cometh the day...

well that day is tomorrow, the day that i finally i will do the dreaded v02 max and lactate threshold tests. jo pavey once likened it to having a tooth pulled out without anaesthetic. rob whalley, when i asked him what it was like cmpared to the most painful thing i know in athletics, running on the track doing short repetitions, in typical northern fashion, the answer was short and to the point. "no its much worse". the good thing though is that there are things that i can't go wrong tomorrow. i can't go off too fast. the speed of the treadmill is will dictate how fast i run which is in turn, dictated by a mr jonathan robinson, who is whe guy conducting the test.



the test will be structured as follows. starting at the lowest speed, which will be set according to how your heart rate responds to a short warm up, for 3 mins, with 30 sec recovery to take blood sample. then repeat at the next speed, then the next and so on and so forth until you are utterly exhausted and just can't take any more or until you collapse in a heap. i've been there a few times in training, once when i had to crawl from one side of the track to the other at the end of the session. i'm not going to make any predictions about what times it wil predict i am capable of or how much lactic acid i can tolerate, but i can tell from my race times that my current vo2 max is some where around about 60-65. thats mililitres of oxygen per minute per kilogram of body weight. the best the highest ever recorded by any athlete i think was either lance armstrong or miguel indurain, who had scores around about the low nineties, whereas dave bedford holds the record, (well these are stats from about 15 yrs ago) for distance runners at 88.0. i some how think though that both kenenisa bekele and haile gebreselassie will have higher scores than that though considering that their 10,000 meter times are over a minute quicker than bedfords. someone i know in brighton would probably have a score close to zero. i wont mention who it is because scott roberts knows damn well who he is

going to the more recent past i raced over 5 miles at weston on thursday night and came away with a new pb of 29:17, and came 10th, which is my highest ever position in that race one which i have raced several times over the past 18 months or so. sub 29 minutes has to be the aim and i reckon i have it within me as on thursday, for large parts of the race i didn't feel laboured. working hard yes, but not fatigued. i started off quite sensibly, placing my self behind a group of about 6 blokes. for the first mile or so they pulled away from me and i let them do this but not too far and not to the point thati couldn't catch them later. after the first turn i was surprised at how easily they came back to me and by halfway i had caught them and they were all to a man going out the back door to use cycling parlance. clevedon runner andy heyes tried to go with me for most of the 2nd lap but i was always confident that my far superior speed would take me away from him and in the end i pulled away from him, albeit temporarily as he produced quite an impressive kick in an attempt to catch me but i covered the last 200 yds or so in about 35 secs which would probably of held off every one in that field apart from phil parry who won and the cardiff runner michael johnson, no relation to the american track and field legend. me and phil were the only two bristol runners who bothered to turn out and his partner sian who won the womens race, well thats actually three in total.

since then its all been easy days in readiness for whats to come tomorrow, with no running at all today. it has to be like that because you are operating on your aerobic and anaerobic limit simultaneously, which is just about one of the hardest forms of exercise you can get apart frommay be doing a marathon or ultra marathon, although ask me again about that that tomorrow after the test!

bye bye!

pete