Saturday 20 January 2018

Test Results

There we go, my wife's Cooper Test is done and dusted and she now has her pace zones for running. 

Fair to say it was not an easy test for her, but then again if you do it right then it never is. 

One of the problems with doing these tests for the first time is knowing just how to pace them. It is difficult to know just how hard to start these running tests, when you aren't entirely sure how fast you can go and what Threshold Pace actually feels like. It is very easy to head out too easy or too hard and fair to say that my wife did the later. 

Still, going out too hard is not insurmountable if it is addressed early in the run, which thankfully my wife did. It still made the later parts of the test pretty painful and it may also have had a minor impact on the over all result, but the fast start didn't cause her to hit the wall catastrophically. 

Over all the result of the test was about inline with expectations. Often with these tests they give a threshold pace that is a little quicker than people were expecting and so it was with my wife, with the Threshold Pace coming it about 10 seconds faster than she had thought. 

Now that we have done the test we have figured out her pace zones using the Front Runner Pace Zone calculator and is all set to introduce a bit of variety into her runs. At this stage we will keep her running program pretty simple, building in a light threshold session and another light tempo session, while keeping her weekend run steady. 

I say light for the threshold and tempo runs because with higher speed comes higher loads on the body and the last thing we want to do is push for too much intensity too early and cause an injury. Instead the idea with both the threshold run and the tempo run will be to start with lower amounts of higher intensity work and then increase the duration of the intervals with time. Gradually working towards a total of 20 minutes of work for the Threshold sessions and 40 minutes of work for the tempo runs. The idea with the steady runs will be to keep them as they are now, but use them to gradually increase volume. Introducing this variety in the running and also gradually increasing the load of the sessions will help us continue to build my wife's running capacity and speed. 

The other advantage to introducing Threshold sessions in particular is that my wife will now start to learn what Threshold feels like. That means that the next time we do a Cooper Test she will be better armed to know how to pace the run. 

All I need to do now is to convince her to do the test again in another 6 weeks.  

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