Well CD is the cadence drill described yesterday. Acg stands for acceleration glider drill, which I will describe below. p denotes that a section of the run is done at marathon pace. Jeff Galloway, you are lucky I bought the book! Usually I would see a run as complicated as this in a training plan and decided not to follow the plan as its too complicated. However, I'm sure I will get used to this, as the sessions repeat every week.
So, copying from the book:
"On Wednesdays, run 2-4 miles at race pace. After an easy warm up, run 4 Acgs. Then run a mile segment at 8:30, and run a second mile with a total time of 17:04, and continue at the same pace per mile for 1-2 miles.
This drill is a very easy and gentle form of speed play. By doing it regularly, you develop a range of speeds, with the muscle conditioning to move smoothly from one to the next. The greatest benefit comes as you learn how to 'glide' or coast off your momentum."
Instructions:
"1. Start by jogging very slowly for about 15 steps
2. Then jog faster for about 15 steps - increasing to a regular running pace for you.
3. Now, over the next 15 steps, gradually increase the speed to your current race pace.
4. OK it's time to glide, or coast. Allow yourself to gradually slow down to a jog using momentum as long as you can. At first you may only glide for 10-20 steps. As the months go by you will get up to 30 and beyond... You're gliding!"
He then goes on to describe key concepts that will help this drill, but I'm not going to type them out- perhaps get the book if your interested, however,the overall purpose is to improve your form, as you will be learning to move at your marathon pace whilst using as little energy as possible.
For me, this workout was a bit much after a fairly gruelling few days at work. As I try to do for marathon training, Wednesday is my 'sorta long' run day, and to allow my adequate time to eat/ stretch and recover as well as going to bed at a reasonable time, I do the run in London straight after work, and get food to eat on the train home, so that my run+dinner time results in my arriving home not much later than if I had got home and gone for a run and then eaten, however, it does allow me a crucial extra hour to 'come down' from my run so that I can get to sleep, and I slept exceptionally well last night, so it must have worked!
I struggled to get the hang of the acceleration gliders- part of this was because there were so many people on the streets of London that I had to be cautious about maintaining momentum in case I bumped into them. I managed to do 2 of them working off the end of a cadence drill. It might be worth swapping Acgs to a day that I don't run in london to save from fear of bumping into people. However, what I did succeed on was running at pace. This was tough as I had some tightness in my left leg caused by a knot in my glut, so I wasn't running very smoothly, but paces for the run were like this- mile 1 is always a bit off, as I'm coming from the city down to the river, so the tall buildings always mess with my garmin. There's no way I was at that pace in my warm up!
Mile 1: 8:17
Mile 2: 8:26
Mile 3: 8:31
Mile 4: 9:54
Mile 4.37: 14:43 (traffic lights take a very long time to change in London!)
All in all, I'm quite happy I managed marathon pace for 2 miles, but I'm exceedingly happy that I have 6 months to work toward maintaining that pace for 26.2 miles in Greater Manchester. What was good to see is my heart rate was fairly steady at the rate I would expect it to be during a marathon, so I'm confident that if I execute the training well, I can do this pace. Just have to believe! :)
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