My last week training before Tough Mudder



A great place to run!
 

I’ve had a rather varied and interesting training week so far. An unexpected day off on Sunday saw me making an appearance at the Parkour Generations weekend wake up class held in Elephant and Castle. The class size was absolutely bloody enormous, twenty people in total! Thrown by the absence of a large, white, woolly hat, I managed to start proceedings well by politely introducing myself to someone that I have actually met and trained with three times (sorry Kevin!). I only realised about halfway through the class why he seemed familiar! I haven’t trained at Elephant and Castle very much at all, so was chuffed that we were taken to an area that I had never seen before. It was a sort of long section of disused flats, full of wall, rails and flat space for sprinting and quadrepedal movement. As we discovered, this area was also full of graffiti and litter, making footing a little precarious!

After some variations on running (forwards, backwards, sidesteps, etc.), designed to warm us up, the first challenge was climbups onto a wall. Pretty chuffed that I can now pull myself into the wall without my feet sliding down whilst in a cat position, although by the end of this section I was struggling a little. At some points we had to hold ourselves at waist level on the wall, and then remove first our left and then our right hands. I just had to hold myself at waist without moving for this part! Don’t have the strength yet, I don’t think, but actually not sure how it’s even possible without face planting! Next, we all lined up, and had to get across obstacles to the wall, then turn round and go back as fast as we could. As there were twenty people in the class, we had to do this twenty times in a row. The only rest we had was when you were at the end, you would shout out your name then run along the front of the line. Each person would start the route as you passed them, and then you got to rest for that one (aren’t they kind!). When doing the route there was definitely an aspect of not wanting to be the last one back! So I found myself sort of clumsily clambering over things rather than trying to Parkour over. When I did try to step vault over the rail, I slipped and smacked my knee. Bah! After we had done twenty of these, we were told we needed to do the whole route in twenty seconds or less. And if we didn’t manage it, we would do it again until we did manage it! Instantly, every person in the line was standing to attention with one foot forward, ready to go. We had all already run through the route twenty times each, so we weren’t keen to do many more reps than necessary! It took the group two times, and then once to go through the route twice in under a minute.

After this, instructor Andy set up a miniature version of what he called ‘The Morzine mega-route’, including gate climbs, wall runs, monkey walk, and incorporating in some rather unusual graffiti at the top of the slope before turning round. People were split into expert/amateur pairs (guess which one I was?). I managed to smack my shin about one minute into the demo, and with a small squeak I slid down and staggered over to the nearest grassy knoll. Then I had to sit and pretend my whole leg hadn’t gone dead to every second person who passed me asking if I was alright. I could see in the distance that instructor Chris was making his way over, and I tried my best to get up before he got there. However, my leg didn’t feel like cooperating at that moment, so instead I managed an awkward bum shuffle along the grass.

“You alright?” He called.

“Yup, absolutely fine!” I said through gritted teeth. I could see everyone else disappearing into the distance, and I was annoyed at falling back. Ever hit yourself in the shin? Well until have you have, dear reader, don’t judge the wimpiness! After a minute, I managed to get myself up and hobble after the tailwind of the main group. Another member of the group, a man in a red t-shirt, actually came back and ran with me at this point, which was very nice!

Then ‘The Megaroute’ was started in earnest, and I think I did pretty well overall (many thanks to my expert partner Juad, who was very patient with me). The highlight was doing the wall run at a fairly decent height for me, and the low point was having to be given a knee/shoulder boost because I couldn’t lift my own weight up one section. After some work on precisions, we did some killer core strength conditioning in which we held our legs out and straight off the floor, leaning back but not resting shoulders or head, for about five bloody minutes! I am definitely looking forward to ‘The Morzine Megaroute’, which is apparently about 2km long!

 

After smacking myself once in each leg during Parkour class, I was a little worried about my planned run on Monday morning. I was going to one of my favourite places to run, in Alexandra Park. This has a great flat section to start on, and then goes into hilly woods which provide a little challenge to navigate around. It’s also so beautiful there, dappled sunlight through the trees in one section and an amazing high view in another. I needn’t have worried about my knee, as I shot round at a great pace, my fastest mile completed in about 6.15 minutes! I even went down the big, steep hill, then turned straight back round and went back up it! I managed to do this by sort of pretending that I wasn’t really going up a hill at all, acting and breathing completely normally until I couldn’t fool myself anymore! I’ve found that this is a great running Jedi  mind trick. My other trick for the difficult top section of a hill is to do a finger count of three or five as you climb it. In this way ‘I’ve got to get to the top’ becomes ‘I’ve got to run for five more seconds’, which is much more feasible.

I was astounded and amazed when I stopped and checked my workout, as this is the fastest pace i’ve ever done, including my brief spate of road running! After running, I did three circuits of arm and core conditioning. I was planning to do four, but my form began to suffer. I used the two arm conditioning Park Gym machines, then did assisted press-ups, planks, sit ups and stomach crunches.

 

After all this, I was feeling great, but very achy! So I was looking forward to the evening, when I had made plans with friends to go swimming in the still rather chilly Hampstead Heath ponds. Although it isn’t as bad as the Baltic conditions I experienced in December and January, eleven degrees Celsius is still pretty damn cold as we all discovered! I was hoping it would act as a sort of ice bath for my muscles. I realised that I was the wimp of the bunch when I came out of the changing cubicle in full Skins to find my friends wearing only skimpy swimsuits! This choice meant that they ushered me into the water first. I gingerly stepped down the ladder and cast off with a gasp. Brr! But the good thing about this temperature is that it’s cold enough to test you, but not so cold as to completely incapacitate you, and make you want to exit the water straight away. I was blessing my Skins, as even with a hole in them they protected me from the ‘burning’ feeling of cold water for quite a long time, whilst my friends were lamenting! We all did three laps of the pond, and then the lifeguard came out and told us that she thought we had been in long enough and that we should probably get out soon. Perhaps the cries of “Jesus Christ!” and “It burns!!!” were a little too loud! However, writing this from the perspective of the next day, I do feel that it helped my muscle recovery a lot, especially my arms. They were literally tremoring after my arm circuits, which normally means ache city the next day. But they feel pretty okay!

So all in all, a nice and varied start to this week’s training! Scarily, this is my last week of training before Tough Mudder! Next week will be a rest week, so i’d better make this one count! To this end, i’m planning one more run, one more swim (in an indoor pool) and two more Parkour sessions. I’m also counting the ice wall climb i’m doing (hey it’s a physical activity!). Come the weekend I will be stopping all exercise, crossing my fingers and trying not to freak out too much at the thought of the looming Tough Mudder. Wish me luck, guys!

 

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