Saturday, July 12, 2008

Woeful

That is the only way to describe my ability to do neuromuscular training (NMT).

After a 17 minute warmup I commenced an unstructured workout of running hard/easy between the runway lights on the airport. I'm not sure of the distance between them but my guess is under 50 meters. It doesn't take long to get from one to the next while running hard.

At first I thought I could run hard then just back off some and run hard again. But after the first rep like that I knew I had to back way down to a crawl to recover. I was only able to do 3x rep before I needed a slightly longer rest jog of several lengths. I ended up doing 6 sets of the 3x rep sequence. It took about 13 minutes and I was done with the hard stuff.

I ran another super slow 30 minutes to make up my hour and went home.

There are some things one is naturally bad at and I think I found one of them.

The good news is that perhaps I can gain the greatest amount of benefit per unit of training by keeping up with the NMT once per week. I have read that it works form and neuromuscular coordination that benefits long distance runners by creating efficiencies. And there's nothing better for a long distance runner than being efficient.

60 minutes ~ 6+ miles.

4 Comments:

Blogger UMaine Cooperative Extension said...

Just one?

Anyway, I was quite shocked to see you do any sort of speedwork.

7/12/2008 4:48 PM  
Blogger MB said...

that's a good reminder post to us all in using some NMT more often -thanks

7/12/2008 9:21 PM  
Blogger Thomas said...

Man, 13 minutes of NMT workout is an awful lot. For example, when you start out doing NMTs, even 6 minutes of 30/30 would be a great achievement. Don't put yourself down unnecessarily.

7/12/2008 10:11 PM  
Blogger Mike said...

I'm with Thomas on the time, especially if it's close to an all-out effort. I hated the 50 sprint, 50 float workouts I've done in the past, and two miles worth pretty much did me in. I'm still torn on when to incorporate these, as I'm more partial to using them for the "icing on the cake" rather than for "bread and butter".

I still like strides at about 90-95% effort, but they're so much easier than what you and Thomas are doing.

7/14/2008 7:45 AM  

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