Second Program: Week #12

Week 58: Second Program - week 12 out of 15

Week settings:

• Area of focus: Cardio-Strength
• Number of training days: 4
• Limitations: none
• Last week feedback: "Hard, but ok"

Training:

• Monday: Metis standard x3 (19:35* -PB)
• Tuesday: Artemis standard (24:56*)
• Wednesday: Apollon standard (22:09*)
• Thursday: boxing training
• Friday: 100M sprint (00:19 -First Time) +200M sprint (00:41 -First Time) +200M sprint (00:37 -PB) +5K (27:03) +Venus standard (21:14*)

Statistics:

• 3'771 points
• 116 minutes

   
The stats of week #12 summarize well its content: lots of points but much less training time (compared previous month workouts). Most workouts were fairly short (i.e. no Kronos this week, so less time wasted staring at the pullup bar while my arms recover!), but packed a lot of intensity.


Day 1 set the tone with Metis standard x3. It was the third time that I completed this workout, so no real surprise there. I was glad to improve my PB by nearly 1:30 minute. It left me laying on the ground looking for my lost lungs, but it's a normal side-effect. And I can't complain when the coach is merciful enough to grant short sessions...


Day 2, I completed Artemis instead of Apollon (I was featherbrained enough to forget my gym bag, so my running session had to be postponed by a day).
I have to confess that I totally underestimated this workout. I mean, I know Artemis is tough on the arms, but I had been doing so many Kronos lately that doing 50 pullups instead of a 100 seemed (on paper) easier. Boy, was I wrong. Artemis' burpees and doing the pullups before the pushups are 2 factors to be reckoned with. As a result tmy arms were toasted and the 100 pushups were much slower than during a Kronos. No PB for me, that will teach me humility...


Day 3: burpees felt good but again no PB today (0:45 above my record). Running will need to be improved.


On Day 4 there was a novelty for me: sprints. I had done the 2x40m runs within workouts, but never tried stand alone short runs.
Last time I did a 100 m was in high school, I don't remember what my time was back then. It was probably really bad anyway. Nowadays, it took me nearly 20s (it helped me put in perspective Usain Bolt's insane 9:58 world record).
I used the auto-complete function, which I found extremely useful for such short distance (sprinting and watching your phone don't mix well).
 The 100m was followed by 2 sprints of 200m. It's a new kind of effort, with its own learning curve. On a shorter distance there is no/little holding back, but it still requires finding the proper breathing pace to maintain a constant pace. My second attempt was 4s better, mostly because I focused on breathing (a lot).
These discontinuous efforts were followed by a 5k. Unsurprisingly during the first kilometers it felt like my legs needed to adjust to the new pace. But I felt good. The only really annoying point was technical issues with the app (on iphone). I like running with music but couldn't do it in-app, so I launched the music in separate app but it conflicted with the sound from the Freeletics app. So I had no audio feedback (shuting down the music app didn't solve the problem). Furthermore my screen kept shutting down (screen saving mode), the only way to see my progress was to regularly fiddle with the phone to enter my code and look at the distance covered. Lesson of the day: for any run of more than 2K, I'll keep using a different app (for the moment Mapmyrun suits me the best) and log manually the results in the Freeletics app.
This long session ended with Venus. It's mostly a strength workout, so I didn't think my performance would suffer much from short runs. Wrong. My stamina had been more depleted from running than I had estimated. I was quickly out of juice on pushups, with an overall time 4 minutes above PB (this is a huge difference versus a ~17mn baseline).


To summarize nothing crazy this week, mostly short workouts and with a focus on legs.
Once again running was used as a complement to the usual gods/goddesses. The Coach is making full use of this new feature, I'm now expecting a run to be assigned almost every week.