Dreamweaver Consulting

Still a week behind I’m afraid, hoping to catch up soon!

So the previous 6 weeks have been about building a solid foundation to work from, safely… Week 7 starts the sharpening section, which meant this was the week I encountered my first Yasso 800! Unsurprisingly I’d never heard of these before, but a bit of googling brought forward what I needed to know.  Yasso 800s are named after Bart Yasso, who devised his own marathon training plan which included running 800m fast, with a slower recovery 400m straight after, then repeating this up to 10 times: the theory being that whatever you get the 800m down to, once you can do the 10 repetitions (eg: 3 minutes each), then that would show what you should finish your marathon in (3 min 800 = 3 hour marathon, 4 min 800 = 4 hour marathon and so on…). For his website, please click here.

Now I didn’t think that sounded too bad… until I had to try it! Treadmill time… easy to count the distance… and worked out roughly what I thought I could push it to with more of a “jog” pace recovery. Warm up of a mile/1600m followed by 800m at 11.3 pace then dropping to a 9.0 pace for the 400m recovery (the gym treadmills are at km, which means I’m always having to google & convert my overall distance into miles for my running app) followed by a mile/1600m cool down.  Well the first two I thought were ok, then I hit the third one and felt a bit sick.  Hitting the fourth one… legs decided that they were tired and wanted to turn to jelly. But it got done.

Since it was Easter Friday and no work, I also figured I’d try to push it a bit and do a second one that day after driving to my local gym.  Big mistake.  Got the third one done and then died. Not the thing to do when you’re knackered, not getting enough sleep and living mainly on adrenaline! When I say died, I mean felt sick, legs turned to jelly and absolutely could not push through that psychological (and physical barrier). As it turns out, I think these are only meant to be done once a week anyway (oops – what was that I said about pushing it ;))!

Overall though, happy days… I not only ran for another 70 minutes (outdoors) but did my longest distance (7.91 miles) and the fastest time… I finally got my average under a 9 minute mile. Very very happy about that!

So training for Week 7 included:

***lunchtime treadmill run of 46.21 minutes x 1

***PT session with Activate Plus PT x 1

***lunchtime treadmill run of 30 minutes x 1

***treadmill run of 43.39 minutes x 1

***weekend run of 70 minutes x 1

Total overall running: 20.76 miles / 190 minutes (3 hours 10 minutes)

No yoga or karate this week due to appointments and Easter and no chance to fit them in elsewhere. I guess when you’re stretched to full capacity, this is one of the problems you can encounter – a lack of flexibility in changing things around! Oh yeah, also had to hand in a food diary at the PT session… it’s one thing to know you have a *cough, splutter* sweet tooth, but quite another to actually have to hand over a piece of paper with everything written down, including just how much sugar you chuck into your tea and coffee! I slunk out of there pretty quick at that point *grin*.

Links:

My fundraising page: MichellePayne13

Street Child

Sierra Leone Marathon 2013

© 2013 Michelle Payne