Following on from the story yesterday, and the difficult path the lady in question initially went on, and I am talking about strictly following the ludicrous book called “run a marathon in 26 weeks”.
It should have been retitled “run a marathon in 26 weeks as long as you can put up with severe blisters, a wrecked back, very painful knees and the most miserable time of your life”, but maybe that title is too long, but still the truth for individuals living in the real world!
Back to the story, we got the lady on a twice a week, Monday and Thursday running schedule, with a lot of walk/run sessions to start with. She did the usual inside workout on Tuesday and Friday, the rest were rest days.
Then 15 yard runs soon became 30, 60, 120 yards run, and the rest period of 40 yards soon become down to 10 to 15. Then the elation of being able to run for 5 minutes without stopping was almost uncontrollable. The lady wanted to run different days and more days I mean by that, but we resisted that urge and get the running to Monday and Thursday.
As soon as she was able to run 15 minutes in one go (which took around 6 weeks), we did then start splitting the runs up.
On Monday we kept to the endurance runs meaning our aim now was to be able for 30 minutes, which we got to in the next 6 weeks.
The Thursday session became an interval session, meaning using lampposts for markers. You run for one lamppost, walk for the next, run for the next, walk for the next and so on. You soon become incredibly out of breath with this way of training, but it gets your lung capacity going unlike anything else. The goal eventually is to sprint for one lamppost, jog the next, sprint the next, jog the next and so on.
This way of running brings an awful lot of results very quickly, but is difficult and your sessions wont last very long to begin with. With practice though, you will be surprised how your distance covered lengthens and your recovery improves.
So it was endurance on Monday, the interval session would be on Thursday and its at this exact stage that this lady was really motoring and rapidly improving.
More tomorrow on how she improved greatly from here!
