Thursday club session

Following my session in the morning, I was able to get away from work early and since I was at La Defense, it only took me 30 minutes to get out of Paris and to St Germain for the club session.

There was a farily good turnout at the club with a lot of unfamiliar faces. Some of the faster runners were absent such as Jean-Marc and Bruno but the regulars were there (Nico, Gérald, Nick back from injury, Thierry, José etc.). Ther really good news that I learnt on arriving was that in addition to the Beaujolais Nouveau tasting after the session (which was probably my main motivation after all), we were supposed to take it easy this evening with 45 minutes of jogging on the cards.

I set off with Gérald and Nico, having wasted 4 minutes with the Garmin struggling to find enough satellites to start. We caught up the others and then stayed at the back for an easy loop around the streets of St Germain. Most of the runners headed to the track at this point, including Gérald, but Nico and I sped up a little with Thierry, Jean-Michel and some others to complete a second loop. Most relaxing with a good chat about the upcoming races and aches and pains we're currently suffering from.

I went back to the track at this point and then as Nico was stopping to get a shower before hitting the wine heavily, I ran around the track with Laurence and her friends doing 6x300m off 100m recovery. Apparently, my presence stressed the women out (Laurence, Pascale, Christiane, Catherine and Christelle) so I had to put up with a lot of banter from them. The 300m section was honest enough with all of them running between 1:10 - 1:12 for each one, but the recoveries lasted 5 minutes as they stopped; had a gossip; and then began sauntering to the start line for the next interval. Even my powers of persuasion weren't enough to get them to speed up for this part!

12km all up so over 25km for the day. Not bad going, even though there was no quality workouts in either of the sessions.