South Pole

It was 2 years ago today that Ray Zahab, Richard Weber and I started out from Hercules Inlet on the coast of Antarctica and headed to the South Pole.
It's hard to fathom it's been two years already but here it is.
The journey would take 33days 23hours and 55 minutes to complete and amazingly all the effort and pain of the trip have been lost to me. I'm only flush with positive memories!

Intervals! Why?

Interval training is critical even for people training to run huge distances. You'd imagine the best training for ultra-distances would be to run for hours at the pace you plan to run at during the expedition.

The answer: yes and no.

You want lots of endurance heading in to an expedition but you don't want to go in tired. You want just enough endurance not to get injured but you still want a full tank to see it through. It's a balance.

The key is to mix LSD (long slow distance) training with high tempo work. This maintains a high level of fitness so you don't loose that edge and keeps your lactate threshold high.

For us this means 1km repeats going flat out. Painful and productive!!