Jordan & Raymond Update April 24

The speaker provides updates on the progress project, including upcoming conditioning and group workout sessions. They also mention a running challenge and encourage participation. There will be a monthly map out call to discuss wins, struggles, and events. The speaker then asks for an update from Raymond, who discusses his training progress for the marathon and a recent lower back injury. They consider adjusting their marathon goal and potentially participating in another marathon after Edinburgh. Overall, the training has been going well. Hello and welcome to the next episode of the private members podcast within the progress project. Today, I have an update from me and head coach Raymond McNamara. How is it going, Raymond? Good, thanks. How are you? Good, mate. Normally, we try to do one of these once a month, just so that you guys can get an insight into what we are doing and updates on the programme. It has been a couple of months since we have done this. I think we did one in March, so there is quite a good bit to cover. Before we go into things in terms of an update on me and Raymond, I will do some updates on the programme. This Sunday, the 20th of April, we have a conditioning session at Functional Fitness at 12 o'clock to 1 o'clock. This is the first of our monthly conditioning workouts, or group workouts, as you call them, that we will be doing. Every single month, we are going to try and do it last Sunday of the month, each month, or thereabouts. That will be the first one. If you have not confirmed or have gone, let us know so that we can plan the session accordingly. We are looking forward to that. One of the things that you guys wanted was more meet-ups, and that is what we are providing. This Sunday, the 20th of April, 12 o'clock to 1 o'clock at Functional Fitness is the first workout. We have our next flex and flow session confirmed, which is 9 o'clock on Sunday 5 May. Again, we will try to keep the sessions consistent, so that you guys can get them in your calendar. That will be the next one—flex and flow—on Sunday 5 May at 9 o'clock. I also wanted to raise another point, which I have put into the announcements on WhatsApp. Colin Meikle is doing a running challenge this weekend. He is starting at 12 o'clock on Thursday 25 April and he will be finishing at Run Club on Saturday 27 April at 8 o'clock. He is doing 7k every four hours for 48 hours straight. He works out doing more than two marathons in that two-day period. That is all part of his training for the West Highland Wade challenge race at the end of May. Colin is happy for as many people as possible to get involved in the challenge with him and do some of the runs. I will be doing some with him, and a lot of other members have already confirmed with him. If you are up for that, scroll back on the announcements and let Colin know what runs you are going to help out with. If you are not going to go to any of the other runs, try to get to Run Club on Saturday if you can. That will be at 8.30 at Beaker in East Kilbride. We will finish Colin's final 7k run together. The bigger group that we can get for that, the better. It is a big challenge, which is something that I did last year. It was very tough, so all the support that we can give Colin, the better. We are looking forward to that. Finally, there will be a monthly map out call next Monday. That is Monday 29 April, at 8 pm. We will be chatting through our normal wins, struggles and challenges from the months gone, and game planning into May. We will also be chatting through events. The topic will be about big events, such as marathons, half marathons and high rocks. As you can see, over the past few weeks, events have been ticking off. I am very big on Raymond as well. Just to chat all around it, it is for everybody to know if you have never done an event, or if you have done loads and want to do more. We will go through the process of signing up for events, what to expect from events and why we think it is a good thing to do. That will be next Monday at 8 pm. That is all from the updates. If anybody has any questions on any of this, message me in the progress chat, and we will get back to you straight away. Updates are done. Raymond, can you give us a wee bit of an update on the last time we spoke? Over the past couple of months, a lot of things have happened. I do not even know whether we spoke post high rocks. I do not even know whether we have done a chat—I know that we did a podcast around our high rocks, but I do not know whether we have chatted on the private podcast post high rocks. How has the time been going in the past seven weeks? At the moment, we have done a public podcast on debriefing high rocks. As you said, since that, we have not done much. Loads and loads have been going on since. The majority have been really positive. There has been a wee bump in the road recently, so I am getting my bearings. After high rocks, there was a wee week's day load. The big focus was Edinburgh marathons. I started off with the