52 Lives

Cooper test is a running test where you run as far as you can in 12 minutes. It was developed back in 1968 by Kenneth H. Cooper. Like many other sport activities, the test was introduced first for US military use. I was introduced to this test in secondary school and afterwards I took the test in an ice hockey summer camp and in the army. My personal best is still the 2800 m which I ran in the first time Worst result is 2510 m, which I was able to run couple of months ago…

Along the way I’ve been talking with my friends about running 3000 meters in the test. That would be a dream come true, since the talking has been going on for about 10 years now. I think that with proper training this goal is achievable. Do I see my first 52Lives challenge here…?

Yep.

Knowing what it takes

Cooper test is an exciting test since it tests your speed and endurance. The 12 minute limit is set so that it’s not only about the speed, you also need to have good endurance. There’s a table of results for age groups 20-50+ below and as you can see, 3000 meters is a very good result! I found the table from Wikipedia, here’s the link if you want to check out the other tables also.

So basically what is needed to succeed in this challenge is to develop speed and endurance. I will later explain these in my training plan.

Equipment

I will trust in my good and well served running accessories in this challenge:

• Nike running shoes. They are just a little bit small for my feet, but lately I have come in to that conclusion that the size thing is only in my head… I cut my nails and wear thin running socks, so the shoes fit nicely.
• Nike running shorts. I had terrible, terrible rash in my thighs in the past when I was running with boxers or any other underwear. During my runs my thighs would touch each other and in one hour I would have both thighs burning red. Ouch! Then I bought these Nike Dri-Fit shorts that fit tight and I didn’t need to suffer of painful thighs anymore!
• Polar’s S410 heart rate monitor. Now here’s an electronic device that I believe has a personality! Once I started to run with a HR monitor, it was like I was going for a run with a friend. You know, you don’t have to just run by yourself thinking how lonely you are and how long way you still have to run. With a HR monitor you have something nice to think about (Uh, that was a pretty exhausting hill… what’s my heart rate now? That HIGH?!?) and that small piece of high-end technology knows other tricks, too! Altogether, in this challenge the monitor’s clock will be a big help since I have a time limit to watch.
• Training book. Goals to be achieved, so better to keep book of the efforts made and gains!

Steps

Obviously I cannot achieve the 3000 m limit in just 5 days, so I have to divide the goal for a longer period of time. In this case my achievement estimate is 10 weeks. That means I need to run 50 meters more every week. It would be time consuming (and painful ) to run Cooper test every week, so I will do it every 2 weeks. This way I need to run 100 meters more in every test.

This challenge will consist of 10 lives (10 weeks). The basic week would look like this:

• Day 1: Fast paced run, 20-40 min.
• Day 2: Rest
• Day 3: Normal paced run, 30 min.
• Day 4: Interval training, 10-12 cycles.
• Day 5: Rest
• Day 6: Long normal paced run, 60 min.

As you noticed, the 5 day challenge takes 6 calendar days I still think of it as a 5 day challenge since every week consists of 4-5 days of training. Normal weeks, like the above, takes 4 days and every second week when I run the Cooper test, it’s a 5 day week.

Conclusion

I have now done the basic planning for the following 10 weeks, now it’s only about following the plan and finding the time for training! I’m really looking forward to beat my record of 2800 m and go even further to reach the 3000 m limit.

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