Back home after what felt like a very long week on the road. My run today means I've ran in France, England and Belgium all in the last six days. Have trainers will indeed travel.
Work been pretty hectic recently and I've been travelling a lot but I've managed to keep up a pretty reasonable discipline in my running distance and frequency, naturally with much encouragement from Team Kennedy manager.
I wanted to go long today just to build up my mental toolkit a bit as I've been doing a lot of shorter runs to build up my fitness. Its always good to know if you are feeling the pace in a race or a training session that you've definately got the distance in your legs, if only so you can get your head round it. That way when it starts to feel hard you can pretty honestly talk yourself out of the low point by using the previous memory of running a good half marathon in training.
First 5K was away in 25:30 and just felt like I was loosening up. At 12K I'd dropped off 3 pretty big hills and was still feeling good. I knew though I still had one big hill right at the end to knock off.
16.5K and I'm at the turn at the farm in 1:27 and I'm thinking I'm not so far away from a 1:40 finish which would be close to my personal best for the half marathon distance of 21K in 1:40:55. However with over 3.5K to go its not a reality with the hilly finish that I have. I'm up the last hill but trying to keep the pace up is starting to kill me and I'm finally starting to fade.
My strides get shorter as the hill takes it toll and it takes me about 500M after the top of the hill to get my breath back to something like normal. My legs feel like they've been drained of blood. I try for a sprint finish over the last 750M but its not overly impressive. I finish in 1:46:05 and so just outside the 1:45's.
However a very good session and a nice start to the week. Time wise its not bad with 5 weeks to go till FirstMonster. I've still not been on the bike yet though. I did blow the tires up yesterday and Team Kennedy manager was out on it for a trial run.
Posts
Hello Running man... Just back from China where I could not follow your progress as your blog is banned in that country. :( Good to see you are on top shape again for your next challenge. Let me know if you feel like riding one of these days. I'd be pleased to get back into the action.
ReplyDeletePhilippe