High intensity mix of bodyweight exercises and sprints at the Hillseeker Wednesday night running session

Lunges using TRX Suspension Training®

I arrived at Saalsporthalle last Wednesday evening for the group coached running session not knowing what coach Jeff had in store for us.  He is always full of surprises (good ones of course).

Every session begins with a warm up, and during the warm up I got the chance to meet another blogger in the group, Christine Syrad.  She sometimes blogs about Jeff's coaching sessions too.  By strange coincidence she also guest blogs for Newly Swissed, which is where my post on running in Switzerland was recently published.  For anyone not living in Zürich let me tell you that Zürich seems like a very small place in terms of the number of coincidences like this that occur on a regular basis.

Anyway back to the point....the session.....

After the warm up and a few sprints through the agility ladder that was laid out for us, we waited for Jeff to explain the rest of the evening's training protocol.  I was a little distracted at first, because for some reason someone had discarded a bag of weed on the floor next to where Jeff was standing.  For certain people a bag of weed may have been a great find (and an interesting evening's entertainment), but for a group of runners about to perform an hour of intense exercise it was simply kicked to the side, out of the way.

Distractions over, Jeff informed us that he had designed a high intensity circuit involving bodyweight exercises and sprints to "induce fatigue quickly".  There were a few worried faces after hearing those last few words I can tell you.

The circuit that he had designed for us involved doing 16 lunges using TRX Suspension Training® equipment (8 on each leg), running a short distance to the stairs in front of the Saalsporthalle and sprinting 3 times up and down them, running to another location where we had to perform 12 bodyweight squats, then sprinting back to the start point.

The idea was for each person to do as many laps of the circuit as possible within a time limit of 20 minutes.  The average number of circuits completed by the group in the time limit was 4.

If you pushed yourself to your limit, that was tiring enough by itself.  But just in case we still had some energy left, Jeff did a pair exercise with us to round the session off.  The idea was for it to be a fun competition, with people competing to be the first pair to complete 3 sets of 5 "special Jeff burpees", a short sprint and 5 jump squats.

Some of the group then went for some beers, whilst Femi (who is training for the UTMB®) went off for another run wearing a 9kg weighted vest.  My preference after an intense session is usually to head home and rest, but I promise I will come out with you for a beer one time though guys.  One beer or two won't kill me!

Femi wearing a weighted vest