Sunfeast 10k, 36 Minutes and a 300 meter track

Out of great volume of literature and training plans available on the internet, I picked up a plan from http://www.time-to-run.com/ for the Sunfeast 10k. This plan helps me race once in 18 days and thus helps me monitor my progress consistently. Running is nothing but goal setting, strategizing and achieving the set objectives that are often time-based. The idea is to couple the 10k training with circuit training to improve strength. The 10k is one of the best races simply because it couples the strength of a sprinter and the endurance of a marathoner. It also acts as an accurate way to guesstimate your marathon speed and personally for me, it gives me a break from the long and often lonely Sunday marathon runs. The race also is often over within 45 minutes and you don’t really have to spend 4 hours on your feet.

Another training strategy I am adapting is to start my daily runs no earlier than 7 am to simulate the actual race day experience. Luckily, I found a 300 meter track close to home, where I can do my speed workouts although a 300 meter track feels weird. Most tracks are 400 meter long. I will be starting yoga, dynamic stretching and some strengthening to stay injury free.

Time-to-run.com has several schedules. I am dividing my training into 4 parts. The first 15 days, I’ll be training for the sub 45 min, next 30 days for the sub 40 and the last 15 days for the sub 35 min. The aim to crack this race in 36 minutes.

Auroville Half Mary

The Auroville half mary is coming up on Feb 16 and 37 folks + from Chennai runners are planning to participate in the event.

I have not been training for this event exclusively. The main problem is I cannot motivate myself to wake up early in the morning just to run. Most nights are spent watching oscar nominations from a pirated cd hub that I discovered close to home.

However, I put in 1 hour runs in the evenings after work and spend 20 minutes stretching/strengthening after. So, despite not training exclusively for the event, I am putting in my speed work, lsd's and the required mileage everyday. I also maintain a healthy diet intake with some recessions once a week where I consume about 5 litres of beer in less than 2 and a half hours. I call this living a balanced lifestyle.

The plan this week is to get a two hour run this evening, a 40 minute run tomorrow morning and another 2 hour run on saturday. The boys are coming down on saturday night and i would not recover from that high intensity speed workout with a combination of LSD before sunday evening. Most sunday morning will be spent toggling between espn, star sports, ss music and discovery channel with spurts of passing out on my couch.

Experimenting Cross-Fit

As a part of my goal to get faster this year, I did a 6*880 mts last evening with an average speed of 3:20 for each lap of 880 mts. The workout started with a 15 minute warm-up run and ended with a 15 minute warm-down session. It took me about an hour and fifteen minutes to finish the entire session along with adequate stretching. I was quite happy with my work-out until I felt like throwing up this morning.

This morning began with me reaching Sandy's house at 6:20 am and we went around looking for a ground to practice. After not being allowed into two tracks for various reasons ranging from a police parade to compulsary membership, we decided to go to the neighbouring Pachiappas. The session was decided while doing our usual warm-up. It was 25 push-ups, 25 sit-ups, 25 pull-ups followed up by a 300 mt full out sprint. Sounds easy right? Now multiply the whole thing by 5 i.e. (push-ups, 25 sit-ups, 25 pull-ups followed up by a 300 mt full out sprint)*5. Let me add another level of difficulty to this. No breaks between each set. The workout was pretty intense and despite some cheating we got it done in 37 minutes.

Plain vanilla running does not help you improve your pace. Road running is similar to playing basketball on a cement court. Your jump improves for the first 3-4 years then its starts to decrease. Thats why you see most Indian basketballers peak when they are 20. After that its all downhill.

If you have been following this blog regularly, I must remind you that the first four months of last year, I only trained on a track until the Bangalore midnight marathon. Everyday was a 5k but at a maximum pace. My pace around the Bangalore marathon was quite amazing and I was also able to perform decently in the race.

Going to an urban yuppie gym is too boring. Cross-fit and circuits are the answer to build in explosions in your runs.

Finally, for those of you who think running is hard and have'nt tried it yet, let me just reiterate what Michaiel Jordan said - "I can't except not tryin".