Up until the last rep of my last workout of the week (today, Saturday) I would have said this week was a miserable failure. By way of review, I started trying out the "Peters workout" in late August after returning from Lahti. In about 5 weeks I went from a best 100 of 13.3 to 12.7, and dropped my 300 time from around 43 seconds to 41 seconds. I felt that I still had some good momentum going at that time for further improvement.
Then I was injured (not related to the training) and took a month to get back in training. I also started a very demanding job which has kept me traveling every week, so I've had trouble training consistently for the past month. I had almost gotten back to where I was before my injury by the end of last week.
This week I was home all week, but just didn't have the "pop" in my legs. My fastest 100s were all 13.0 or slower for my 3 track workouts - very discouraging! I was running 5 or 6 100s instead of 4, trying to get under 13.0, so I wasn't running the 300 rep at the end of the workout. Today I couldn't beat 13.0 in the 100, but decided to stop with 4 reps and run 300 anyway.
On the third leg of the 300 I felt myself tighten up and had to really push to finish fast, feeling very discouraged. But when I looked at my splits I was pleasantly surprised: 13.2, 13.3, 14.6 for 41.1. That's only a tenth off my very fastest of the year, and the fastest first 2 legs I've run thus far.
The other thing I've started doing on my "off" days is running 1 mile easy to warm up and then a mile at around 6:00, to keep some endurance in place.
I've been thinking about the mental aspect of the Peters method - which I haven't been able to learn about. I haven't been able to get an email address for Steve Peters to even ask him. From what I've observed in his training he can't have better endurance than his competitors - this method is solely about speed. Yet I hear he passes people in the last 100 with a supreme effort. Is it possible that his mental approach somehow triggers a boost of adrenaline at the end of a 400?
|