Leeds marathon, and then we changed it because we had a lot of members doing the Edinburgh marathon. I was trying to get the body accustomed to the volume. I set a goal for myself at the start of the year, and I started off with—I think the target was 15k a week. You spoke to yourself and said that you wanted 25k. On paper, I was absolutely horrendous. There is no way that I am going to be able to do that. I started off with marathon training. In week 2, there was a half-marathon running test. I looked at that on paper and thought, oh my goodness, that looks absolutely horrendous. I chose to do an event for that, just on the topic of next week's Monday marathon. I could not recommend that enough. If I tried to do a half-marathon on a whim, like down the Strathclyde park, I would have been in a lot of pain. Obviously, you chased me for that, as did a few other clients such as Godby, Steven and Big Trish. I think that we have seen a few friendly faces. The fact that it was in an event was massive for me. I learned a lot from that, and I think that, going forward, when it comes to high-octane season halves and fulls, I will always utilise events for training runs. I think that it is really beneficial. Since then, it has been great. I have been building my running volume up by 30 or 40. Some weeks, I actually have 65k in total in a week, which is absolutely creative for me. In general, my body has handled it pretty well. Obviously, I am in charge of my running block. I have built it up by doing my stretches and keeping it on top rather than slowly incorporating strength work, because you cannot just totally eradicate strength work at all. It is going really well. I am absolutely flying. The most recent big run was last Sunday, 30k, and I got 2 hours and 42 minutes. It just felt absolutely phenomenal. Then, probably down to a wee bit of laziness and fatigue and life getting in the way, I did not really stretch after that the following day. I was doing a lower-body strength session on Thursday, which is a week from tomorrow. I was just sitting there, picking up a set of dumbbells, and I felt a wee tweak in my lower back, which has been a little bit painful for me. I have not had any flare-ups since January, before high rots. I was meeting the next day and could not put my socks on again. It was the same old story, straight to physio. It was the disc bulge again between L4 and L5. I am just working through that now, trying to remain positive. As I said, tomorrow will be a week since the injury. I am getting there. I got acupuncture the other day, and you always feel worse after that. You get a soft tissue rub, so I am starting to get a bit mobile doing my stretching exercises. We still have five weeks to go, which is good. We still have time on our side. We were going for a sub-3.45, so there will need to be a conversation between me and you on whether we should just do it for completion. Can we still go for the 3.45? As I said, I can potentially try a run on Thursday or Friday this week. My intention was to do a few runs with Colin, so I might try to do a wee easy 3k myself. If it goes well, I will smash out a 7k with Colin, but it is just baby steps now to ensure that we can do the marathon. I have a six-week lay-off after Edinburgh before the Glasgow 10k, but I am quite tempted to identify another marathon four weeks after it and go for the sub-3.45. It has been a bit of a shame. It was a fantastic seven weeks of training, probably the fittest I have ever felt in my life. However, there are loads of folk on the programme just now—nursing injuries, Ali, Gordie—who are all doing marathon training. It is part and parcel. You probably do not find many folk who will do a marathon block without picking up a few niggles. I am trying not to get too disheartened. It could be a lot worse, so we are working our way through that. As a whole, the training has been absolutely fantastic. Yes, it has been brilliant. One of the biggest things that I noticed, to be honest—I will say this on the podcast—was that, with yourself, I would have probably started your marathon training like four weeks before we did, just because it was your first marathon. I would normally go a 16-week block at least. Obviously, with High Rocks, we could not really do that, but because of the progress that you made with your run in pre-High Rocks, a 12-week period was fine. What that meant was that we probably had to increase the mileage a bit quicker than we probably would have otherwise. When you did your first half-marathon—I will just bear in mind that Raymond did his first half-marathon in the furthest that he had ever run before, which was 13 or 14km—we managed to get sub 1.55m for that first half-marathon. Raymond looked fairly ill after that, I am not going to lie. He was really, really struggling. Those last 3 or 4km were a real battle. Just from there, I was like—after that, I can remember—we had 10 weeks to a full marathon, and I was just like, I am what the plan is to run faster than that. I was in my head going, I