Today Lauren and I were coaching the BKL kids, and had them running 2 minute intervals on the trails. We tried to explain that the intervals were supposed to be as hard as possible: run as fast as you can! Go as hard as you can go! Give 100% – this shouldn’t feel like 90% or 80% or, as you requested, 30%! You should feel like collapsing at the end! (But don’t, please actually keep moving around so you will feel better!)
There was a bit of grumbling – 2 minute running intervals are really tough, if you do them correctly, and Pepa always calls it the workout where us GRP members will be “on our knees praying” – and one kid said, “How about at the end the coaches have to do whatever WE tell them to.” This idea has been brought up by this and other kids multiple times.
Lauren did a good job of explaining why this wasn’t a legitimate argument. “Yeah, see, Pepa already gets to do that to us, every day, twice a day……”
The kids might have thought that we were being slackers, but they hadn’t seen us this morning.
What did we do this morning that was so hard? A 5k test on the SkiErg, as hard as you can. If that’s not hard enough, add a breathing tube in there, and a noseplug to further restrict your breathing. The chair behind me in the picture is for when you collapse at the end of the test, because you will collapse. You won’t be able to stand up.
This was early in my test, probably somewhere in the first 1000 meters. You can see (or maybe not) that my heart rate is 178 on Pepa’s big fancy monitor. By the end, my heart rate was 199: yes, that’s 100% of my max. The test was strange in that I hit my max heart rate and had a high-ish VO2Max, but the time was slower than when I tested in the spring. While this might be frustrating to an athlete, to a coach, it’s really no matter: for Pepa, everything is data, telling her how we are responding to training and what we should do differently.
After sprinting it in, I was ready for the chair, and the chair was ready for me.
Thanks Marc for taking pictures!
