week 15

[Antonio247]

Wednesday 14th January 2004. Unexpectedly, today´s been a different day in my training. I intended to go for a 7 km run this morning but I woke up at 7 when the alarm clock rang, so I decided to put it off for this afternoon or evening. I decided to go to the athletics stadium, “Emilio Campra”, which is about one kilometre from home. I phoned a friend who sometimes goes there to train and he told me he was going with a mate. Then, we agreed to meet there at 5.30pm. My friend, Antonio H. and his colleague Juan, are local policemen who sometimes train at the stadium. I arrived earlier and started to jog on the grass. It´s a bit boring to be spinning around it but occasionally it helps you change your way of training. Besides, it´s a long time since I hadn´t trained in an athletics stadium. There were many people training, most of them teenagers or youngsters in their early twenties. When my friends arrived, they joined me and we stopped when I had done 25 minutes. Then, we did four short series of about 50 metres on the grass with the same distance jogging. They were faster than me. Later, we did some stretching and they left. I decided to do some more series of 800 metres because I had read something about Yasso, who says that if you do 10 series of 800 metres when preparing for a marathon, the average time of a series, would be the time you will do in a marathon, changing minutes into hours and seconds into minutes. For instance, if your average series is 4 minutes, 30 seconds, you would do 4 hours, thirty minutes in a marathon. I only did three series of 800 metres, the first one in 3´ 58´´, the second one in 3´56´´ and the third one in 4´4´´ with four minutes jogging after each series. I´d like to do these series every other week and increase one series each time until I can do ten series and see which would be my average series. Besides, it will help me to see if I´m improving my record in that distance although perhaps I should try shorter series to increase my speed, 200 or 400 metres. After the marathon, I could check if the Yasso formula is correct for me. Nevertheless, according to Greg Mcmillan calculator http://www.mcmillanrunning.com/Running%2...ulator.htm my possible time at the marathon would be 4 hours 54 minutes and at half marathon 2 hours 19 minutes, which actually is. Nevertheless, I haven´t done ten series yet, which would have lowered my average series. Well, in all, I did fifty minutes and around seven kilometres