Week 8

Another week and more pain. It's definitely getting harder but I'm beginning to feel the benefits (more about that later). So what happened this week.

No running Monday as I was in Lyons for the day and had to start early.

Tuesday - 8 x 1km interval session first thing in the morning. It's been a little warmer this week so not quite such an effort to get out and go running but the thought of these intervals was not a huge motivator. After a short warm-up, I ran each km interval in between 3:49 to 3:52. This is not quite 10k speed but for an interval session at this time in the morning, it wasn't bad going. 15km in just under 1:09.

Wednesday - Only early morning runs during the week so I won't go on about how hard these are, how tired I feel, how dark it is, how lonely I feel, ... OK I'll stop now. Recovery run this morning. Most pleasant 13.7km in just over an hour. Felt good to enjoy a run.

Thursday - Short VMA session planned this morning: 12 x 200m in 42-43 seconds off 200 recovery. I started on pace and quickly sped up to run the intervals in 39 - 40 seconds. The idea was to be above marathon pace but not to tire yourself out too quickly. Probabaly could have run a second block of 12 at the same pace or thereabouts so not completely exhausting. Find I recover fairly quickly at the moment. 10.5 km all up in 48 minutes.

Friday - Recovery run. 11.1k in 50 minutes. Very steady and enjoyable. Weather is definitely improving.

Saturday - Since it's the school holidays and both Andy and Nick are away, I arranged with Laurence to run a little later than usual and to go to Cora and around. Laurence was supposed to skip Cora while I ran and caught her up afterwards. As it turned out, Laurence encouraged me to leave her earlier on and that we would meet at Pavillon de la Muette as she wanted to cut the run a little short. I took off at this point and ran hard to Cora at Marathon pace. I managed 8 km at around 4:15 pace (bar the uphill section to Pavillon de la Muette in 4:33) but was feeling full of energy after a good night's sleep. 15.4km all up in 1:14. First time in a long time that I've been able to run so far at marathon pace. I interpreted this as a good sign of the benefits from my recent training and it's encouraging me to push it further.

80 km for the week despite the lack of a long Sunday run due to the cross-country. Pretty good effort.