Sunday recovery

Laurence and I made a special effort to get up this morning to go running with the club. It wasn't that the club was running earlier than usual, just that we'd got to bed at 2:45am and were still determined to make it to see the others and burn off the excess of alcohol/starters/cheese/desserts (delete as appropriate!). It was no easy job to rouse my wife, whereas I was as fresh as a wilted daisy. No breakfast, jumped into our kit, jumped into our shoes and jumped into the car and got to the club just in time for the morning brief.

Aaargh - first disappointment: no Thierry, no Miguel but Michel who was the self-appointed coach for the morning with his usual clarity and quickness of mind, he explained what we were supposed to do. We had a special guest in the person of Dominique Chauvelier, the patron of the club's 10km corrida last night, who was kind enough to come and run with us all this morning.

José, Nico, Bruno, Jean-François were all there and despite the fact that Laurence and I had turned up expecting a 90' easy recovery session, 2 blocks of 10' threshold training were announced. We warmed up easily enough and then began the session proper. I set off with Nico to begin with but soon felt the efforts from yesterday's race in my legs and let him pull away with José in tow.

The second interval was harder still since both Nico and José were ahead from the start. I was following them at a distance when I heard footsteps behind and "Chauchau" caught me. I told him to catch the others and he tried to let me latch on but I lost energy and motivation in the slight uphill section after the bumps. He cruised on easily to catch José and Nico and to push them to the end of the interval. His ease when he runs is most impressive.

We let everyone catch up at the end of the interval and then ran back to the clubhouse. This run back was supposed to be easy but with our "guest" we all got carried away and were running at 14km/h for the last 5 km back home.

16.4 km all up in 1:24. Nice run but not the recovery that I'd initially intended.