MicroTA's great leap forward

I'm sure that it is right and proper to be immensely proud of your children, so I'm going to go ahead and do exactly that :-). Micro isn't always the most willing participant at Run Club, often whinging as only a 15 year old can. Since the end of the Footy season, the only exercise that he gets is at Run Club, and there's been a clear tendency for him to slow down and take it easy.

Last week during the track session, he asked "can I run with you next week?" (ie at the 3k time trial). Now I do have to admit that that provided me with a bit of a conundrum, as I was soooo close to the 12 minute mark last time and I had a feeling that I could get under it at last this week. However, I was pretty sure that MicroTA would be unlikely to get within a bull's roar of that kind of time. His best so far was 12:43, and that was months ago. Anyhow, when he asked me again last night while we were warming up, I couldn't say anything but yes.

I knew from last week's run that he was quite capable of the speed (damn those long legs he inherited from his mother!), but I wasn't sure that he could carry the distance. It was an absolutely perfect night - still, and cool but not cold. I figured that I try to take him through in 4:05s and see what happened. Well, I got a huge shock at the end of the 1st k when Tim said 3:50! It just didn't feel that fast at all. I immediately said to Micro that we'd slow it down a bit and so we ran the second in 4:15. It was about this time that I noticed his body starting to rock around and his breathing getting a bit erratic, and to be honest I pretty much expected that he'd drop off before long.

I watched him carefully, talked to him incessantly and made sure that he was running beside, not behind, me. To give him his due, he hung in there even though I know that he was hurting, and we brought it home in a flat 4:00 for a extraordinary new pb of 12:05 - 40 seconds off his previous, and minutes off what he's been doing lately. (I was really pleased too, in that while it was not a pb for me, it was only 4 seconds off it, and I was talking all through the last k and still had heaps in the tank at the end. Pretty happy with that).

Tiger angel's evening was no less extraordinary. She had the second of her Hepatitis injections yesterday, and with hindsight probably shouldn't have run (but hindsight's a wonderful thing, isn't it :-). Notwithstanding the jab, she proceeded to run the fastest 2k she's ever done, and then only missed her 3k pb by 10 seconds when her body started to disintegrate in the last k. Not a bad week, with a best ever time on the Bike on Wednesday and a new best for 2k on Thursday, and this in a phase when she's not supposed to be achieving anything! Maybe TA doesn't stand for Tiger Angel at all; maybe it's Terrific Achiever, or Totally Awesome. Any way you look at it, she's amazing :-)

sfG