Juneathon day 8: run 5.41km time 31min
Today’s Guardian carried a rather alarmist story about the dangers of ultra marathon running. One of the quotes which interested me was from personal trainer Rob Blakeman:
"We're very specific organisms, with very specific requirements and very specific limitations. More training is not necessarily better training. If you do a really tough workout, the next day you often feel as though you have the flu. It's a systemic stress. If you don't allow that systemic stress to subside before you go back to the gym, you break the cycle of improvement."
This ties in with something, again in the Guardian, from the column by Oliver Burkeman, which evaluates self-help advice and life tips:
The truth, according to an important new book, The Way We're Working Isn't Working (out now in the US, next month in the UK), is that we're thinking about this wrongly. High performance isn't about maximising time worked – or time asleep– because it's not about maximisation at all: it's about synchronising with the rhythms that govern our lives. "It would be reasonable to say," one researcher tells the author, Tony Schwartz, "that everything that happens in our bodies is rhythmic until proven otherwise." Marshalling research from across industry, sports, even professional chess, Schwartz demonstrates that what's key isn't managing time, but managing the cycles of energy and focus, rest and renewal.
This is all very well and good but it is not compatible with ethos Juneathon, which elevates as a virtue the daily grind of more miles. So instead of exercising according to the ebb and flow of my energy cycles I went out today for another steady run. it felt harder work than it should have done but the reward is another day being chalked off and the satisfaction of knowing that I haven’t fallen off the wagon yet.
(the other satisfaction was a casual piece of trolley spotting, complete with precise locational information - or road sign, if you prefer).
Juneathon statistics
run 6/8
distance 42.03km
time 4hr 07min
Cycle 1/8
distance 21 miles
time 1hr 32min
Gym 1/8
time 45min
4 comments:
Yep as i was reading that i was thinking well this is exactly what we are not doing but that's the point isn't it? to do something slightly out of the ordinary and against all logic just to make it more interesting? Well... for me it is.
Lovely trolley. Model type?
Marks and Spencers
Obviously I am not so much of an expert as to be able to tell you the manufacturer and model number.
I'm preparing a post on the ebb and flow of running and I found your blog. Thanks for sharing these quotes. I think you will find, over time, that there is relevance to cycles. I'll prove this out in my post to follow shortly.
Keep it real.
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