Good for the Gander, less so for the Goose.

Hmmm... In my attempted misappropriation of an old saying, I may have just called my beloved tiger angel a goose. Unintentional, believe me. Ah well, push on...

It has been a very good week for your old mate Gnome. Firstly, it was my first >60km week since the first week of January. Secondly, I ran to and from work on Wednesday, fulfilling a long held dream to run to work (and, for the first time ever, backing up two reasonable length runs - 11.5k each - on the same day), and thirdly, I ran a season's best time of 44:30 at the Striders 10k at Lane Cove on Saturday. It's still a long way off my 42:19 pb, but at least it's heading in the right direction! :-)

Apart from that, I squeezed in a 1.5k swim on Monday, a 5.5km AT run on Tuesday, cycled to work twice (though got a car ride home both times for various reasons), did Run Club on Thursday night and a 16.5k run up to Hornsby and back this morning (Sunday). Phew... Run Club comprised a 10 minute 30/30 session (30 sec firm, 30 sec float) and then 2 x 2km reps. It was supposed to be 3 x 2k, but we ran out of time. :-) 500m splits for the reps (actually 475m splits, but who's counting) were;
2:05, 2:03, 2:05, 1:58 and
2:01, 2:02, 2:06, 2:02.
That's roughly a 4:25 pace, which set me up well for the 10k on Saturday. Like I said, a pretty good week.

Tiger angel, alas, didn't fare quite as well. At the moment, her focus is on strength, so Monday and Wednesday's sessions were an interesting hill mix. She had to run a 100m hill, recover down, then walk the same hill up and down with 5kg weights in each hand, and then repeat all that 3 more times. Tuesday was a more traditional gym weights session. After the Wednesday session, her back was a bit sore and as she was at the physio anyhow for her wrist, she asked that her back be looked at instead. General consensus was that her glutes and hammys were tight as a drum, and her pelvis was a bit out of whack again, so all that was worked on. However, afterwards, her left calf got *really* sore up near the back of her knee. It hurt to walk until it warmed up, and was really sore to the touch all the time. Hrmph!

As it didn't feel like a tear, and it was OK to use after warming, tiger angel decided to do the Run Club session nice and easy. Now, you're expecting me to say that everything exploded in a shower of blood and tissue, aren't you? The way things have gone this year, that'd be about par for the course, but actually the whole session went really well - it still hurt like crazy to touch, but didn't hurt at all to run. Most strange! Since then, it's got better and better so by now it takes a concerted bit of poking and prodding to make it hurt. The sports doctor on duty at the striders run said that it was just a strain and that doing a set of heel lifts before running was all that was required and that there was no continued problem. Good news, but it just leaves one question. Where did the problem come from in the first place? Curiouser and curiouser...

Gnome