3 down, one to go.

Good news on the tiger angel front. Two (count 'em, two) days in a row with her body feeling OK (constant headaches, but you can't have everything!). TA's just about dancing around, she's so happy about feeling good. There's still a long road ahead, but maybe, just maybe, she's got to the turnaround...

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I had a pretty lazy week, followed by a pretty energetic weekend. To steal Go Girl's description, the Doona Demon had me trapped on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, so my first run for the week was RunClub on Thursday evening. We did a track session, which always cheers me up (1x800, 2x400, 2x200 with 200 float, 5 min of random fartlek & 1x800). The times from that were nothing special, but somewhere I got the idea that the CR5k on Saturday just might throw up something good.


Only Papa Luigi and I were going off on 21 minutes, and he tucked in behind fairly quickly, so I was on my own for pacing. I'd decided to try for something in the order of 4:05 (20:25 overall) so when I hit 1k at 4:04, I was happy. By the 3rd k, I was breathing like it was my last (km, that is, not breath :-)), but at the same time I knew that I was ahead of the pb. As I hit the 4th k, I could hear Papa's footsteps looming behind me. I tried to pick it up, but I really didn't make much impact. We passed Uncle Dave (pacing Sista Christa) at about 4.5k and he called out "come on dad, you can catch him!". Papa's beaten me so many times over the last 6 months and he has such a strong finish that I didn't need any more incentive. I poured everything I had into it, bringing in a 17 second pb at 20:19 (and a pb for Papa of 20:25 too! :-)).

I think that I made about 4 more steps after the line, collapsed face down on the grass for a few minutes of remedial breathing, and finally rolled over to declare to anyone who was listening that that was my last ever attempt at a pb over that distance. Never again. Never. D'ya hear? Geez that hurt....

However, that result means that I have pb'd in 3 of my 4 distances since the marathon (not including the marathon itself, of course). I now have new pb's in 3k (11:48, though the distance there is a little suspect), 5k (20:19) and 10k (43:35). The only one missing is the half. Maybe I should have run it... Nah!

Particularly pleasing was the evenness of the splits - 4:04, 4:05, 4:08, 4:04 & 3:58. That little race also ticked over the 1000k for my 'new' pair of shoes (I guess I'd better give them a different name now :-) ).

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Micro's footy game was on Saturday night (to the best of my knowledge, the first time that Junior AFL footy has been played under lights in Sydney) at Macquarie Uni (their senior club).
I had volunteered for Boundary Umpire duties again, but this time I didn't wimp out - I wore the garmin. We have a system ideal for unfit parents; we have 2 boundary umps on each side, so you only have to patrol half the distance, and hence do about a quarter of the running. Even still, I racked up almost 8k during the evening. This is the speed graph. You can see that the 1st and 3rd quarters were somewhat more busy - the game was a little one sided...

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This morning was the first Sunday that TA and I have had together with no particular obligations for many a long month, so there was no way that I was getting up early to run this morning (I was also feeling a bit knocked around by the previous evening's sprints, but that was beside the point). We lazed in bed till about 8:30, went to church together (sadly, so rare) and then had friends over for an impromptu lunch. Lovely day!

About 4pm after our guests had gone, I got a call from a mate wanting help on a problem with his house, so I pulled the running gear on, popped over and fixed it, and continued on for a gentle 12k at 5:30 pace. It would have been 13k, but TA chanced past in the car and stopped to see if I wanted a lift, and who am I to knock back a lift when a gorgeous girl offers... :-)

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