A good week thus far

You'll be pleased to know that there'll be no whinging or self-absorbed introspection in this posting. I think that it's time to cut back on the worrying - I was geting too good at it :-)

Tuesday - I was aiming to do a stamina session of some kind, but I wanted to work out one that I could do with Angela (we do tempo work at different paces, and I didn't want to just wave her goodbye at the start - that's not exactly training together!). We decided to do a 3x2k session up and back along the only straight flat road around here, with me doing the 2ks, and her doing whatever distance was right for her in the same time period. 3 minute walking recovery between, and we did a 2k warm up and the same cool down.

I managed to stuff up the first 2k, stopping about 300m early (misread or misheard the watch), but the second and third ones were fine. I ended up doing 4:30 pace rather than the 4:15 I was aiming at, but I've since realised that 4:30 is roughly right for a stamina workout (a fraction slow, but only a fraction). The 4:15 is for when I get to speed work in 4 weeks' time (hooo, that'll be tough :-)).

Angela has decided to work on the next few Striders' 10k series (well, she said the one in 5 weeks' time, but when you've done one, it's hard to stop), so we're going to keep on with the stamina work together on Tuesday mornings. We'll just have to keep finding sessions that we can do separately but together (I hope that makes sense).

Wednesday - Mid week easy run. Feeling a bit heavy after Tuesday, so I headed for the bush and did about 6k out and back along the Great North Walk (10k all up including streets). It's reasonably rough, so you have to pick your way along, meaning both that I wasn't pounding my legs and was exercising lots of other muscles. Very nice, but a lot harder than I guess I was originally intending. Given that this is supposed to be a 'down' week, and so far I'd done two hard sessions, I really wasn't organising things well, was I? :-)

Thursday - Ride to work was a fraction slower (and much squelchier - humongous humidity!) than normal. Otherwise nothing to report.

Run Club tonight was a track session - basically 'speed' in format, but to be held back a bit, concentrating on form rather than speed. After normal start-up stuff, we did 4 x 200, 3 x 400, 2 x 500 (picking up on the final 100) and 1 x 800 with full recovery in between. I was very pleased with both my consistancy (every spilt was within a second of the others), and that the times I did were bang in the middle of my range for sprint workouts over those distances.

Tiger angel set up the wind trainer at the edge of the track tonight and did the session with us - when Angela was running, she had to up the pace and load, and when Angela was recovering, she could drop back to an easy cadence. I can tell you that she was watching Angela like a hawk waiting for her to cross the finish line each time :-)

Rest day tomorrow, then striders 10k on Saturday morning. I'm not willing to publicly predict what I'll do, but I'll tell you after the event whether I made it or not (what a cop out! :-)). On Sunday, I'll limit the long run to the low 20's in preparation for the first of the 32k's (ack!) the following week.

sfG