The Good, the Good and the Ugly

Big news of the week is that tiger angel ran tonight for the first time in about 2.5 months! Dr Pain finally gave her the go ahead to start 1 minute on, 1 minute off running and to build it up. The Achilles is obviously responding to treatment. It's a pity that the total exhaustion isn't... :-(

She came to Run Club tonight and did snippets of the session, covering about 2.8k over the night. She was a good girl, keeping it slow and controlled, and I think that she'll live to run another day :-) Happy, happy, but it'll be nice for her when the lethargy starts to respond to treatment too. Dr Quack thinks that it may take a couple of months before she starts to see a significant difference, but at least a significant difference is expected. :-)

Tuesday - Oh, my aching butt! I'm coming to the end of my stamina phase and starting to move into a speed/strength phase. Angela came over as usual at 6am, and we jogged 2k to the bottom of a nice little rise. The aim was to do 6 to 8 repeats with a walk down recovery on a 210m hill (don't know the elevation - sufice to say it was adequate :-)

We ended up doing 7 repeats, all within a second of each other at 48 or 49. It got harder and harder as the repeats counted up, so to maintain the pace was very pleasing. Ange covered a 200m distance in about 53s, which was likewise cool.

We quit after the 7th because I felt a bit of a stab in my right calf on that run, and there was no way I was going to risk anything more. We jogged a bit home, but I didn't want to risk the leg so we ended up walking most of it.

Wednesday - The intent for today was a nice, clean 14k, not thrashing myself, but not just floating either. Beautiful run at 4:55 pace on a rollercoaster hills circuit. No niggles, but my glutes were feeling it after yesterday's hills.

Thursday - Still feeling the glutes a bit (looks like I'm going to have to work these hills a bit more :-)). Ride to work uneventful.

Run club was the ugly bit of the week. Well, not Run Club per se, but me at run club! Right from the word go I just felt heavy. After the normal warm up, stretches & drills, we did a tempo session. 2 x 400 at 1:30 each (a little too fast), then 20 minutes on a 1k loop with a rotten little hill in it, another 400 (1:39 this time which is more my pace) and then straight into another 10 minutes on the loop. I was a little slower than the last time we did this session. Hopefully that was just because it was on the back of a fairly solid week.

Rest day tomorrow, and then the CR5k on Saturday. I have a friend who has taken up running over the last 6 months or so and has been pounding the pavements by himself, so I finally persuaded him to come to the 5k as a preparation for the striders 10k next week. He is expecting to take about 27 minutes, and, to be honest, I was trying to work out how I could get out of running with him because I was keen to see how I'd go at the 5k this month. Well, after tonight, I've decided that running with him would be the only honourable, friendly (and easy) thing to do :-) So, no 21min heroics for the Gnome this month - but there's always another one in four weeks :-)

Gnome

p.s. Cirque asked "what question could possibly take two hours to answer"? I told you it was a simple question! It was "how did you get into running?" (and no, I'm not going to answer it here. Blogger doesn't have that much room :-)