Club session

I was able to get out of work at a reasonable time and made it to the club with plenty of time to spare. It was a lovely evening with the sun shining in a perfectly blue sky and the temperature hovering around 16°C at 6:30pm.

It was a real pleasure to get to the club session and to see most of my running colleagues who I haven't seen in a while: Nico, Miguel, Thierry, Jean-Marc and then Gérald. I instantly went over to Gérald to congraulate him on running the last 10k race in 36:45, beating my record by 12 seconds in the process. Respect. He's in fantastic shape at the moment and I'm sure that he's going to finally beat his marathon record and beat 3:00 for the first time ever in Toulouse. I'm really pleased that I'm going to be there to see it too.

The programme for the evening was a VMA test over 2k on the track. I had brought my Saucony Kinvara in case anyone was interested in running this seriously but Nico, Jean-Marc et al were all resting after racing at the weekend and nobody seemed bothered. Only Gérald facnied doing some speedwork and suggested running the 2 k after we did a warm-up over 1k to begin with.

We ran our normal warm-up with the rest of the club and then Gérald and I joined the back of the VMA test over 1.5k for the slightly slower runners. We started at the back and then worked our way to the front over 1000m, finally finishing in 3:35. This was for the warm-up as we then lined up for a 2k time trial with a few others: Charles, Nick B, Gérard and a couple of younger, faster runners.

Gérald said that we were only to treat this as training as we were to run more 1k intervals afterwards. I wasn't convinced and wanted to run a reasonable time without killing myself in the process. The 2 young lads (Romain and someone) set off fast and after 150m I pulled out and started running 5 metres behind them. Gérald was just behind me and we went through the first lap in 78s. The second lap was more of the same, passing the 800m in 2:38 with Garld on my tail and then on the third lap Gérald went past me and I didn't have the motivation to follow him. We went through 1200m in 4:02 and then I lost count on the fourth lap of the split. I could feel my legs tightening with lactate over the last lap and I knew that I lack this sort of speed training at the moment. I spend too much time running intervals by myself and not against others. I managed to stay close to Gérald to finish just behind him over the 2k in 6:49 while he finished in 6:46. Not bad for some interval training.

We ran another few kilometres after at just below 15km/h to wind down !

10.5k all up in 52 minutes or an average of 5:03. Good to see everyone and shame that Nico didn't want to take part in the test. Big event will be on Thursday when the really fast guys (Mohammed, Tom, etc.) do their VMA test. Wish I could be there.