Week 4

Started the week with a long Sunday run with the club.

Since I know that I'm going to be running the marathon again in the not so distant future, I am determined to build up the mileage again and the main aim is to include a long Sunday run in every week's training schedule until April. I started here by running to the clubhouse and meeting up with everybody there, so that was already 5k under the belt. We set off towards Le Mesnil, retracing virtually the path that I had taken to get there ! I was running with Thierry, Nico, Bruno, Régis and Mireille. I wasn't talking to Régis as I hadn't got over his victory over me at the cross-country championship (just a joke - of course I spoke to him: just to tell him never to do that again!) . The plan was to run 10min, 12min, 14 min at threshold off 3 minutes rest. It was a great session: I tried to hold on to Thierry, José and Nico but they lost me on the second interval and quickly made 50 metres or so of gap which never reduced. On the final interval, we lost Nico and José who turned left instead of right and I fought it out with Régis, Mireille and Bruno and none of us would give in. It was supposed to be threshold but I was well in the red and very glad when we stopped after 14 minutes.

The initial intention was to run back home at the end of the session, but due to the quality of the session and the fact that when we got back to the clubhouse, I'd already run over 25k, I decided to call it a day. Good quality workout.

Monday and Wednesday I went for an early morning run. Monday I took it easy (45:49) but Wednesday I picked up the pace a little (43:25) .

Thursday, I mentioned to get out of work early and make it to the evening club session. 8x800m: I couldn't have chosen a better night. Suffice to say that I ran with Fabrice and Mireille and was glad to hold them both off after a really hard track session. Intervals went as follows:
2:44, 2:49, 2:50, 2:50, 2:51, 2:51, 2:52, 2:50. Boy was I glad to finish. Real hard work and lactic was running high on every interval after the first.

Saturday back to Cora with Nick. Nice run to finish the 15k in 1:12.

75km for the week.