People and Places

Wednesday 29th April

Hello Libby again.

The BBC Sport website describes interval training as

“Periods of hard work followed by a timed period of rest, repeated several times in one training session.”

Once again, the Humber Bridge car park on a Sunday morning – the sun is shining and the place is already filling up with children on space hoppers preparing to hop across the bridge of charity.

Today we’ll be doing a bit of interval training – bit more start stop than last week but nothing we can’t handle – Peter assures us.

And off we go. First stop – a series of sprints over a short distance. This is to get the heart pumping and lungs moving. By breaking the training up into chunks of more intensive exercise, it works the body harder and starts to push our fitness levels up bit by bit.

All I know is that sprinting – even over a short distance is much harder than last week’s jog.

Next – steps. A short flight to warm us up followed by what Peter describes as 50 steps. By now we’re all starting to ‘feel the burn’ but that’s what it’s all about so up we go as fast as we can. On reaching the top we’re greeted by a couple running down the steps ‘Well done girls, you’ve done the 99 steps’ they cheer as they pass. 99? “Well it’s 50 if you do every other one” jokes Peter.

Session two was much harder work than the first, but the rest periods definitely help and I’m hoping that a few more weeks of this will start to make a real difference to our fitness – and to the all important 5K run.

Wednesday 22nd April

Hello Libby here, Chloe asked me to tell you all how our first training session went on Sunday morning.

11.30am, armed with woolly hats and gloves, we wait for our personal trainer in the Humber Bridge car park. Welcome to the first group training session with Peter Jones.

For our introductory session, Peter suggests a ‘short run across the bridge’. Oooh, that’d be good – nearly 2 thirds of the full race for life distance, that would get us well on the way to the full 5K.

After the all important warm up stretch and a quick chat with Peter to establish how much exercise we all do, there’s a cheery cry of ‘follow me!’ and off we go. Peter sets a good steady pace and keeps us all enthused as we cross the bridge on a beautiful morning – neither as cold or windy as expected. 

I normally run or train alone and wasn’t really sure how I’d get on with an organised session – but running in a group was turning out to be good fun and a great way to keep motivated. Having a fitness trainer to set a pace and keep you moving is also more fun than expected – not at all like boot camp. 

I found out later that we’d actually run 3.6 miles Peter’s encouragement had helped us to run much further than we thought we could – brilliant!

At the end of the session, after a few gentle stretches, Peter assured us that we would have no trouble with subsequent training sessions he had planned for us – interval training – sounds painful

Race for Life here we come!

Monday 20th April

Hello all Race For Life fans, as promised here is the run down of our team’s health assessment from last week.

Twelve of the team members made their way throughout the day to the Sport and Exercise Science department at Hull University to participate in, what we were told was, the ‘gold standard’ of fitness tests, we were very afraid.

Once we turned up and saw the giant treadmill with a crash mat behind it, fear grew, but Ric, the sports physiologist and his right hand man Steve, were on hand to help us out.

All twelve of us participated in the VO2 MAX test which measures how many ml of oxygen per kilo of body weight your body uses when exercising. Now that in itself doesn’t sound too scary, however they measure said test by strapping you to a treadmill with an oxygen mask that catches everything you breath in and breath out.

The treadmill starts at around 7km/h for a couple of minutes power walking, it then increases in speed by 0.2 km/h every 12 seconds, the idea is you just keep going until you cannot go any more.

Once you had gone for as long as you can, all the data is stored and the chaps were able to tell us our statistics.

VO2 max wise we were aiming for 30-40 which we all achieved, the higher your VO2 max the better your body uses its oxygen, Ric told us that a certain City player had come in the week before and recorded a VO2 of over seventy! We were also given the statistics on what velocity we stopped at and I think we all did rather well.

In fact once we got going the test wasn’t terrifying at all but quite invigorating, it certainly helped having not only other team members with us, but the sports staff constantly giving us encouraging words. I honestly didn’t think I would last longer than four minutes and I managed just over eight so I think we were all pleasantly surprised by how well we did.

A huge thank you must go to Ric and Steve at Hull University as they not only fitted us in for a test that is in very high demand, but they were so supportive and made all of us feel like high class athletes!

