Hill Week

I have a feeling that I've got some hills in my future, and even if I don't, I think I need them in training more regularly than I'm used to. However, I wasn't quite planning it this way...

Saturday, of course, was Striders at Lane Cove. That should be enough hill for a month! However, on Tuesday morning I warmed up by jogging around to my hills-session hill and set into attacking it. I was a little (a lot?) frustrated by how it went. The first 3 reps were 44, 42 & 39 seconds, and the last was 43. It wasn't supposed to be the last - I was intending on doing 5 reps - but I clearly was running out of grunt and there was no point in pushing it further. As I remembered, I normally did this hill in 41's so I was a bit dirty on myself.

Did another couple of k home as warm down, and then went back and looked at the history. Believe it or not, my memory is shot. I was wrong about running them in 41's. Each time I've done them, I was doing 47's! It's no wonder that I was exhausted after the 39! Next time (and that won't be far off), I'll take it a bit slower and try to get more done. Geez, I'm thick some times :-)

Wednesday morning was a lovely dry(!), clear, cool morning, perfect for a nice 14k standard loop @ 5:14 pace. Very even the whole way. Very satisfied. Glutes a bit sore after Tuesday's foolishness.

Normal ride to work this morning (Thursday). They've re-re-replaced the fence at the bottom of Gladesville Bridge, but this time they've welded two big bars through the panels. I really don't think that they want cyclists to remove them again. It doesn't stop us taking that particular short cut, it just means that we have to toss the bike over the fence. Glad that I have a lightweight :-)

The lights were not on on the oval tonight for some reason, so we headed up into Callan Park for a hills session (yep, another hills session!). Tim's found a new loop up there that is much better lit than the old loop, but it has a killer hill. The whole loop is only about 800m, but I'll swear that the uphill part of it is at least a km long :-) Anyhow, we did a 10 minute period (2.5 loops, made up to 3) and 15 minutes (4 loops). The times were interesting. I felt like I had no energy and must have been getting slower, but in fact I held it steady and then did the last two quite a bit faster(??). Splits were 3:47, 3:52, 3:45, 3:46, 3:46, 3:39 & 3:24. Apart from the blowout in the second, the first 5 were within +/-1 second, which is pretty consistent in anyone's language.

I feel pretty tired now - I was going to write something about up-coming goals and race calendars, but I think I'll hold that one over for another day and just go to bed now. Goodnight!

Gnome