training Plans will have a "Peak Week" two or three weeks before the race week. Peak Week is where you will have the highest weekly mileage of all the training weeks. This should set you up properly to tackle the distance on race day.
My peak week was truly intense. On July 3rd I officially started taining with my personal trainer, Dom the trainer! (aka. hubby). He's put me on a 8 week training plan where I will be working with free weights, barbells & body weight three times a week with the aim of making me more toned, stronger and more powerful than before. I have never in my life lifted 32k barbells or loaded my muscles with 47k weights but it was nice to see that I could do it. In Dom's own words - "You're stronger than you give yourself credit for" :-) :-)
As for my runs, I got in an intense tempo run on Tuesday, an easy short run on Thursday and my long time favourite, beach-to-beach-to-beach lsd run on Saturday.
Thursday's run was a cross between a Tempo run and interval training. I did 1k x 4 at goal pace of 5'55" (This is the pace I need to run at in order to complete a 10K under 60 minutes - thats the goal for this year). Running 1k at this pace is uncomfortable to say the least. It is high effort for me and I am really pushing it. Not an effort that I can sustain for even 2k let alone 10k. Which goes to show how far away I am still from my goal.
I think I've confessed before to my not knowing cycling and also about my attempts at learning it afresh earlier last year. I've had a cycle with me for the past year - and some more - and now and again, I take it out to try and improve my skills. I cycled for 20 minutes on Thursday (very wobbly but managed to stay cycle-borne) and then did a short easy jog for another 10 minutes. Though it was a light workout, it left me feeling very pleased with myself.
On Saturday, I did my beach-to-beach-to-beach run. I had run this route last year once when I had to meet a friend of mine at Thiruvanmyur for breakfast. Now another friend of mine lives in Thiruvanmyur and I invited myself over for breakfast on Sunday just so I could run this route again... :-) I was very sweetly obliged and my smelly, sweaty, post-19.5k-self was tolerated and fed a hearty South Indian breakfast. (Thank You Priyanka!).
Sunday turned out to be a bonus work-out-all-day day. My running group had their annual running event - The Nitros Running Festival at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium and all of us were volunteering. Apart from actually running, there was a lot of running around, walking and heavy lifting to do all day (5:00 am to 9:00 pm) which was a terrific workout in itself.
I was pretty pooped at the end of the week and took Monday off (no workouts at all). Which is just as well since this week is taper week. I'll be reducing my running volume and recovering so I can be fresh and pumped for race day.
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