Below are our results in the order in which we did the tests.

MAX VELOCITY VO2 MAX
Jane : 10.4 35.81
Indi: 8.8 32.39
Helen: 12.8 42.47
Jen: 8.5 32.29
Sarah: 11.6 33.43
Clare: 13.4 41.64
Chloe: 12.0 40.85
Gemma: 10.6 34.96
Libby: 12.0 40.30
Lizzie: 14.4 46.02
Pritti: 12.4 44.85
India: 13.6 41.40

Wednesday 15th April

Hello all, apologies for the second instalment in the Race for Life blog being rather late in coming, but we have had huge amounts on!

Firstly, a couple of us joined in the fitness task for the breakfast show’s version of ‘The Apprentice’ last week. Basically Ruth Barcroft (supported by Pete the trainer) put Indi and I through our paces live on air, eek! It was a wet and windy morning on Victoria Dock but I think our enthusiasm more than made up for the lack of sunshine. What made it even better was that Pete, personal trainer man, has offered a weekly personal training session to our team in the run up to Race for Life, if that doesn’t light a fire under everyone’s bums I don’t know what will!

As well as our foray into breakfast training, everyone has been doing their own thing, from upping their walking per day and continuing usual gym training to additional training runs.

I personally have not done as much as I would like over the last week, I blame Easter eggs and my sofa calling to me, also the absence of my running buddy.

However we have managed a couple of runs and have pushed the actually running time up to 2 minutes during our interval training, that is up from 1:15 in just over a week. We also had a go at a dance fitness DVD which was a really good laugh, though doing it in my guest room that has no curtains may not have been my best idea.

Most importantly this week we have had our health assessments at Hull University, watch this space to see how we did, as soon as the results come through I will be posting more info about the test itself. Here is a hint, it involved an elevated treadmill that felt a bit like it was in a cage and a strapped on oxygen mask.

Happy Running!

Thursday 9th April

Every year thousands of women across the country join Race for Life to help raise awareness and money of research into cancer treatment. Having never actually run the race I decided this year it was a time for change. I'm the sort of exerciser who needs chums around to keep her going so I decided to organise a team.

Thus, the BBC Hull Race for Life team was born. Some of the ladies have run marathons before, some have run Race for Life and some have never run at all. Everyone has their reasons for doing the race. But, whatever the reason, for fundraising, general support, memorial or fitness, we all decided we needed to help in the fight against cancer and Race for Life was a way to demonstrate our commitment to the cause.

Let's face it, running can be a bit dull, particularly if you are new to it. I decided to shake things up a bit, after all "variety is the spice of life" as they say. So, in addition to regular training, either by ourselves or in a group, I've been trying to organise fun activities to help increase our overall fitness and the likelihood of finishing the race.

Enjoyable exercise is the key to a lifelong friendship with health, so hopefully our adventures will broaden our fitness horizons. That sounds like something one of those life coach and fitness writers would say, but it seems to be a natural flow of the way this works, at least in my experience. We're going to try different forms of exercise over the next few weeks, from dance sessions to green gyms; nothing is off our fitness agenda.

No matter the methods we employ, at the end of the day we have to jog or run the 5km distance. Some of our team members have chosen to walk it but I've set a personal goal to run along with colleague and friend Indi. We've drawn up a six week schedule to help us complete the run and fingers crossed we'll be successful.

Last night was our first official training session. Unfortunately due to our different work patterns there were only two of us from the team running in the park. As novice runners we started by doing a one-minute-power-walking burst followed by a one-and-a-half minute run. We did that combination ten times, basically it turned into a 25 minute walk/run. The verdict? I didn’t feel too bad. We made we sure stretched before and after. Indi didn’t even need extra inhaler puffs. Tonight, we're going to try and push it up to a two minute run. It doesn’t sound much of a difference but it still feels bit daunting.

Next week the majority of the team are taking part in a health assessment at Hull University, it's the same one they do for professional athletes. I have warned them we aren’t in the same league. Check back next week to see how we did, but please remember we are only at the beginning of our training so if you see some exhausted and exasperated people looking pooped by the roadside you'll know it's us and do feel free to offer up an encouraging word.