am not 100 per cent sure if we might need to re-evaluate things here, obviously because we have only had a 12-week block. Since that, he just came on absolutely leaps and bounds. To put it in perspective, that 30km that you did on the weekend felt great. That was pretty much the exact same pace, near enough, as you did the half-marathon at Alloa, and you felt ill. You did 9km more at the same pace, which felt brilliant, as opposed to that half-marathon. In that short space of time, the build-up has been phenomenal, and you have been running really well. I was like, okay, we are back on track for this. However, you hit a nail on the head with regard to niggles and injuries. When you are training for things such as marathons—I will touch on that in the month of the map outcall next week, when we talk about events—when you train for marathons and ultra-marathons, even any run of the next 10km, and high rocks and things like that, injuries are going to be more part and parcel for us everyday people, as opposed to professional athletes. Professional athletes get injured as well, but at the same time, they have all the time in the world that they can focus on their stretching and recovery. They can go and sit in saunas all day and get massages every couple of days. They have all that constantly, so they are going to be less likely. When you are trying to do these big challenges while living everyday life, working, juggling kids, and then trying to fit in your stretching, trying to get a massage here and there when you can, it is going to be more likely that you are going to get niggles and injuries here and there. I have suffered from injuries, but it is not avoidable unless you are going to be 100 per cent on it. Even if you are 100 per cent on it and you have stretched every single day, you are still likely to get the odd niggle or the odd injury with this intense training. What it is about is identifying it straight away, stopping as soon as we feel any real pain, then getting it seen to, and then just adapting it. With myself, what we will do is keep on top of things. The one thing that has given me confidence is that, normally, with a marathon, the longest that you will go distance-wise is about 32km, and you have already ticked off a 32km win a few weeks ago. The fact that you have already got that distance in you is what is making me think, okay, he has got that distance, but what we might have to do, just seeing how the next couple of weeks go, is potentially adjust the goal from, is it a sub-3.45km, or are we just saying, right, let's just get round this, let's aim for a specific pace, but if we need to drop it, that's fine, the aim is just going to be to get round it, which might well be the case if we don't get to really train or do anything over the next three weeks, because over the next three weeks, we then get into the final two, and you don't want to be then sitting and trying to do big, massive runs at that point, so we will have a calm rate, but I think you have been a good inspiration to a lot of people in the programme around not having really done a lot of running, to then building it up really, really quickly and seeing some great progress with it. Yeah, definitely. You have been bang on there, and it is just the case of, I have probably learned that as well, just kind of maturing the age as well, that usually it is pretty dumb out and you just get raging and moping around and all that, but ultimately, it does not add to that. I will tell you that it is sub-3.45, is it going to be my last marathon? Absolutely not. I have actually really enjoyed the training for it, so it is just a case of go and enjoy doing it with yourself, doing it with clients, and then just move the goalpost a wee bit, and we will definitely get another one on the cards, whether it is this year or the marathon team next year. It is just a case of putting a big hole in the road, but at the end of the day, it is still going to get smashed at the park, unless it continues to get worse, but it is looking good. Compared to six days ago already, it is going good, but the Monday Lampic Hall will be really good for it as well, just to get more folk, because there are quite a few folk in their 70s now, and it is so frustrating. Sarah obviously skied the world in seven or eight weeks, but she has just been back running in the last two weeks if she did not go with me, so it is just so common. We do not have the luxury of five-star physios on your beck and call. You still get kids to pick up, someone to go and do your day job and stuff, so just make do with what you can. Yes, definitely. Also, on your running, you had a few wee hints of runners' high a few times in some of those morning runs. Oh, 100 per cent. I am itching to get back out to the fairs. I thought it was a myth, but it does exist. For me, personal preference, I like to get up and get my run done nice and early, so there is something about just having a big, long run and feeling good as the sun comes up. It is unbelievable, but just on not so