Hard running

29 September, 2008 | 22:09

Another gruelling training day began at the National Tennis Centre at 10:30 am, Monday.

The familiar light blue service of the indoor courts spells tennis training, but the athletic spikes are a clue to the afternoon session...

Yep, Monday would have more than just tennis in store, but in any event that's how it started.

The guys hit for over two hours in the morning, with Andy working on different patterns of play using cones as targets.

You tend to find every other rally is punctuated by the sound of a cone going crashing across the floor...

The competition between both of them to hit cones increases the more they get into a groove. At this point, Matty 'Treacle' Little decided to make a point by putting out the top of a dustbin...

That got the hackles up, and it wasn't long before a few more cones were scattered across the floor. Same could be said of the serves; each one that hit its target getting a round of applause from the junior players watching from the balcony.

After all that they took a good hour or so for lunch, wolfing down huge plates of food to get ready for a heavy afternoon running session.

The initial plan was to bash out a load of 400 metre repetitions at the track in Wimbledon, but with the gates to the stadium firmly locked they decamped to the gym to bash out some 40/20's.

Whilst there's a lot of difference between a 400 metre session and 40/20's, it's fair to say that both are seen as necessary evils. They don't look forward to either, but feel good once they're done.

Not a lot of talking gets done in the build up to either...

For those of you who don't know what a 40/20 is, it's a type of interval training. You select your speed, select your incline, then run for 40 seconds, followed by (exactly) 20 seconds rest. You then do that 15 times.

It's a cornerstone of the physical maintenance Andy does during the season; if winter training is about 'getting ahead' on fitness, these routines are about keeping yourself at competition level....

Keeping Andy company in all of the nasty running sessions is his trainer Matty Little. To Matty's great credit - he's from the 'whatever pain he goes through, so will I' school.

At the start, there's the occasional exchange of banter between Andy and trainer Treacle, but that soon disappears; just hanging in there becomes the major focus...