WC Squad Meets in CA to do the Beep Test
The World Cup squad flew into the Bay Area this past weekend (July 15-16) for another training session. It was just on Saturday (because Saturday's a rugby day!), but a long Saturday it was (9am - 6pm).
We met at Stanford's rugby stadium for a day of drills and technical work with some specialist coaches. The forwards spent time with Liz Kirk and Alex Williams, the backs with Jen Crawford and Krista McFarren. We did a lot of decision-making and learning to read each other better.
However, the highlight for the day was our very first activity - the BEEP TEST (aka bleep test). This is one of the most dreaded fitness tests and we had to do it because many of us hadn't submitted our workout journal ( click here to see our training program) to the coaching staff and it was a sign that we needed to take a request from the coaching staff seriously.
For those of you who have never had to do it, consider yourselves lucky. It's supposed to test your VO2Max (the amount of Oxygen that the athlete can consume per unit of body mass) and I guess that shows how fit you are. Essentially it's 10+ minutes of steady running between cones 20 meters apart and there's an audio tape with beeps that get closer and closer. You have to make it to the other side by the next beep and you keep going until you're sprinting and your legs feel like jello.
As much as we didn't like doing it, we all had personal best scores and it helped create team unity in sweating through it together. Ellie, Pam, and Baja were particularly impressive with the highest scores for the team.
Just as an aside, as I was searching for a link to Stanford's field I found a site that mentions the tours that the Stanford Women's Team (click on "Tours") have done. I was fortunate enough to be invited to tag along on their Sept 2001 tour to Fiji and Samoa and was pleasantly surprised to find some pictures up there. You might even be able to spot me if you view the slideshow!
We met at Stanford's rugby stadium for a day of drills and technical work with some specialist coaches. The forwards spent time with Liz Kirk and Alex Williams, the backs with Jen Crawford and Krista McFarren. We did a lot of decision-making and learning to read each other better.
However, the highlight for the day was our very first activity - the BEEP TEST (aka bleep test). This is one of the most dreaded fitness tests and we had to do it because many of us hadn't submitted our workout journal ( click here to see our training program) to the coaching staff and it was a sign that we needed to take a request from the coaching staff seriously.
For those of you who have never had to do it, consider yourselves lucky. It's supposed to test your VO2Max (the amount of Oxygen that the athlete can consume per unit of body mass) and I guess that shows how fit you are. Essentially it's 10+ minutes of steady running between cones 20 meters apart and there's an audio tape with beeps that get closer and closer. You have to make it to the other side by the next beep and you keep going until you're sprinting and your legs feel like jello.
As much as we didn't like doing it, we all had personal best scores and it helped create team unity in sweating through it together. Ellie, Pam, and Baja were particularly impressive with the highest scores for the team.
Just as an aside, as I was searching for a link to Stanford's field I found a site that mentions the tours that the Stanford Women's Team (click on "Tours") have done. I was fortunate enough to be invited to tag along on their Sept 2001 tour to Fiji and Samoa and was pleasantly surprised to find some pictures up there. You might even be able to spot me if you view the slideshow!
posted by Lee Knight at 8:24 PM
1 Comments:
Do you have any idea what ballpark "good" bleep scores are? (ie what scores for forwards, backs, couch potatoes should aim for?)
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