Over Easter I went to Normandy for a week. My grandmother owns a traditional thatched farmhouse there, it's like my refuge. When I'm there life slows down a beat or five. It's bliss.
It would be easy to take a break from training and enjoy eating cheese, but with my London to Brighton run looming on the horizon I wanted to use it as an opportunity to boost my fitness and enjoy everything I love about Normandy at the same time. As am sure is the same with most families, a large part of our family holidays revolves around food. We love to talk about what we're going to cook, spend hours preparing in the kitchen and then have meals that last late into the night filled with wine, story telling and often lots of laughter.
My training program over the week involved cycling, running and interval training in the garden with Charley. You don't need a gym to keep fit, I love to utlise my natural surroundings and make my own gym. I would trade the treadmill for open roads anyday!
On Good Friday, we explored the beautiful countryside and went for an hour run. In that part of the world, we can run for all that time without seeing a soul and passing by very few cars. Just cows and fields full of luscious green grass and oil seed rape. Living in London, this is a rareity for me and I love the space to think and just run.
To the amusement of my family, we then used the swingset and surrounding grass to complete our workout with a 30 minute HIIT (high intensity interval training) session. Here's what we did:
- 10X pressups with knee to opposite elbow
- 30X jumping jacks
- 15X pull ups
- 30X jumping jacks
Repeat 3 times
- 10X double leg raises
- 20X situp cycles on each side
- 1 minute plank
Repeat 3 times
Death by burpees!
- Do 10 burpees in a minute then 10 seconds rest
- Repeat each time adding one more burpee
- Continue until you can't do the allotted amount of burpees in one minute
Having not done any long runs in training, we used the Easter break as an opportunity to prepare mentally and physically for the 60 miles we would be running a week later. On Easter Sunday we did a 3 hour run covering just under 20 miles. We left home, ran for 1hr 30, turned around and tried to run home quicker. It worked! We kept the pace low enough to maintain a conversation throughout. Not that being able to chat was our objective, although we did the whole way as the road is such a good listener! It was this pace we were aiming for, our all day pace. Our aim was to practise maintaining a steady speed, find the right running style to minimise risk of injury and get into the zone so we knew we could continue that for hours on end.
Of course we wanted to earn our Easter chocolate too!
If you're like me, then you probably do a bit of indulging when you go away for the weekend or on holiday. This means it's important to balance the delicious food and great wine with getting your heart rate up and maintaining the form you work so hard for back home. To create a short HIIT workout, you only need a small patch of grass and a little bit of determination!
Ideas for utlising your natural gym:
- Running up and down stairs
- Pull ups on railings/swing set
- Tricep dips on the bench
- Jumping onto low walls
- Sprints
- Burpees/Pressups/Situps/Squats/Lunges/Plank
- Piggyback carrying (if you have a training buddy)
The world is your oyster! Have fun x