Hello everyone,
I am getting ready to take the ASTB next month and have been getting myself back into good physical shape preparing for a shot at OCS. Planks I easily score into the Excellent category. With pushups I can barely get into the Good category currently with good form, but I am not too worried about upping those numbers. I was running about 2.5-3 miles a day, 6 days a week for some time (over half a year) until I hurt my hamstring back in October and unfortunately I have had lingering issues with my hamstring ever since which has really sidelined me from being able to perform any running. It really hasn't gotten any better and so I will finally be seeing a doctor about it in 2 weeks where Im expecting them to give me a shot (really bad knot in the muscle that wont go away) and physical therapy. Although I really enjoyed my daily running I wasn't particularly fast with it (1.5 miles in 11-12 minutes), and now that I have been unable to keep myself conditioned for the past 2 and a half months I really fear that it could take some time to get back to acceptable numbers. I was wondering if anyone in these forums basically had to start running from scratch to prepare for OCS and how long it took?
Okay on a real note. First thing. You haven’t even taken the ASTB. Idk if you’ve seen how things are going with aviation selection boards and OCS ship dates, but you ain’t getting to Newport anytime soon. So you have time. Second. 1.5 miles in 11-12 min is a pace of 7:40 to 8 min per mile is good, and running 2.5-3 miles at that pace is good too. However, if you’re running all of your 6 runs a week at that pace, I’m honestly not surprised you got injured. The bulk of your runs have to be easy runs, unless you’re an advance-elite runner, I highly doubt your easy paces are under 8:30. I run around 35 miles a week and my 10 mile easy pace is 8:45 on a cold, non humid, non windy day (my 1.5 mile is 9:30 for reference). So once you start running again, if you wanna keep your 6 runs format, I would limit it to 2 fast runs, 4 easy runs (I mean EASY, as in you should be able to have a conversation…less that 155 bpm roughly).
Moreover. The exercises they recommended you are good, like the pushups, burpess, leg lifts and shit. HOWEVER, I would add to that rows, pullups, facepulls and band pullaparts. If you don’t, and you over do it, you might end up looking like my good old boy Quasimodo, and potentially be DQ’d cuz of a hunch back (one of my OCS roomates is living the SWO life because of this same reason)
“But David! What about OCS? We cannot do any of those pulling motions there!”
Well thanks for asking Alice! ☝️ You can take resistance bands to OCS and do all of this back/rotator cuff extravaganza whenever you got time, I did, and so did many others.
Take it as you will, just trying to help