Swimming?? Swimming!! (Huh!!??!!)

Guess what? As of this last week, tiger angel has started to teach me to swim. Yep, the old brick himself now aspires to be a bona fide floating, breathing(!), 1000m-in-nonchalant-style swimmer! And what's more, on the basis of two lessons, I think that there's a moderate chance of it happening too. Wonders will never cease (though not such a wonder when you consider who the teacher is).

So what brought on this change? Some Road to Damascus conversion to the semi-aquatic multi-sports? The sight of tiger angel sweeping all before her in her lead-all-the-way victory in last week's tri?? Well, no, actually. It can be actually be traced back to this article (this one is interesting too) which says that good mountain running needs swim & cycle training as well as straight running. As I already do a bike session once a week, I figured that a swim session wouldn't go astray as well, and so here I am... If blog entries terminate suddenly, you'l know that I'm on the bottom of a pool somewhere, trying to work out which way is up :-)

As for the rest of the week, I was tossing up whether to nominate it as a 'down' week, but some back pain made that decision for me. Turns out that a tumble I took last week over an errant piece of footpath put my pelvis out of alignment. A quick trip to the physio has mostly fixed that, though I'll still have to go again this week because there's something pinching down there :-(

Thursday night at run club was a tough opening session for the year. 4x200, 4x400, 3x500 (push the last 100) and 1x800. The focus was on good form rather than top speed, and the recoveries were relatively short (again - not supposed to be top speed). Very happy to be back, and very happy with the evenness (the 500s were 1:31+0:19, 1:31+0:19 & 1:32+0:19), and James and I really pushed each other at the end of the 800 which was a lot of fun!

On Saturday I fronted up to Quarry Rd for a planned 2 laps with the Strider's 6ft Training Group. I've done 1 & 1/2 laps a few times quite easily, and I assumed that the extra half lap wouldn't be an issue. WRONG! I was smashed by that last climb from the bridge to the Hornsby end. A lot of the 6ft-no-worries attitude disappeared during that last 20 minutes. The first leg was 39:04, the 2nd was 5 seconds faster, the third 2 minutes slower, and the last was another 2 minutes slower again (in other words, a 6 minute positive split - not something to write home to mum about!) .

I did a recovery run with TA this morning (7km @ 6:45 pace) and felt pretty blah all the way. Tomorrow's supposed to be hills, but luckily (for me, not them), angel and micro are both going to have their wisdom teeth out, so there won't be any time for running, which means that I have an extra day to recover from Saturday...

Gnome

p.s. Tesso, the CR cap behind TA in the photo was Mouse.