tiger angel's well-earned break

Tiger angel's indefinite running moratorium continues. At this stage, Dr Pain is not even commenting on when a return may be on the cards, so she's been faithfully doing her stretching exercises and not running, and we'll see what the good Dr has to say next week.

Given TA's action-packed last quarter of the year followed by the trip to Cambodia and her return with whatever lurgies she managed to pick up, it was clear that she needed a holiday more than anything else - a good, sleep in, lie around and do nothing type of break. Unfortunately, we could only manage 3 days, but 3 days is better than nothing and I'm pretty sure that it helped. With a bit of luck, she'll continue taking it easy for a little while, even though life resumes exactly where it left off...

Tuesday - I couldn't get leave, so I commuted to work on Tuesday & Wednesday from where we were staying at Terrigal. Hence, my runs this week were all in new territory. I was only intending to do about 5k or so in deference to my Sunday morning niggles, but after finding that I couldn't get from Terrigal to Avoca around the rocks because it was high tide (and thus having to clamber all the way back), and then getting lost and ending up stumbling through mud flats around the back of the lagoon, I ended up doing 9.6k. Niggles no problem.

Wednesday - The intent here was to do around 12k easy; go exploring again, but not quite so adventurously this time :-). Mission accomplished with 12.3k at 5:30 pace. However, although I did intend easy, I couldn't resist a run up "The Skillion", which for those of you who don't know Terrigal, is a ridiculously steep headland. I had to run around the lookout at the top once just to get my breath back sufficiently to start back down again!

Thursday - As of this week, I'm moving from pure endurance running to adding more emphasis on stamina, and hence today was to be a Mona Fartlek. By this stage, I'd sussed out a reasonably flat distance to run it. The basic idea of the Mona Fartlek is to run ever shorter intervals with similarly shorter rolling recoveries over a period of 20 minutes (not including warmup and cool down). I loved this run! I did the intervals at 4:00 pace, and the rolling recoveries at around 5:00, covering about 4.4km in the 20 minutes. I'm glad that I had the trusty Garmin doing all the timing for me, because I could have sworn that he threw in an extra 90 second interval at the beginning - heaven knows what combination I would have ended up running if I was trying to keep track of it myself :-)

Rest day today, CR 5k tomorrow morning (looking forward to it, though I'm expecting something a little behind the pb) and then 29k on Sunday - haven't started thinking about where I'll run that yet.

sfG