Getting comfortable with feeling uncomfortable.
Intervals is as much a mind-game as an effort game. You need to work on getting comfortable with feeling uncomfortable.
Brain Training would be one way of looking at it.
The Central Governor Model, postulated by Prof. Tim Noakes proposes that a monitor in the brain’s motor cortex will stop you from recruiting additional muscle. By training closely, but not too closely, to this level of failure will feel uncomfortable. Continued exposure to this discomfort, with sufficient recovery, will enable you to spend more time at that effort level.
The aim of today’s session was, therefore, to do precisely that.
3 – 4 repetitions of an 900 m loop with a loose 90-120 seconds resting. Target of repeating all reps in the same time at 5k/sub 5k pace.
Did I say there was a hill involved? Starting with a false flat meant that the main incline effort felt shorter, with a sweeping downhill that was never so steep that you felt you were losing control
As you can see, everyone did exceptionally well in keeping to consistent timings (Ignore Nicola’s. For her this was a light recovery run) ET did a cracking job on his first interval session in quite some time. Egged on by Stacy that both pushed on the last interval, indicating that they could have gone faster previously. Louise and Chris hit their times perfectly, and both Bob % Hilary eased back having felt they had pushed too hard on rep 1. I could not be happier with these results.
Awesome!
