I love weekends!

I love weekends. It's the time when I pretend to be a 'real' athlete, a time when I push myself hard, relax hard, eat well and then reflect on the past week's activities and the journey so far. Its a time of personal challenge, reflection and reward.

With my new work arrangements now in full swing its obvious weekends will become even more special. And critical. I can see I will often be time poor during the working week so fully using my weekend time will be important to achieving my goals. I'll need to reflect on what needs to be done and what I need to do. Sounds like something to think about...... probably next weekend!!! :-)

Anyway, these rambling thoughts were prompted by the events of last weekend - it was a beauty! I woke up early on Saturday determined to complete a long run. I've done some good runs recently but with only 71 days till the Gold Coast Half Marathon it was time to benchmark my running/fitness situation. I knew I had gone too hard too early on recent road hikes (that's I call my long run/walks)so it was time to get smart and see what I could do. All the literature I've read has said to concentrate on time rather than distance; train yourself for how long the event will take you to complete then work on the distance. So my plan for the day was to run for 5 minutes, walk for 5 minutes over a two hour period. I was interested to see if I could maintain the effort over the long haul, and to see how much distance I covered. I thought it was a good achievable plan that would give me my current fitness position.

Well it was, and it did!! In 120 minutes I ran/walked 5 minutes alternate sections and covered a very pleasing 16.4kms. This is exciting. My eventual goal for the 21km 1/2 marathon is 2hrs 15min which is just over 9kph. Today I covered 75% of the distance at an average of 8.4kms (93.3% of target time) and I only ran for half the time!!!

All I need to do now is increase the time (i.e take it to 2hrs 15) then gradually increase the total amount of time I run. So there's the motivation for next weekend ; Increase the running time to 6 minutes, walk 4 then continue this small increase each weekend until I am running the whole way. (By the way, this is also the motivation during the week - do short runs of 6min run/4 min walk as preperation)

Back to last weekend- I was not tired at all when I finished the session, so I had a quick protein drink and a shower then went to my Mother-In-Laws for morning tea, alway lovely! Then as reward for all my recent good efforts, Shirl and I went clothes shopping at David Jones. I bought a pair of very smart looking moleskins, a pair of good jeans and 2 beautiful country-style shirts.

Its an awesome feeling to buy clothes that are seriously smaller than I've ever worn before e.g. medium in place of XXL!! and even better when the reflection in the mirror matches what's always been in my mind. A great reward!!!!

Still on a high and after a short rest, I went to the gym in the late afternoon for a hard 'Spin Tri'- After a long warm up on the rower I did 2 minutes flat out on the spin bike (heart rate in Zone 3, ~140bpm, Level 7, 100rpm) then a brisk 8 minutes on the treadmill (7.7kph at low Zone 2, ~125bpm.). Then repeated this for 30 minutes. Overall an average 123bpm over the half hour, not counting the 20 min easy row.

Afterwards I was exhausted, a little sick from Lactic Acid, and very very leg sore. But boy, was I proud of myself. And pleased. What a day - A brilliant two and half hours of hard exercise, and some rewards. Gotta love weekends!

On Sunday I did another hard 90 minutes of interval training similar to Saturday night. Again, tired but very pleased with myself.

Yep, I love weekends- how long to the next one??

More later, journey on
James