Coming from a gym background, I can back squat fine but my longest ever run is 10km and that was rough. The format is eight one kilometre runs between the stations, so on paper it is a distance I could already cover. I have sixteen weeks and can train five days a week. Do I train it like an 8km race or is that the wrong mental model entirely?
Wrong model. You never run 8km in that race, you run 1km eight times with your heart rate already near the ceiling and your forearms wrecked from a carry. The specific skill is starting to run when your legs feel like they belong to someone else, and you can only train that by putting a run immediately after a station.
Once a week early on, twice a week from about week eight. The rest should be plain easy running because the aerobic base is what stops the wheels coming off after station five.
So compromised running is the whole game. How often would you do that kind of session in sixteen weeks?
Do more plain running than the strength crowd will tell you. I trained the first one as a hybrid event with barely 20km a week and faded badly, then did the second with 40km a week and largely the same station work and took eleven minutes off. The stations do not get much faster with training in a few months, the running does.
True, and the sled is technique as much as strength. Low body angle, short steps, do not stand up. Worth practising even once if your gym has one.
This depends heavily on where you start. Coming from the gym like the poster, the sled push is often the thing that ends people, and no amount of easy running fixes a sled you cannot move.
Sixteen weeks is plenty. Two easy runs, one interval session on legs that are already tired, one full station simulation every second week, and keep lifting twice. The thing that will surprise you on the day is the wall balls, not the running.
Practise the transitions, they are not free. Walking the length of a hall between a station and the run track, finding your kettlebells, getting your breathing down before you start moving again. I lost several minutes across the day to standing around deciding what to do next.
@chef_deglaze · 3d ago
Numbers from my first one: I could run 5km in 22 minutes fresh, and in the race my kilometre splits ran between 4:55 and 6:20 with the slow ones after the sled and the lunges. Total run time was about 45 minutes across the eight, and my finish was a bit over 90 minutes. The gap between fresh pace and race pace is the entire story, and it is bigger for gym-strong people than for runners.
Reply
Report