January 5th to January 18th (2weeks)
Tasks to manage the chimp
Book flights and accommodation for half marathon and two full marathons.
Keep graphs and charts up to date.
Maintenance goals
Keep sleep to an average of 7 hours a night
Target goals
Increase speed
5 x 5km training per week, + 1 park run timed (30km per week)
Run parts of the 5km at 4min per km pace- increasing the fast distance on each run.
Week 1
0.5km fast
1km fast
1.5km fast
2km fast
2.5km fast
Week 2
3 km fast
3.5 km fast
4 km fast
4.5 km fast
5km fast
Diet
Focus on water and green tea (keep a good diet but not the target goals)
8 glasses of water a day
3 cups of green tea a day
So how did it go?
The overarching aim here was to be able to run 5km in under 21:54 (The value calculated to be equivalent to my desired marathon time (see finding my current level article) – I managed to run 4km at the desired speed, getting a time (on a treadmill of 21:12) – this is a good result for this phase!
Looking at the other foundation stones…
1.1 Body fat percentage
Reduced by 2% while still retaining muscle mass- good result.
1.2 Body weight
Reduced by 2.3kg since the last inBody assessment – good result.
2.1 Sleep
Average amount of sleep started off well at the start of the year and now is dropping to below a good level. I need to pull this up again.
2.2 Resting heart rate
Below 60bpm seems to have lowered but difficult to tell.
3.1 Distance per week
Even with plans to run more, there seems to be a pattern- an alternating pattern dipping to 0km in a week, every 3 weeks. The peak is 20km per week. This value is less than a third of target. It will take effort to increase to desired distance.
3.2 5km time
Target achieved in the last phase.
3.3 Half marathon time
No data
3.4 Conditioning
Averaging target amount- this has resulted in muscle mass remaining constant as desired.
4.1 Tracking diet
May need to target this as value too low.
4.2 Water consumption
Good on 6th Jan and then deteriorated.
4.3 Green tea
Sometimes 3 cups but very irregular.
A few points that I have learnt:
After you finish a section of training you need a breather or a celebration or just a bit of down time. When thinking of design work it would seem a good idea to start a project on a Monday and finish half way through a Friday (may be three weeks later) to give an afternoon to reflect and celebrate and then a weekend downtime before starting again.
Even though the time was less (2 weeks rather than 5 for this phase) there was still a drop in the activity (especially clear with water intake) after a few days. Next phase I will have a longer timespan but with weekly progress monitoring to motivate myself to improve each week.
I was so busy getting phase two right that I didn’t think about phase 3! I am now three days into phase three without a plan. It is tough but while working on one phase, the next should be planned, at least in part. I will now roughly plan phase 3,4 and 5 – up until the Vienna Marathon.
In a creative design cycle it is key to have work ready to pick up once a project finishes. Allow for a break and then get the momentum going as quickly as possible.