Oooo, I ache all over...

Starting at (almost) the end, I spent most of yesterday (Sat) on the end of a concrete grinder turning parts of my family room floor into dust. By the end of the day I could hardly move, and went to bed at 9:30pm to sleep the sleep ofthe truly weary. I still prepared for SMC, on the basis that a run might free up all those locked up muscles, and if I felt too under the weather then I could drop back to the 10 or 5k. As it was, I was able to move reasonably freely this morning (Sun), so stuck with the half as planned.

I went out with the intention of keeping Johnny Dark in sight, and if I could keep to 4:30's then all the better. He shot off in the first few k, and then settled down to a reasonable pace about 500m ahead. From there on, there he stayed. I slowed up a little on the hill, but looking at the splits later, I realised that I never really sped up again afterwards. The split for the first 10k was 44:04, and for the second was 47:58 (eurg!). Even allowing an over-generous 1 minute for the hill (which falls into the second 10k), that's still a positive split of 3 minutes.

I knew that I was slowing down alot and I was beating myself up a bit about it, but then I realised that a) I'd just done a PB (by 30 sec), and b) I had worked myself into a state of exhaustion the evening before. I'll tell you what though; I've never felt so sore at the end of any race before. So, Central Coast still looks hopeful (provided I taper and eat OK, and don't beat myself up working on the house the day before :-) )

So what else happened this week? Tuesday, I had access to my car, so I headed to the pool. unfortunately I forgot my towel (Doh!), so I headed home again and did an AT session on the bike (5 x 5min @ 145bpm and 1 min recovery between). Wednesday was one of those lovely runs - it felt light and easy. 15k at 4:54 pace. I wish they were all like that. Run Club on Thursday night was 6 laps of the hospital hill loop, with a hills ladder in the middle. Despite the wind (awful!), I kept things pretty even - 3:32, 3:37, 3:35, 3:35, 3:38, 3:34. Then on Saturday, I managed to get to the 6ft training group run on time, and we did 13k from Roseville Bridge up to Lindfield and back again. Nice run. I wish 6ft would be that nice :-)

Finally, in answer to some questions - 2P, the 6ft announcement was carefully hidden away in this post :-), and Tesso, Windsprints are just any series of sprints followed by a short rolling recovery. Two common ways to do them are to run 30 sec hard and 30 sec easy for 10 minutes, or to run the long side or diagonal of a soccer field hard, the end easy, and then repeat.

Gnome