Easy Cora

Why was Cora so easy today ? Well despite the fact that I was running another 86km week this week, the Saturday run with Nick and Andy was not too taxing today. Andy was having an off day. He explained half-way through the run that he was a little tired since he'd only gone to sleep at 5:00 am Saturday morning. Since we set off at 8:00 am, this was 3 hours sleep at the most. So what exactly had he been doing to go to bed so late: partying until the early hours at friends, night-clubbing at the Pacha club ? Nothing quite so exotic: he'd been reading Tom Clancy until the early hours. So here I am reading Running with Buffalos, dreaming about running 10km in under 30 minutes and suffering with the intensive training while Andy is dreaming about being a CIA agent infiltrating the IRA !!

We ran through the forest at around 4:40 pace to begin with, even speeding up to 4:32 at one point but by the time we arrived at Cora, tiredness had set in and Andy was falling off the back. We slowed down at this point and ran back up the slope towards Pavillon de la Muette at 5:10 pace. Form then on we hovered around 12km/h even on the flat back through the forest towards home. Andy looked tired when he got back and I think that the best course of action at this point was to return to bed ! So much for secret agent training ! Having said this, we actually ran the loop in 1:03:30 from Andy's house and back for 13km and the time was only a minute slower than last week. There's definitely a distinct improvement in the run and I'm sure that if everyone slept reasonably before this run, we could run the circuit in 60 minutes from Andy's house.

I ran back home with Nick and then bought some croissants for Laurence, ready to welcome her home from her 30km run. She was well pleased !

15.7 km all up in 1:16 or an average of 4:51 per km. 86km for the week.