Week three of the Castlebar Adventure Duathlon Boot camp training kicked off with a 5 min warm up, we used our bikes starting with easy gears at high cadence slowly moving up to heavy harder gears while trying to maintain a cadence of about 95 rpm until we were ready to do our intervals.
After our short warm up and for the second week in a row all the boot campers were thrown strong rubber bands and told to tie them around their legs, the aim was to create resistance so that core and support muscles were firing in correct sequence to do this we had to isolate them with a series (secret) controlled movements that are designed to get key muscles activated so that the trainee gets the most out of their strength, the activation efforts only lasted a few minutes and before we knew it we were back on the bikes for 5 mins of fast spinning to aid the neuro-muscular response.
The efforts on the bike for week 3 are known as a Tabata session that really works the VO2 (heart and lungs).
The session consists of 2 by 4 minute interval. We used low to medium gears (small ring on front and mid cluster on the back ) and resistance 5 on the turbos. The interval consisted of 20 sec spinning at a cadence of 100 to 110 rpm (or as fast as you can) and a recovery of 10 sec of easy pedaling, this on/off interval continues for 4 mins. With a recovery of 2 mins between efforts.
On the running session we revisited our 1k running pace which we covered in our very first Boot camp back in January. We got all our boot campers to run 1k as fast as they could trying to maintain the same pace for the first half (500m) as the 2nd half of the 1k. This is where a lot of people fall down with their pacing, to pace yourself properly is the key to have a successful event. If you go too hard at the start you will end up paying for it later on. Back in January everyone got a time for their 1k effort and were giving a specific pace to train at for their 1k efforts ie (if a person ran 1k in 4:49 the pace they should be training at to improve on this is 5:15).
Their was a noticeable improvement in everyone which goes show how the training had made a difference, after this we revisited our hill running intervals. These consisted of 5x250mts hill sprints getting people up on the ball of their feet and pumping their arms and leaning slightly into the climb.
The Cool down was a gentle 1k jog back to centre for a stretch.
Coach Mary Mulchrone.
