Friday 16 March 2012

Some warm weather training in Lanzarote


I have just returned from 10 days warm weather training at Club La Santa on the island of Lanzarote. I was part of a group of 100 members of the Serpentine Running Club who'd gone to Lanzarote for some swim, bike and run training. We take club coaches across each discipline and this helps encourage everybody to train together, adds structure to the week and can provide athletes with various training techniques/sessions that they can bring back to the UK.

My personal aim for the week was not to use the additional time to pack in significantly more mileage, but to allow my body to recover completely after each session. This is something that I find difficult to include in London; trying to juggle 70 miles running, 20 kilometres swimming and some long hours, it often means that its the recovery/sleep gets the chop.

Below is the training that I completed in the last 7 days. In particular, the sessions and long Sunday went well, and I feel its given me the confidence to be able to realise my goal for the London Marathon. These have been:

The total run distance for the week was 81.5 miles and the total swim distance was 19.4k. While not too dissimilar to the sessions I have been doing in London, I have been able to supplement these with a fair amount of strength and conditioning work. I have a 30 minute routine that involves planks, lunges, squats, press-ups, sit-ups etc. with each exercise taking between 3-5 minutes. The load on each exercise is small, and I feel that the benefit from conditioning these relatively low utilised muscles is invaluable and a contributing factor to preventing injury.

Despite it being a relatively tough week, I am returning to the UK feeling refreshed and in a good mindset, first for the Eastleigh 10k on Sunday, then probably for a marathon paced effort at Reading Half, before hitting the taper into the London Marathon.

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