« A varied week | Main | Hill running »
Training at altitude and at other places along the way…
By Chris | January 17, 2008
Unlike Paul who spent most of December 07 roaming the Himalaya’s, last week I spent 7 days in Davos, Switzerland participating in a winter fitness training camp. This little trip came about because last year I discovered that running training does not necessarily mean more of the same.
Prior to last year my race preparations consisted of running further more often, which sometimes included back to back running. This where you run say 17-25 miles on a Saturday then run 12 miles on the Sunday, the idea being that your legs get used to the pain! Last year though the light dawned. It dawned at my first taste of a spring warm weather training camp in the Algarve. Here we ran to a structure; 8AM 5-6 gentle miles both on and off road before breakfast. 3.30PM Yoga or stretching prior to some track work and cross-country hill loops. Here I came across words such as time trials, strides, thresholds, Kenyan hills, recovery runs, easy runs etc. This was a new language to me and with came the realisation that I had never actually ‘trained’ for running, let alone train for races. Wow! Anyway, to cut a long story short, following this revelation, I decided to invest in some personal coaching which led me to another, this time Autumn, warm weather training camp in Provence, a 4-day international challenge in Cyprus at the end of November and then on to the winter training camp in Switzerland. See how it goes? Get the bug, spend your money. Or as they say in Bali ‘No money, no honey’. Oh no, sorry, that’s for another type of activity altogether.
So my training now consists of following a professionally prepared weekly schedule that includes all those funny words above, gym work and now altitude training using cross-country skiing, snow shoeing and Nordic walking to improve my fitness. The underlying philosophy of this training is, by the way, the belief that to improve your game, you need to improve the quality of your training, not just run more of the same.
It remains to be seen… on the 16 Feb 08 I guess.
Topics: Chris | Comments Off
Comments are closed.