Almost there

A good week for me, a pretty good week for tiger angel. TA's swimming is getting better and better with the twice-weekly squads she joined, and as of last Wednesday she had the first of what is planned to be a regular weekly ride with a friend of hers who is a stronger cyclist. They spent about an hour covering a good selection of the hills around Cherrybrook - in fact, around Cherrybrook it's hard to find anything that isn't a hill.

On Saturday she had a long run scheduled so she decided to make use of her prepaid strider's entry and make the 10k at North Head her long (steady, not fast!) run. All went very well for the first 5k, but just after that her breathing got a little restricted and, deciding that DNF stood for Do Nothing Foolish, she pulled the plug. She came good pretty quickly and had no problems with an easy hour this morning, so it was clearly the right thing to do. TA's entered the Sparke-Helmore tri up in Newcastle on the weekend after next in the amusingly titled "Diehards" distance (500m, 25k, 6k). Sounds very gung-ho! :-)

Only three runs (plus X-training) for me during the week just gone, well spaced from each other and all at a little bit higher intensity than normal. The last one was the doosey. Just as the key run last week was the Equaliser, the key this week was the Strider's 10k. Not only did I want a good run to put that last bit of spring in the legs, I also had a sneaking desire to get that PB that I just missed last month, and North Head's as good a place as any to get it.

Normally, I'd look at my PB (42:43 - 20 months old) and aim to pull 10-20 seconds off it, but this time I decided to give it a big shot - go with the 40 minute pacer and see what happened. At the same time, I was very aware of not doing anything stupid before next week, so I wasn't going to beat myself up trying to stay with the pace group for too long. I hung with the group for the first 3k's before I started to drift. At the turnaround point (about 5 1/2 k) I was still only about 20 seconds behind 40 minute pace, so I knew then that a PB was in sight as long as I didn't do anything dumb.

The 7th k was not so good - 4:19 - but that woke me back up and I pulled it back to the low 4's for 8 & 9. Some quick calculations at the start of the last k suggested that if I could hold the 4 minute pace for the last one then I could get a 90 second PB. North Head being favourable to fast last k's, I surprised myself with a final 3:48 to record a 108 second pb - final time 40:55! Stoked!

What made it even better was that I won a luck door prize (they distribute the prizes by pre-selecting some random positions from the start, middle and end of the field plus volunteers) and when my prize was announced, Barb said "prize goes to Bruce, who finished in 40:55, making him our front of the pack winner". No one's ever called me Front Of the Pack before! You couldn't get me in the car for the severely swelled head, and even now there some doubt about whether I'll be able to get my helmet on tomorrow morning :-) :-)

And so I find myself in an interesting position - one week out from the big one, in the best shape I've ever been, with the longest uninterrupted training period I've ever had - to put it simply, I've never had it so good. Does this mean that I'm going to be up there with the big boys? Front of the Pack? Don't be daft! What it does mean is that I'm in the best possible position to do the best I can, whatever that may be. I've had numerous prognosticators divining my finishing times, and as always they are about 1/2 to one hour too fast (but thanks for the confidence anyway! :-) ).

So, one easy week remains. A couple of runs, a couple of cycles, a preventative physio visit, a massage on Thursday and then Saturday morning, here we come! :-) Waiting for Christmas was never this much fun!

Gnome