Antartica Marathon starts in 
| Training progresses |
| Sunday, 05 February 2012 07:18 |
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Sunday 5th February Training is progressing nicely for the Great Wall marathon - now just under 15 weeks away. I am doing my 3 runs per week, but I am dreadfully slow. Part of the reason for this is that I am doing a lot of leg work - squats, tabata interval sessions, lunges and hill runs, to prepare more properly for this event rather than for a standard, fairly flat, marathon. I have to keep telling myself that it doesn't matter that I am slow, just that I keep going! Todays run was from home to the top of Mt Lofty and back down again via the Long Ridge Track - 24 km that was all up, then all down and took over two and a half hours. My back was quite sore in the last stages after so much downhill running and angling myself back a bit. I'll post a link soon, once Charlie gives me back my Garmin connector for the computer!! I have also been doing quite well with my cross training - Hot Yoga 2-3 times per week at a new studio that has opened up down the road (I love living here!!), YogaFusion. Sue and Amy run awesome classes and the infrared heating panels are a good way to create the heat, compared to gas heating systems. Their approach is also much more gentle than the Bikram yoga I tried a couple of years ago - 5 sessions there took me 6 months to adequately recover from. 6 sessions in now, and I am feeling good. I have also done a little riding and hiking, as well as some swimming. I even did a beach swim a few weeks ago - 700m or so at Normanville. So scared of critters in the water, I was often in barely a meter of water, and whenever I found myself in deeper water I rapidly went closer to shore again so I was back at the 5 foot mark. Such a big scaredy cat! Last week I notched up 12 sessions in the week - a public holiday day off work helped those stats! I can't manage that in a normal week. I am working hard to try to lose some of the weight that piled on rapidly in December - post marathon and wedding rebound, and it takes so long to come back off again!! 2 kg down now, another 8 to go, ideally. Such a tiresome process, but I am trying the slower and sustainable method this time, rather than the high protein focus of last year, which is not balanced enough for the long term, in my non-nutritionists opinion. Especially when I am supporting the Jodi Lee Foundation and bowel cancer awareness! I am trying to get a fundraising page organised, so I will post a link when that happens.
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This weeks links
The Cancer Council came out this week and announced that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption, and that alcohol should be considered to be as carcinogenic as smoking and asbestos are. As well as being highly associated with throat and mouth cancers, it is now found to correlate highly with breast and bowel cancers. Perhaps it should not be so surprising that a substance that can so alter mood and ability, even at very mild levels should turn out to be in fact, not good for us.
This story, an editorial from the British Journal of Sports Medicine earlier this year has some amazing targets - it ties in with our look at sitting and health, and is about developing healthcare systems that support exercise - recognise it as being as vital a measure of our health as is blood sugar levels or blood pressure. It recommends 150 minutes of physical activity per week for adults as a minimum. 30 mins on 5 days. For children, it is 420 mins / week - 60 minutes every day. How close are you?
This is another article on inactivity / obesity and health from Sports Medicine Australia, highlighting the link between an inactive childhood and a lifetime of battling depression. It is food for thought (!) these days where there seems to be much paranoia about safety of children away from their parents watchful eyes, and therefore a tendency to want to keep them closely under watch instead of encouraging more activity and indeed risk taking behaviours. The ability to judge situations for risk and to be able to take appropriate risks builds self esteem and resilience. Not much to do with bowel cancer awareness, but close to my heart as well.
Another article on sitting
This one is in really simple terms - if you walk 30 mins (as recommended) and sleep 8 hours, most of us still have 15.5 hours per day not moving. You cannot sit all day behind a screen, then drive your car and sit and watch tv with out it being bad for you. A good read.