Back on track

Tuesday night training session at the club and the marathon runners had planned 5 x 2000 m threshold session.

The weather has improved remarkably over the last few days and it was a real pleasure to be running on a warm (16°C), sunny evening in the light. We warmed up by running towards the St Germain terrace and then back along by the swimming pool. Whether it was the nice evening, or just a coincidence, there was a large turnout with plenty of runners I had never seen before.

I was runing with Régis, Fabrice and Nick talking about St Patrick's day and the importance of beer in the marathon runners diet. Convinced that some serious research and a book on the subject could become a bestseller ! We ran back to the track and then began the interval workout.

Fabrice, Régis, Yannick, Mathieu (?) and I were running the 2000 m together while the rest of the club was doing some fartlek training. Fabrice acts as guardian of the training schedule and so he told us that we were supposed to run the 2k in 8:10. This seemed slightly slow to me for a threshold session, but he explained that the aim was not to kill ourselves.

These laudable intentions lasted for all of 3 seconds as Yannick set off like a bullet on the first interval. Fabrice was chasing after him and I just stayed on his shoulder, enjoying the pace which felt comfortable. I seemed to have plenty of energy last night and even as the session went on, I was extremely consistent in the intervals. It wasn't the first time, however, that I noticed that the Garmin is convinced that the track measures 420m instead of the 400m we assume. Since I was on autolap for every 1km, this meant that the 2km time would beep when there was still 100m to go to complete the 5th loop.

The 5 loop times for the intervals went as follows:

7:39, 7:45, 7:44, 7:38, 7:36

What is more interesting though is the kilometre intervals according to the Garmin (and not relying on the assumption that the track is exactly 400m):

3:34, 3:36, 3:41, 3:36, 3:41, 3:39, 3:38, 3:33, 3:38, 3:33

If this is true then I was running these intervals faster than my time over 10km and I still felt easy at this pace. I was really boosted by this session and I'm beginning to feel that everything is coming together for the marathon.

17.3 km all up in 1:21 or an average of 4:42 per km.