Track session

I managed a new record last night for the club session.

I left work a little later than usual and rang Laurence from the car who told me that she was still a little tired following the race at the weekend. With the rain that had started and the rest session on offer at the club, she decided that she was going to train by herself. I rang Nico instead to tell him that I was running late and would he be doing a track session. That was his plan so, since there was no way I'd be able to get to the start of the session in time, I planned on running the opposite way round the warm-up to join the guys as they finished. In the 30km drive from work to the club, I managed to get fully undressed (including socks and shoes) and put on my running kit so that when I parked the car at the clubhouse, I was out in 5 seconds and pounding the tarmac towards the other runners - a new record !

After this exploit, the rest of the evening should have been easy. Jean-Marc and Nico were running 10x300m on the track but I chose the alternative, running 3x2000m with Bruno, Laurent, Nat and Charles. The pace was set at 4:15 per kilometre so easier than last Thursday.

I ran the first kilometre with the others and then left them for the second to finish in 8:15. The second interval I carried on at the same pace and ran this in 8:00. I was feeling tired now and sweating from the effort, probably due to the after-effects of Saturday's run. I decided to run with the others for the last interval and stayed behind until 500m from the finish when I moved to the front with Nat and pushed him round until 1800m when I gave a last little kick to finish hard. So last interval in 8:10 probably. All times are approximate as I haven't had time to download the data from the Garmin and when we're on the track the Garmin indicates the kilometre laps too short.

A quiet warm-down after this and I was pleased that I'd made an effort and had been able to stay ahead of the group. A good workout in preparation for London and this is the last week of hard effort before the 2 week taper.

10km all up.