Good news! Not injured yet.
This is the first update for our Daft 5k January Challenge – you may want to go back and read our intro first!
Jamie: My high volume & high risk strategy appears to be going well, although I’ve missed one training session (long bike) and the distance is a little short. But on the upside, I’ve hit 40km of running in the first week and fit in three quality sessions: tempo, speed and a bike HIIT. These sessions are essential this month. Normal training blocks are 10-12 weeks, so three weeks of training and a week of tapering isn’t likely going to be enough to beat my PBs without pushing it a bit on the speed front.
First learn: know what core work and appropriate stretching is before writing it in your training plan. Sounds like a great idea and advised by many, but I wasn’t exactly sure what composed a good stretch workout. A few youtube videos later gave me a few ideas, but definitely something to work on. Second: I’ll be looking to incorporate some drills a couple of times a week before my easy runs. Good for stretching and warming up apparently. I almost feel like I know what I’m doing?
A lot of my running this week has been on Zwift, which definitely isn’t because of the weather and perhaps waking up a bit late. It’s made pounding the treadmill running a bit more interesting and we even popped on for a brief moment to “assist” Eddie Izzard on her way to completing her ninth marathon in nine days. Fair play to her! It was mildly amusing to see her Zwift avatar with a big huddle of other runners following along. The odd cyclist stopped by for a gawp as well. With another 22 marathons to go in January, it really puts our 5k shenanigans in perspective. Perhaps we need to be more daft??
Alex: Intervals. So many intervals.
I stuck somewhat to my plan – doing a tempo run and 2 interval sessions. It struck me whilst running one of the tempos that, at these paces, they’re actually just an interval training session in disguise. So, essentially I’m just doing 3 interval sessions a week – who knows, perhaps that’ll work?
After an initial tempo run on Monday I was looking forward to a bit more of a varied workout before my straight-up 6x2min interval session on Wednesday. Loading up the first 45min indoor cycle workout on Apple Fitness+ I was welcomed with ‘Hi Team, today we’re going to be doing 20 intervals’. Oh well… suck it up and focus on getting through them I suppose!
For Thursday’s bike session I purposefully selected a hill session. Again this turned out to be an interval session (just on a higher resistance). Ok, so 5 interval sessions a week must be the secret to success, eh?
Friday was my first frosty run in a while! The 3×1-2-3 intervals weren’t too bad – mostly avoiding slipping was the main concern. One deviation from my thoroughly researched workout plan was the progressive… something… distance? (the training where you just run basically). Rather than adding on an additional 5k to each run session I have just been rounding the session up to 10k – because that’s probably enough, eh?
As per my summer exploits I’m taking the weekends off. Woohoo!
Daft Runners 