Category Archives: Fitness

Fitness & Freshness

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There’s a premium Strava feature called Fitness & Freshness that I am a little addicted to. I love seeing the chart shoot up after a hard workout, and I fret when I see it coming back down again. But when you think about it, this makes no sense at all. Everyone knows, you don’t get stronger or fitter in training but in recovery. Infact you could even say that the entire purpose of training is to trigger the body going into a recovery mode where it overcompensates and that’s how gains occur. But F&F shows the uptick immediately on completing the session, and then it starts to go down the next day, but after a hard session it’s on the next day and the day after that the benefits start to materialise, biologically.

Secondly according to F&F right now I am the fittest I have ever been since starting to use Strava and honestly… I’m just not.

Upcoming Running

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To be updated as I add/complete more things:

Date Event Done
17th April Flitwick 10k ✓
15th May Paras’ 10 (run) ✓
30th May London 10k ✗
12th June St Albans ½ Marathon ✓
9th July Fan Dance with TTE. Basic kit only tho’!  ✓
4th September Paras’ 10 (TAB)  ✓
14th Jan 2017 Hellrunner

First time at the Paras and the St Albans, but I have done Hellrunner 4× before, the last time was many years ago tho’, and Flitwick and London 10ks once before each. The Fan Dance will also be a new experience!

I have taken January and February to cross-train, have done quite a lot of swimming in the pool, working my way up to 1½ miles, but from March 1st my focus is going to be back on running. Then another period of cross-training after the ½ Marathon, I think, before training to run in boots with a Bergen…

Fitness Goals

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Well we are into 2016 now, I’d better write down my fitness goals for the year before we get too far in! I’ll post a followup near the end of the year. There are a couple of all-round fitness standards I have come across on the Internet, both from the American military, the first is the entry test for Ranger School:

  • 49 pressups
  • 59 sit-ups
  • 6 chin ups† ✓
  • Run 2 miles in 15 minutes
  • Run 5 miles in 40 minutes

And the other is the Navy SEAL PST:

  • Swim 500 yards‡ in 12½ minutes
  • 50 pressups
  • 50 sit-ups
  • 10 pull ups†
  • Run 1½ miles in 10½ minutes

Obviously I’m never going to attend either, but they’re not bad benchmarks for a 40-year-old geezer such as myself. I’ll do them individually too rather than as a single event, and those are the minimum scores, I gather that real candidates do far better, but if I reach all of them by the end of the year I’ll be happy. There are other standards of course, but these I can train for and measure myself against easily with what I have on hand, no special facilities required, just the local gym/pool and the park.

What’s this got to do with diving? Well I haul a lot of heavy gear around, and fitness improves SAC and tilts the odds of deco in your favour, so it’s all helpful. And I don’t want to start a third blog 🙂


† Underhand vs overhand grip in Rangers vs SEALs
‡ I’ll do metres, the local pool is 25m