Dolls Point
It’s great to have a race like Dolls Point in your backyard. 8am start. Close to home. Cheap entry.
Racing is training has never been summed up better than this race.
We had 5 of the crew race. James Bonamy and Paul Humphreys in the 10k. Jarrod Crump, Greg Attwells and Scottie Allison in the Half Marathon.
Bonners and Humps chose the 10 as a great chance for a race with mates but didnt put their full force into it. Both athletes actually took a wrong turn and made it a 10.6 just for fun … Bonners went 44:29 and Humps went 58:29.
The Half mara crew were keen for a good old rip in whilst holding training load high. Crumpy lead the way all day with a strong finishing 1:31:15. Greggy wasn’t far behind him in 1:31:38. Scottie also not far back in 1:35:54. All three athletes kocking PB’s out.
Two Blocks
I put this one up on Insta the other day but it’s worth repeating here as it was really well received ….
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A week isn’t a week in athlete preparation. The sports scientists calls them microcycles. In fact but, my coaching week contains 2 blocks or microcycles.
The first block is Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, where we get to work the quality sessions. Intensity and intervals. Intensity and intervals. Get stronger by using interval training over your race pace. Main things to consider on an individual basis are the number and length of intervals and how hard to go as well as how long the rest interval is.
The second block is the endurance block. Typically done on Saturday and Sunday. Two days of working on aerobic and muscular endurance with the simple tool of session duration as the baseline. Once we hit the specific preparation block we can do some race pace specific blocks in these, but for the most part we are developing durability via volume under LT1.
That accounts for 5 days and of course misses Monday and Friday. They are my recovery periods between work blocks. Swimming and easy rides. Sometimes even easy runs. But with the goal of recovery before the next block.
So next time you think you want a green week, pare it back to looking for a green intensity block or a green endurance block. Judge each block separately as they have different outcomes.