Hard Times!

I am now two and a half weeks into my winter training, and every day I am learning so much. Its much different here at Loughborough compared to Bath, as the whole centre here is geared towards athletics. I am finally getting a hang on the many different drills we have to do, and I am putting together some good sessions both on the gym and the track.

My shins have been a bit sore recently. This normally happens when I start back training, and I usually don't worry too much about it, but today I had to stop running for the first time ever because of the shin pain. I am going to see the Dr tomorrow, and hopefully it isn't anything more serious than a bit of muscle damage (I don't want it to be a stress fracture!), because I don't want to miss any training just as I start to get going.

Finally, it was my 24th Birthday the weekend just gone, so maybe I am just getting old!

Start of the Long, Hard Slog

Currently I am finding it very hard to walk thanks to my friend Mr. DOMS. DOMS stands for delayed-onset muscle soreness, and it is where the muscle fibres are damaged due to encountering training loads that they haven’t experienced before. After the athletics competition season, where training loads are low, and a nice three-week rest, starting back into winter training causes a lot of muscle damage. Its nothing to worry about, and will generally ease in time, but it isn’t a lot of fun at all!

This week I moved up to Loughborough to start training with my new group. It really is a big change. My new coach is big on running technique, something that I have never really worked on before, so training involves lots of drills that I am not very good at. There is also the addition of hurdle drills, again something that I have never done before, and am not very good at. There are loads of new exercises in the gym for me to get my head round, some of which I am not very good at. My new training group are used to all the different exercises and drills, and so they are experts at them. This leaves me feeling pretty inadequate for most of the training session! However, with time I will get better at the exercises, and hopefully start to beat my group at them. This is all part of the reason that I moved; new exercises and a new challenge to change things up a bit. I’m very excited about the changes I am making, and hopefully the improvements I am making, so hopefully next season will be much better than the one just past.