much runners' high, just for folk who might be able to relate to this, I had a two-week period where every run just felt terrible. It was actually before that 30k. It did not matter if it was tempos, intervals, long runs—I just really struggled to get going. It does bog you down, I would say. The first four weeks, I was flying, and everyone was looking forward to it, and then I just hit this two-week lull, and I just could not get going. It is amazing how it just happens. I was actually dreading 30k, because it was the most I ran. I was like, if a 12k tempo run feels this hard, what is my 30k going to be like? Then the 30k would drown. I lost every single minute of it. It is just so funny. It is like a big rollercoaster. You just need to—when you work out, or you are running, or whatever it may be—feel good, you need to enjoy it, because two days later, for whatever reason, it could just be an absolute struggle. Seeming motivation is high, and you are feeling good. It is easy, but it is the sessions that are a slog, and you need to drag yourself to the gym that are the most important, because you still need to tick the box, but just get there and do it. Yes, definitely. That is one thing to say. No matter how good your programme is or how much you do enjoy it, most of the time, you are never going to absolutely love every single session. That is just what happens. There are going to be certain days when you feel on top of the world, and there will be other days when it is just like, that was a real slog. The ones that you do slog through are normally the ones that give you the most benefit, because you could have easily just been like, I am not going to get that done. Even just a mental battle, winning that mental battle and getting through those sessions is a big one. It is all part and parcel of it. There are ups and downs, and I am really excited for Edinburgh marathon. I just hope that everybody can get there with a bit of freshness, because, as you said, there are a few wee niggles kicking about, but with five weeks to go, we should all be good. No, I am really looking forward to that, which is actually my next main focus as well now, after high rocks. Since you last spoke, we did doubles high rocks. Back then, it was still a bit dodgy with regards to running. The fact that we are not doing high rocks right now is probably beneficial, because when I was trying to train for the high rocks, which is what it was like back then, it was a bit of a nightmare with all the different movements and stuff, whereas running is a lot more manageable. You are just getting easy runs in. It is not as taxing on the back, so hopefully that can bode well. After high rocks, my back was a wee bit sore after doubles high rocks. It was not back to square one, but it set back a wee bit, and I had seven weeks and six weeks or so until just Berlin at the weekend. My training has been slightly different to the guys in the lead-up to Edinburgh, because I have had high rocks to focus on. We have been training ranger-style, getting my high rocks sessions done. I have pulled back on the long runs, so I have not managed to join the guys in the 28km and 30km and stuff like that, just because it does not really tie in too much with high rocks training. I have got high rocks for Berlin picked up at the weekend, and I was really happy with that. My first solo attempt, I managed to get 101.56, so just above 62, which I was delighted with. It was the first European event that was actually outdoors, and that made a massive difference. I can only compare it to Glasgow, which is the only other one that I have ever done. You will confirm as well, it can feel quite claustrophobic at times, very hot, very sweaty, like air, not fresh. I thought that was quite tough. It is almost like you know yourself when you walk into a gym, depending on how big or small it is. It is stuffy, because ultimately there is potentially 20, 50 or 100 folk training, and high rocks is a different kettle of fish, so there is body everywhere. Everyone is breathing at their root. It was crazy. They have obviously air conned it, but it was just so dry. Bizarrely enough—you will probably touch on it—there were so many folk complaining about being outside, asking for good things. I could not think of anything better than being outside. The full thing was open air, even the stations. It was like an airport hangar. It looked unbelievable. It could not have been better, to be honest. It seems good to have. Yes, definitely. It was obviously a risk for them to take, because you just do not know what the weather is going to be like. If it was torrential rain and blowing a gale, it might not have worked well, to be honest. Thankfully, it was actually dry. There was a wee bit of wind, but nothing major. It was a wee bit breezy, but nothing major. It was dry, so it worked out perfectly for them. Because of that, originally, when they announced it was outside, a lot of people complained. They might have been thinking, what if it is pouring rain? What if it is