*Doing a Cooper test
I had some good fun listening to one of Andy Huberman’s podcast (so long, so geeky, so precise!) and aside from generally marvelling at the format - I’m a newby to these long form, highly detailed explorations - I learnt some good stuff about assessing fitness and lots of pleasing minutiae about steady state and capillary growth.
One of the pleasures I realised I was getting from this is the joy of listening to Americans talk science. This is something of an intersecting Venn for me. I’ve long enjoyed American’s skill in talking - this may sound facetious, it’s not meant to be. They seem to learn rhetoric and oral delivery in a way that us brits don’t, and I’m counting the famous independent/public school ‘polish’ here. The latter is a kinda brute force politesse, the Americans seem way more surgical, and I think it’s impressive. Anyway add this to the precision with which scientists who are good communicators can use, and it’s a joy to listen to, for me anyway. Not sure how anyone keeps up with the output (they are Long) but perhaps people graze on them.
(Talking of articulate voices on the radio, I heard Fiona Hill Reith lectures and I cannot say how much of a joy it was to hear an articulate County Durham accent on the radio. Doing the Reith lectures! So good. She grew up 20 miles down the road from me, and went to Bishop Barrington School in Bishop Auckland which was the rival school to where my dad taught physics and chemistry. Her biography took the phrase of something her dad had said to her as a teenager, regarding the long term career future for her in the north east: ‘There is nothing for you here’. Sadly I don’t think things have changed much)
One of the baseline for testing fitness that Andy Galpin talked about is the Cooper test. This means running as far as you can in 12 minutes. I gave it a go today. A nice slow warm up for 18 minutes to get to the canal, then off we go. I’d thought sticking around 8 minutes was do-able. And that’s what I did. It was hard enough, and my HR was steady around 189 🥵 and there was some unseemly gasping: all signs of a good run! I covered dead on 1.5 miles. On my way home I saw a heron.
I stuck it in the race time predictor and it came out as a 2hour half marathon. I was pleased with how it felt - I felt like I was running hard, at a manageable pace (only manageable for about 12 minutes it tuned out). Simultaneously it’s quite a bit slower than I think I could have done it before my op.
But hey ho. I only started running again in September. This time a year ago I was still on opiates, tending to a massive scar, and going for V E R Y slow perambulates round the block before coming back and settling in for my first of 2 naps. Actually this time last year I think I was in hospital with covid. Anyway, you get the picture, it’s ok and Im very grateful Im running.
Jon is encouraging me to do a half in May, but it feels too early. Im not sure. I’ve been looking into @trackclubbabe’s running program and the general advice seems to be get fast and then get fit, so I’m tempted to wait to do a longer race til later in the summer. We’ll see.