Push harder!

After 14 weeks I returned to Acton for my review with Julian.  He was pleased with my general style on the warm-up but we were both disappointed with my performance on the 400m time trial. I've been hoping got break 8:00minutes and only managed 8:02minutes although my pace was better than 2:00min/100m to begin with.

After  much discussion it was clear that I'm not working hard enough in either my training sets or on the time trials with him. Apparently some will feel nauseous after giving it everything. I don't think that' in my character!

Anyway we tried again with single lengths of 25m and I managed to get down to 23s. Ok, that was a one off and quite different to 400m but it showed that I can go faster if I make the effort.  So we tried a 100m timed set and I managed 1:52minutes on that and I suspect I could have done more...

I was concerned about a loss of technique, too much splashing and so on but looking back over the video my techniques isn't all that much worse and I'm going so much faster. Looking back at my sets it seems that my need to keep going means that I'm too fatigued to work on the speed and I'm also not putting enough effort in to get to the power. I've been here several times with running! Basically I do have good low level aerobic ability but shy away from anything approaching anaerobic effort if I think I've got more to do.

Now I've a new programme including some focus on effort and I must take the breaks and go slow between the hard work to allow for recovery. I'll have to get my Tempo-Trainer out as one routine has specific pacing that seems unachievable at 1:54min/100m even though I've just done 1:52min/100m.

Week 1 is bound to be tough and I might not achieve the goals but experience suggests that I'll get there.