Double Runthroughs
I am tired. Not like a regular, I didn’t get enough sleep kind of tired, but just plain exhausted. Let m goe explain.
As a competitive figure skater, it’s pretty commonplace to practice your program every time you hit the ice for practice. Well, any GOOD skater should do that. My coach told me that I needed to up it a notch. Rather than run my program once, she asked me to start running them twice. We call these double runthroughs. And folks, they are very, very tiring.
Imagine sprinting for 2 minutes and 50 seconds. Then after a short break, doing it again. I’m sure that seasoned runners and other elite athletes will have no problem doing this, but for an average person, this is really difficult to do.
For the past few practices, this is what I’ve been doing. I’ll step on the ice, skate around for a few minutes and go straight into my first program runthrough. Then I will give myself a 5 minute break to grab water and slow my heart rate down and do the second runthrough.
It’s a good exercise to build up stamina. However, the second runthrough is generally not going to be as good as the first because my legs feel like jelly. I’m hoping that as I keep up this practice habit, my runthroughs will become easier and less taxing. Then, the week of competition, we’ll scale it back and only run the programs once per practice, and perhaps only once that week.
Send extra oxygen, a masseuse, and some energy bars my way!