Whispering Gnome

I'll apologise, but if you can't hear me properly it's because I can't talk. I left my voice at Telstra Stadium last night. 20 people on the Cahill was a pretty good cheer squad - 60,000 at the stadium was even better :-) Three Peliminary Finals in four years, two Grand Finals in two years. Not bad for a bunch of ugly ducklings :-) :-)

Anyhow, back to running. This week was the first of my soon-to-be-regular easy ones. As you'll see, I haven't got the discipline perfect yet. On Tuesday, I figured that water running wouldn't contribute to any damage, so there was clearly no need to reduce it. 45 minutes, comprising a 10 min warm up, 10 min solid pace, 4 x 2 min on / 2 min off, and 5 min cool down. I generally try to take the opportunity whilst I'm on the water to have a go at that swimming caper, and I generally die before 100m, regardless of how slowly I turn the arms over. I can run for hours, but my lungs are busting within 25m in a pool (and yes, I do remember to breath! :-) ). A friend suggested that I should use a pool bouy and just concentrate on the stroke. It had two odd effects -
a) I felt like my legs were just about dragging along the bottom of the pool. The bouy didn't seem to do much, and
b) I easily did 4 x 25 m without any breathing problems. Maybe I just kick too hard normally??

On Wednesday I managed to be a good boy and limit my run to 45 minutes (half in the bush where the Garmin won't work, so I worked on time rather than distance). On Thursday I couldn't halve my ride to work, so it stayed full length, but it was at Run Club that I let things get away from me.

We did a "rolling bay", where we run the bay in formation, with the last person in the line sprinting to the front ad infinitum. The first 3k were at 6 min pace, but then we were split into a couple of groups, with our group to cover the remainder at 4:20 pace. After 2k, I stopped to walk for 30 seconds with one bloke who had fallen off the back, and then set off to catch up to the rest, half of whom were heading up the Dog Park loop. I should have headed straight home, but instead I followed them up the loop at 4 min pace to catch up. Another 2k later, it dawned on me that I was supposed to be in a light week, and here I was doing things longer and faster than normal! Idiot. I pulled back and did the final 2k at 5 min pace, but 9k, with 6 of them averaging around 4:30, was not what the doctor ordered.

I was very careful this morning, only doing the old 5.5k loop at 4:55, and tomorrow I'll just do 10k. Next time I'll get it all right :-)

Gnome