Pushups Week 1/Day 1

Week 1 of the One Hundred Pushups challenge involves 5 sets of pushups with 60 seconds of rest in between each set.

The sets were 10/10/8/6/max*. The max set had to be at least 7.

Pretty easy with the rest period in between. Did 26 in my max set before the jelly arms arrived and everything went to custard. That's enough dessert metaphors.

I have to confess to a small amount of conditioning on this excercise. At hapkido class, which I do twice a week, we have a set of 20 pushups as part of the warmup. Hapkido is a martial art originating in South Korea.

The challenge will get harder I'm sure - the next one is on Wednesday - but so far so good. Quite fun he says while the going is easy.

Push The Limits

Half the fun of blogging is giving titles to the posts - this one is from a song by the group Enigma.

Relaxed run today on a new route along Mt. Eden Road and back Dominion. I call it "Mt. Eden City Fringe Loop". The terrain was rolling and took in the top section of the North Western Cycleway.

Run was good - 9.5km in 43:42. This is 4:35 min/km pace which was a bit suprising as I "felt" the pace was quite relaxed. Maybe I went quick on the downhills.

Noticed the traffic was starting to build up near Eden Park with the All Blacks game against England tonight. Dominion Road is always congested when there is a game there.

Over on the excellent "Andrew is Getting Fit" blog I noticed that Andrew had posted about the Hundred Pushup challenge. Apparently

If you're serious about increasing your strength, follow this six week training program and you'll soon be on your way to completing 100 consecutive push ups!

Cross training is a good thing so I'm going to give it a go starting Monday. Did the initial test and managed 34 good form push ups which was pretty good but a ways to go to eek out 100. Lets see if I can get there in 6 weeks.

Allegretto

This means "Moderately Fast" in music tempo and describes my two training runs in Whakatane this week.

Wednesday - 13.79km Town Loop with the glorious river side track.
Did this in 1:03:32 which is a 4:35 min/km pace.

Thursday (this morning which was cold and foggy) - 5.95km Small town loop.
Did this in 26:20 which is a 4:24 min/km pace.

I was listening to Trance 2008 Vocal Sessions on both runs. Not sure if its fitness on the improve or the music but quite pleased with the training. It was run at a "steady" pace but I guess that is countered by the fact these runs are pretty flat.

Fellow blogger Bruce asks which way up Mt. Eden I go on my hill training run. I've been going up the road from the Mt. Eden road side which is a long steady climb. The straight up approach would probably sort the men from the boys I reckon ...

Run like you stole it

One of my work colleagues is a South African - lets call him Mr. W - and he has done a swag of marathons and ultras over in darkest Africa. Crazy.

Last week he gave me some advice to mix up my running. Flats and hills, long runs, fast runs, fun runs. Well you get the picture. I guess it keeps the body guessing a bit and not adapting to one steady pace.

So keeping Mr. W's sage advice in mind I did a hill run on Saturday and a very short sharp tempo run today. I have to say the contrast was quite interesting.

Saturday - 13.65km including Mt. Eden summit climb - 1:07:59 @ 4:58 min/km. There are some killer hills here. St. Albans, Grange, Mt. Eden.

Sunday - 2.65km - 10:47 @ 4:03 min/km. Felt faster but legs a little heavy after yesterday. Still it's great to put the foot down knowing it was only for a short distance.

Quite fun to run like you stole it.

The July Race - North Shore City Half

Kathy posted a comment wondering which half Marathon I was training for in July.

Well it is the North Shore City Half (also known as Run Auckland Race 6). There is also a course map here.

I don't live on the shore so the area is not that familiar to me it looks relatively flat. As Jon Ackland says in his Half Marathon book I'm not going to get sucked into predicting a time for my first go at this distance. Just putting some training in and the race will take care of itself. I don't know about crushing the event but hey let's just see what happens :)

In two weeks time I have my last 10km in Race 5 of the Run Auckland Series. This is a circuit around the zoo and western springs. My little sister T is doing her second 10km then as well. Should be fun!

"That's good running, mate!"

On location this week at Whakatane.

Managed to fit in two runs (a 13.8km run around town on Tuesday at dusk and a 6km shorter version the night after). The first of which got me the above verbal pat on the back from a local runner. More on that later in this post.

Firstly here is a picture of Whakatane river taken at dawn on my cell phone camera. It is looking East out towards the heads and the wharf. My Whakatane runs start on the other end of the wharf and follows the track along the river. It is a nice stretch with the boats and water to run past.



My Tuesday night run was a newer route I had mapped out the night before.



Near the start I was saw another running start the track and I was keeping pace with them but at the start of the grass track (perhaps around 500m into the route) he took off on what must have been about 4 min/km pace. The grass track is really two terraced sections. I took the low road as such and had a little mini-race with the local :). At around the 3km point in my route the terraces converge before the road and bridge. At this point the runner says to me "that's good running mate!" and turns around and hares off back along the river.

Feeling pretty chuffed by the compliment I then realised that the fast pace is hard work and essentially plodded around the rest of the course. I guess that is a lesson in racing about not starting to quickly as it is hard to recover from it (it says that in the half marathon book alluded to in the last post).

The rest of the run was fairly sedate but I passed my new running friend at the 11km and got a friendly wave. Whakatane is a friendly town but in general when you pass a fellow runner a nod, smile, or "gidday" is normal. It's an exercise fraternity of sorts.

The run the following day was a route I had done previously. I tried a bit of ad-hoc intervals which basically meant 3 or 4 all out sprints for 100m intervals interspersed along the run. Wasn't very scientific but it was quite hard work and the subsequent recovery periods were slower than usual. After some research I will be incorporating some better thought out interval training into my running program.

All in all a good trip down to Whakatane this week.

Reading and Races

Reading

Instead of going running today I took a rest day and went to the local library. Lucked out and found a book called "Complete or Compete" by Jon Ackland. Needless to say have borrowed it. As well as some training programs there seems to be a wealth of useful info in here. Will post a review once I've finished reading it.



Races

In terms of races post Run Auckland 2008 am thinking of one of these two - in order to keep the training up especially into the warmer weather. Need to hurry up and start saving so I can enter :)

Auckland Half Marathon - http://www.aucklandmarathon.co.nz (2 November 2008)
ADRA Charity Half Marathon - http://www.adracharityrun.org/info.htm (30 November 2008)

On location in Whakatane for a couple of days this week and have a couple of good training runs lined up.