Fintess test

Fitness test... sounds awful doesn't it? We actually enjoy it now, which is perhaps slightly bizarre. Here's an overview of what we did this past Sunday, which was our latest one (they're every 8 weeks or so). We also had City2Surf training, so that's in here too.

We started by doing three 1km pacing laps. In theory this should be at the pace you actually want to run the race at, but I find it hard to slow my pace down on the 1km laps. I was hovering at about 4:30, with a couple of minutes break between each lap. If I could do 10km at 4:30/km pace i'd be really pleased, but i'm a long way away from that (this is Matt writing if you hadn't figured it out already). That was the City2Surf session. A lot shorter than usual, but the pacing is good practice.

The first item on the agenda for the actual test is a run. At the standard level it's a 2km run, and it's kind of a time trial so you're trying to set the fastest time you can. I'm at the point now where I can do that in 7:45 but I've started to try and do more laps at a fast pace. So I did 4km in 17:10. My goal was 16-17 minutes. A shame to be slightly outside that, but a good time nonetheless. Sarah did 3km, besting her 2km time and then doing a 3rd lap as well. Go her!

After that is a shuttle run. I can't remember how far apart the cones are, but it's how many runs you can do in 90 seconds. I did 17, which is one less than my best. On to 'exercises' next. We do push ups, sit ups, the plank hold and squats, followed by shoulder presses to finish. These are all done to the maximum number of reps you can complete in a minute, except the plank hold, which is as long as you can hold it up to 2 minutes. I only managed 1:10, which is my PB.

We get a printed report of our test results which compares it to our previous ones and gives us averages of performance. Don't have that yet but i'm looking forward to getting it as I'm fairly sure I did better on everything except the shuttle run. Sarah bested pretty much everything too.

8 more weeks until the next test and we'll need to set some new goals. I'd like to bring my 4km time under 17 minutes and get to 20 push ups in a minute. My arms and shoulders are slowly getting stronger, but it's still far from my strongest point. Fingers crossed. Further down the line I want to be able to do a 20 minute 5km, but that's a way off yet.

Our fitness story so far

I've never been one for team sports really and despite being thin, until recently I was definitely a couch potato. Sarah and I have both known for a long time that we were active enough however we never got around to making the necessary effort to improve that. In the back of our minds we knew that our journey to Oz could provide us the motivation we needed.

Except, we still weren't motivated enough. We were getting more 'general' activity than we had done in the UK, from being outside and walking the dog for example, but fitness? Not really. Until Sarah heard about Step Into Life through a colleague at work. SIL is a franchised company that does group personal training, outdoors. There are a variety of session types (cardio, toning, kickboxing, bootcamp, etc) and this type of outdoor, social training seemed like something we'd like. A free trial proved that we did. It's not cheap (in fact, you could say it's expensive), however we knew if we enjoyed it, we were going to make friends and get fit, it was totally worth it.

We've been going for nearly 4 months now. That's 2 cardio sessions and 1 toning session a week. David, our trainer, is excellent at his job and brings encouragement and fun to the training, rather than punishment and pain. There's a wide variety of people of all genders and ages that take part and you're encouraged to work to your own ability. This hard work has lead to us making huge fitness improvements. At our first session, I couldn't run 2km without stopping. It took me just under 11 minutes. I've now done it in 7:45. Toning and strength exercises have seen slower improvement, but we have both improved in that area too.

After being well and truly bitten by the fitness bug, we've also taken up running outside of our regular training. We've just done our first race event; a 10km run on a hilly course through the Hunter Valley Wineries. Our hard work paid off and we finished the course in 53:48 (Matt) and 1:11:51 (Sarah). 3 months ago that would have been impossible. And it doesn't stop there. On August 9th we're taking part in the City2Surf, a fun run in Sydney that goes from the CBD to Bondi Beach. That one is 14km. Then on my birthday (August 30th, don't forget!) we're doing the Lake Macquarie 10.5km. That's around the lake and is local to us, pretty much right on our door step.

We're fitter, healthier and next time you see us we'll be leaner, stronger and faster.

Back!

Sooooooo, The Huttons are back! We haven't actually updated this blog since november last year, which is terrible of us. Once the initial excitement and newness of being here wore off I guess it kind of took a backseat to establishing ourselves. Well now we're very well established and people have commented that they were reading it and it was a a good way of keeping up with what's happening.

So we'll endeavour to keep the blog up to date with news, comments and musings. If you sign up to Blogger you can comment on the blogs as well as reading them, which might be a good idea. Let us know what you think of our Aussie adventure!

After I finish writing this i'm going to send an email to everyone to let them know it's worth checking again, so hopefully that's why you're reading it. It's like a time loop! Except, not really.