A pretty good few days (for sfG, not TA)

TA is back (great rejoicing in the TA/Gnome household :-) ). When I picked her up off the plane on Friday morning she looked like death (slightly) warmed up, but she appeared to improve through the day. Unfortunately, things are two steps forward, once step back at the moment, but hopefully those two-steps will become three, four and five before long. I'll leave it to her to report on what it's like from inside the death mask, and also on why the physio has just put her on an indefinite running moratorium {muted sounds of extreme frustration from the background}.

Run Club on Thursday was a pyramid track session, with 10 minutes of 1m on, 1m off at the peak. I didn't push it, but it felt OK. However, my abs reminded me that they haven't done any abs-specific work for a month, and they felt it.

I had a rest on Friday, then, as this is a 'down' week, took it easy with a 5.5k on Saturday morning. Ended up doing it at 5:13, which was faster than it felt (nice when that happens).

This morning was the rematch with the SMC 1/2M course at Smithfield. This time I had some significant advantages - a) it was cool and still, b) I know the course now, and c) I've had 4 weeks to obsess about what happened last time :-). My major priorities were to cope with the hill in the middle of the course more effectively, and keep my concentration together through the whole race. By running a steadier, more controlled race, the hill was no problem (in fact, I overtook a couple of people up it) and I had plenty in the bank to raise the pace in the last 3 ks and do a fair sprint towards the end. Result was a 2 minute pb (98:45).

I learned two lessons today.
#1 is to be careful with the water sachets. The first two times I took sachets, I got a large squirt of water down my wind pipe, resulting in a coughing fit (not much good when you're trying to breathe, and also a fair bit of swallowed air. I was feeling a bit sick in the stomach around 10k which I ascribed to having taken too much water, but when I let loose a few enormous burps I immediately felt much better, and was able to take on a decent drink at the last two stations, which helped the run home.
#2 was that I didn't use every ounce of run today, so independent of improvements through training, it is still open to me to make some (albeit minor) improvements through just pushing a little harder consistently right through the whole race. I'm sure that my body can cope with it, but I don't know whether my head could. Having said that, next month at SMC is 25k, so I won't be trying to push obscenely hard anyway.

Total for week - 55k
Next week - long run will be 24 or 25k, total in low 60's.

sfG