Marathon training

Well it had to start sometime and since tomorrow I will miss the club session, I planned the start of my Paris Marathon training tonight with the VMA session for the week.

I haven't found a good translation for "VMA" which stands for "Vitesse Maximale Aérobique" - basically a speed session where you build up lactate and thus get your body to acclimatise to harder and harder levels of training. The marathon training I am following over the next 10 weeks has one VMA session, one threshold session, one long run and two recovery runs per week. I am determined to give myself the best chance of achieving my objective this time so I'll be following this plan assiduously.

Tonight's session in the plan for someone wishing to run a 3 hour marathon was 5x400m x 2 series with each 400m in 1:23. The recovery was 1 minute with 3 minutes between the series. I peeked a look at the 2:45 training schedule and this was the same but with each 400m in 1:16. I figured that if I want to run well under 3 hours I should be somewhere between the 2, so I was aiming for 1:20.

I started with a 4km warm-up run at around 4:50 / km pace and then headed to the track. Im glad that I'm determined because mentally I was not looking forward to this. Without any more ado, I set off. I stretched out and tried to run fast but not to the limit with the result that I ran the first 400m in 1:23. "Not good enough" my brain was telling me so I put a little more effort in and tried just a little harder.

The full set went as follows:

1:23, 1:23, 1:20, 1:20, 1:22, 1:20, 1:21, 1:20, 1:22, 1:19

So fairly regular and I was running by myself so I was pleased with the result. 1:16 for a 2:45 marathon is out of my reach though. Perhaps one day in the future.

I warmed down with another 10 minute jog. 12 km all up.

Sitting down now at the PC to write this up and can feel the tiredness in my legs. This could be due to yesterday's race, the swim session at lunchtime or the VMA session tonight. More likely to be a combination of all three. 10 weeks to go.