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.