Of Cheering and Statistical Anomalies

Last week was my biggest week since January (56k), though only by a statistical anomaly because I did the previous week's Sunday long run (17k) on Monday. Made the week before look a little weak :-)

All up, I had some really nice runs. On Wednesday morning I ran down to the local oval to do an interval session with tiger angel (who had driven there). 8x400 with 200 walk recoveries. TA set the pace, and how's this for evenness. 2:05, 1:57, 1:56, 1:57, 1:56, 1:56, 1:57, 1:58. She really had to hang on for those last two! Ran home afterwards. Thursday night's rain caused Run Club cancellation, so Julia, Pete and I went for a bay lap. Pete really can't run that slowly (he does a 70-something half marathon), so he made his apologies after about a k and left us to our own devices. I don't know what it is about running in the rain, but we just chatted and ran and finished with a sub-5 minute average pace. Beaut!

Friday & Saturday were a lather of stress and self-doubt in the lead up to the Blackmores half. I do enjoy pacing races like this when I'm not up to putting in a good run myself, but I always worry about whether I'm going to lead people astray or leave them stranded if something goes wrong. Anyhow, it all turned out fine and I finished 3 seconds ahead of the nominated time with some satisfied customers, so it's all good!

After the run I made my way back down to the CR Cheer Squad in front of the MCA building to watch the marathoners come in. The marathoners were inspiring as always, but the Cheer Squad was fantastic; really going off. The longer the day wore on and the slower the runners got, the louder the Cheer Squad got, and I was really impressed that they didn't reserve their cheers just for Cool Runners, but cheered any and everyone. There was a loot of comment on the CR forums about how uplifting they were, but I noticed many times comments like "the cheer squad were fantastic. They really gave me a lift when I needed it. I wasn't wearing any CR gear...". Girls and fellas, take a bow! :-)


There they are in a slightly lower-energy moment... (thanks to CR springer for the photo).

TA and I were both really tired so we took our leave early from lunch at the pub, went home and crawled into bed and slept for 3 hours. Nice end to a great day :-)

Gnome

(Oh, incidentally, the 21st birthdays in last week's blog were for 'Angel', our daughter, not tiger angel. Sorry for any confusion. Maybe we need to invent a new nom-de-plume for her)