Training XLVIII

After last Friday's abortive attempt at training we made it to the track last night.

With the Fat Lad facing another fitness test in just over a week, it was time for us to check out our distance. We started off at a reasonable pace and I was comfortable completing the first 400m at 1m45s but as I came down the home straight a local athletics club were still milling about. One of the coaches called the group across the track just as I was approaching them and most of the group demonstrated perfect etiquette by moving out of the way or waiting for me to pass them by.

One young man was far too engrossed in his conversation with his friend and stepped into my path. I tried to avert a collision but he still got bounced off my left hand side and I stumbled before stopping. His mumbled "Sorry" wasn't enough to get me going again and it was another 150m or so before I felt like I was running properly again. I ran on through to the end, pushing myself as hard as I could and I managed 2020m. It probably would have been 2050m but for the collision. So I've lost 60m since the fitness test practice in September. That's not too bad bearing in mind how many games and training sessions we've lost to the weather.

Fat Lad was disappointed as he only made 2350m but on the night, with an adrenaline rush and some encouragement from the sidelines, including someone pacing him through the last lap, I'm sure he can pick that up. At least he knows not to referee while injured which isn't something I can say for one of my coachees on Tuesday.

Despite my asking him repeatedly, he assured me that he wasn't injured, it became obvious that he was struggling very early on in his game for the local academy side who were playing an U15 fixture. All the development points in my report revolve around how the injury impaired his performance. Overall I thought he had a great game with a few shortcomings. Both his assistants were the same and all three are shaping up to be good, young referees.

Back to training now and once we had done our 12m run we did two sets of 800m. The first took 5m14s and the second, when I really pushed myself hard, was 4m 29s. That's not too bad after a 5m rest following the 12m run and only a 90s rest between the two sets of 800m. This was a 1050 calorie burner with an average hr of 81% and a max of 99%. That's pretty hard going and while I'm 400m short of the minimum distance, I'm hoping that a hard training programme over the summer might just see me hit that 2500m mark.