MILL REPS

I was doing an regular easy run on the mill that day.

Suddenly, the guy next to me was kicking real hard.

He was literally sprinting. I could hear the hard huffing

and puffing, I could see his face flushing. He was running

wih high knee and fast legs turn over.

But when I glanced at his speed indicator, I was astounded that

it read 10(6:00km/min pace). WHAT??? To my further surprise, this guy

soon collapsed and resorted to slowing down to walking pace and finally

drop out of the mill.


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This reminded me that few years ago, I was in the exact same boat as this

guy. I normally jogged at 8:00k/min pace, and once a while broke into a fast

6:00k/min pace of fast running that might last just a few hundred meter or less.

Who knows, through sheer hardwork and persistant training,

I could hold that pace for 42K few years later.

(See? The most powerful ergogenic aid is training. From 400m to 42.2k,
that was an improvement of 100 times).


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SPEED IS A RELATIVE THING!

What is fast for me might be slow to you.

What is fast today could be just an easy pace tomorrow, well may be not

tomorrow, but how about next year.

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We all dreamed one day that we could hold that dreadly 3:00k/min pace

for that dreadly 42.2K. But until then, we have to first attain that speed,

tamed it, literally "slow" it down to feeling easy, etc. Just think of as

a manufacturing process where it has to be gone through various stage of

processing.


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How do we "manufacture" that fast pace then?

As I said earlier, different training (process) at diferent stage of

the pace refinery process.

The very first thing of a pace refinery is "attaining" it. When I

say "attaining", I refer to that "sprint" of the guy next to me

on the mill. Attaining means sprinting under controll. It wasn't an

all out effort yet but close. I mean a pace that you literally

felt almost like sprinting, bot not quite as yet. And it is relaxed,

under control, and definitely no huffing puffing.


I MEAN Vvo2max or slight faster to be exact.

(If you want to know about Vvo2max you could use

my program vomax.exe that comes together with

eDiaryRC5 downloadable in previous post).


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To turn today's sprinting pace(Vvo2max) into one that

could be hold for 42K required flowing through

many different training "process". The tempo,

interval, long MP run, LSD all has its role to play.

But we are not going to talk about those today.

We are going to talk about "attainning" the pace,

and the training that matches this is called "Repetitive

Running" or "Reps".


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Here what I do on "mill Reps" ( I always do

almost all my qaulity run on Mill. There are

a lot of advantages compare to gound running, though

it also bear some shortcoming.

But to the least, it keep me "ON PACE").

Warm up sufficiently, then run at Rep pace (4:50) for

200m, then switch to MP (5:40) for 600m and repeat 6 to

10 times depend on how tire I felt.


The pace of 4:50 matched my current fitness level (

you can use vomax.exe to check yours) and the distant

200m is carefully choosen. With a pace of 4:50, 200m

is is covered in lest than 1 minute. The pace of

5:40 is also carefully choosen. The average 600m

5:40 and 200m 4:50 is 5:30, which is the GMP.


(I always make use of the recovery. I believe that

the recovery could just as beneficial as the hard

work bout as it trains how you would deal with fatique).


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Reps is classified only as an easy run, and I don't

consider this as a quality run. It is just a variant

of my easy run.


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Crank on.