Hill training in Wiltshire!

My good friend TJ invited me to the Wiltshire countryside today to do some proper hill training in preparation for the hilly Jungle stages.

Although a fantastic experience, today's training session has really brought home the enormity of the Jungle Marathon challenge.

I'm sat on a train back to London completely exhausted after running up and down hills for hours on end in the baking heat. However, far from being satisfied for having completed a tough training session, I'm worried... The thing is that today is nothing compared to what I'll be doing in the Jungle- there I'll be doing similar (if not harder) courses in 40+ degrees and 99% humidity. I really struggled today and I need to rapidly improve my hill running.

I've had some really tough and gruelling training sessions this week, but it's not enough. Next week I have to up the mileage, up the hills and up the pain if I'm going to do well in this race. 

Now time for an ice bath and an early night! 

Me in Wiltshire

One of today's hills (legs are full of scratches and bites)

UVU Jungle Warrior training!

I planned to have an easy training day today and so I thought I'd try out the 'Jungle Warrior Camp', which is a collaboration between Third Space Gyms in London and the race sponsor UVU. It was taking place in the pokey dojo and the usual instructor was on holiday and so I was expecting it to be a piece of cake. How wrong I was!!!

Courtesy of our trainer Carl Wilson, I discovered the delights of Tabata interval training. It consists of 20 seconds of ultra-intense exercise, followed by 10 seconds rest, repeated 8 times. After doing this for squats, burpees, push ups, lunges and a bunch of other evil exercises, I was well and truly broken. 

It was a completely different type of workout to what I'm used to and it seriously hurt! It's definitely a class I'll go to every week now. It's available to the public too for £10 and so drop me a message if you'd like more details.

It's gonna hurt!

I've been lucky enough to be put in touch with a really cool guy called Darren who has run the jungle marathon twice before. He's given me some great training and equipment tips and some really good words of advice. One bit of advice really stuck: "it's the competitors who are mentally the toughest who do the best and you're gonna get through this if you realise now that it's going to hurt like hell regardless and you're gonna be a mess afterwards!"

This is the week that I'm going to really up my training. The jungle course is apparently very hilly and so I'm going to hill train as much as I can. I ran up and down Primrose Hill 20 times last night followed by a 10km run and this evening I ran 25km in just over 2 hours.

I plan to do the hill reps again tomorrow and on Saturday I'm planning on doing a 60km run!!!

Here's a photo from this evening's run by Albert Bridge in Battersea :)

Friday night marathons

It's 22.30 on Friday and far from chilling out and enjoying the warm evening, I've just got in from running 26 miles along the Thames path. I ran it in around 3 hours 10 minutes and so I'm really pleased with the pace and it means that I can have the day off tomorrow for the Olympic footy final! I've really got to start paying more attention to nutrition though as 3 bottles of lucozade sport every time I go running can't be good for me!

Squeezing in training wherever and whenever possible!

I've found myself going everywhere with my running gear in a back pack, trying to fit in training runs! As I had tickets for the Olympic Games athletics yesterday evening and I was working in Surrey in the daytime, I jumped off the train home a few stops early so that I could squeeze in a run!

CNN votes Jungle Marathon 'The toughest endurance challenge in the World!'

http://www.cnngo.com/explorations/escape/worlds-toughest-endurance-challenges-152211

Preparing for the 100km stage!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, only 14 people finished the 100km stage in last year's race. I suppose this isn't surprising considering that it's 2 and a half marathons in 1 day! I think that this is where huge amounts of time can be won and lost in the race and so I am going to prepare as much as I can for this stage. Ideally over the next 6 weeks I will do a 50km run, followed by a 60km, 70km and 84km run and I'd aim to do all the runs at 3 hour 30 marathon pace (12km/h).

On Saturday I ran my first ultra-marathon. An ultra-marathon is any distance over the marathon distance of 26 miles and I managed to run 30 miles (50km). It was a long and lonely run up the Thames Path, but I managed to make a few friends along the way to pass some of the time. It took 4 hours and 10 minutes and I was pleased that I managed to run at 3 hours 30 minutes marathon pace. It had been a really tough week before the run as I had moved house and had a busy week of work and so it was great to get a long run like this under my belt. As you can see from the 2 videos attached, I was really struggling and there is still a long way to go before I'm in Jungle Marathon shape!!!