this or that? We actually got the offer of a refund, or to transfer a ticket to Hamburg later in the year. I was buzzing to try it outside, and what a difference it made. I do not know whether that made a difference to my time or pace. It is hard to tell, but what it did make a difference was how fresh the air was, how much I felt. It just felt less claustrophobic and allowed me to probably run more to what I am used to. I am used to running outside, so it felt more like what I am used to. I was really good. I really enjoyed it. The solos were a bit different to the doubles. I was doing a bit different. I was going to do a recap podcast on it, but I was going faster on my runs and taking the zones a bit slower. You are doing it all yourself, so you have to try and manage it. However, in terms of how it went, it went really well. As I said before, if I could get similar to the 105 mark, I would be happy to do even better than that. I was delighted. I do not think I have qualified for the world championships. I came ninth in my age group and the top four qualified. Initially, I thought that I had missed it by a good few, but diving deeper into it, in high rocks, you can check other competitors' results in high rocks and previous high rocks. I think that I found that four of the people above me have already qualified for the world championships from previous races. If you remove those four, then that would put me down to fifth. If one other person says that they cannot make it, or if they have qualified and I just cannot find them, then I could get that invite. We will wait and see. It would be good to get invited to that. Now, we have good experience around high rocks. Anybody who is thinking about it, including myself and Rhiannon, have both done a doubles. I have now got the solo experience. We have also got Sarah to lean on, who is going to be going to the world championships with the doubles experience. We are building up our experience and authority around high rocks. I know that we have already got a few people booked up to Birmingham and Dublin, so anybody who is thinking of future events, we have you covered now. It is something that will be big on the schedule inside the progress project going forward. It is just a really great event. I could not promote it enough, to be honest. Glasgow was excellent, and Berlin was excellent as well. That has been my training since then. Things have gone well. My back is feeling a lot better, even after that full solo effort. I am not really feeling a major aftereffect. I am feeling good and ready to go into a big weekend of running at the end of May. I will be pacing Colin at the West Highland Way on Saturday and then pacing Raymond at Edinburgh Marathon on Sunday. I have a big weekend of running. I am pretty much using it as an ultra-marathon training for my next event, which is Run the Blades in July, which I know a few of the members are doing as well. My focus is to turn into running for the next few months. We have not got a high rock until October now, so it is going to be running predominantly for me over the coming months. That is where you can update on me and on Raymond as well. I am really looking forward to the months ahead coming into the better weather. Lots of people have got things coming up. We have got good meet-ups going up with the big day out starting in June. Finally, I want to give a big shout-out to the guy who did the photoshoot. That was a great event last week. Everybody showed up in terrible shape and what a day it was. We are looking forward to that. That is something that we will be doing every year. We are going to make it our annual bring the photoshoot, but that was another really great event, so well done to everybody involved in that. As usual, I think it was just to surpass our expectations. You know that the photoshoots are going to be good and it is going to bring a great technique, but more people have done it this year. Last year, it was only Sarah who did it. This year, there were five or six girls doing it, so I definitely inspired a lot of folk. To be fair, for the guys and girls who did it, what better time? Summer is just approaching. It is the best shape of their lives. Now, everyone is talking about maintaining that shape, which you can do, and it will see them right through to summer. For next year, it will take a few months to get time aligned and stuff, but I could not recommend it enough. I have not done it myself as well. Excellent. Brilliant. That is pretty much a big update around the programme, around how myself and Raymond's training is going and what is next. I am looking forward to catching up with everybody next week at the workout and then at the month-to-the-month outcall. Is there anything else that you wanted to add, Raymond, before we finish up? No. All good, mate. I look forward to the big summer again. Definitely. All right, guys. If anybody has any questions off the back of it, just message me in your progress chat and we will speak to you soon. Cheers, mate. Cheers, mate.