What are My Life doing for us?

My Life are a specialist personal training organisation run by a group of professional trainers trying to help many Bristolians get fitter. Here's their website: http://www.mylifept.com/

Mike and I were loking for help in training for the TransAlp and we came across MyLife helping out at one of the Nailsea Running Club events. We contacted Andy Wadsworth, who runs My Life and, after a little persuasion convincing him:

1. that we were mad enough to see this through the training for the next year,
2. that we needed his help to get through this (very easy given our levels of fitness)
3. that we were serious in raising £30,000 for St Peter's hospice

...he agreed to help us. This was fantastic for our motivation at an early stage of our training.

Then came the hard bit. He set up a meeting with a specialist to measure our fitness. This involved putting on a gas mask and jumping on a running machine:

We were then made to start walking and every minute the speed was increased to a fast running pace. Once running at 12 mph, the incline was increased 2% each minute. Here's Mike mid-test looking fresh as a daisy:

What then happens is you hit your anaerobic threshold. That's when your physiology changes completely, you stop being able to take in enough oxygen to run at the speed you have, lactic acid builds up and you suddenly feel terrible. Basically you collapse.

Here's Mike just after the test. He really looks like he enjoyed it! The problem is trying to get enough oxygen back into your lungs through the mask when you are completely shattered having just had your heart rate up to its maximum.

I have to say it was very hard work, but it will be fascinating to see how our fitness improves over the next year as our training increases and our bodies adapt to the mileage we have to put in.

We'll talk more about the results of the tests once we understand them!