Early morning intervals

Wasn't sure if I'd be able to make it to the club session tonight so I dug out my old marathon training schedule and looked at what I should be doing. I saw that I'd crossed out the initial plan when training for Toulouse and put in 3x2k. It worked then , I thought, so I decided to do more of the same and programmed the Garmin for the morning.

The alarm rang and I almost had second thoughts about the whole affair. 6:00 am is inhuman for going running but since I'm in a determined mode at the moment I got ready and left. I dawdled over the first kilometre putting off the dreadful moment when I'd have to start trying. In my mind, I imagined doing under 4:00 kms as I'd been achieving on the track lately. The first kilometre marker arrived and I was down by the Seine so I hit the lap button and started.

I was just getting into full stride after about 500m when I saw a figure alone in the middle of the road. I was a little wary as: firstly I never see anyone or rarely on my runs; secondly, I was in the darkest spots of the loop and wondered what on earth he was doing there, looking lost. He called out to me and I stopped and he turned out to be a newspaper delivery man looking for an address. I wasn't much help but relieved he didn't turn out to more dangerous. So much for the first interval as I lost about 23 seconds (quick analysis from SportsTrax on 200m splits - no I did not time my conversation with the old geezer - what sort of geek do you think I am ?) and ran this first interval in 8:26.

A 2' recovery and I set off again. Normally I speed up on these intervals but today I was losing concentration and dozing off. Going up the slight hill from the river slowed me down too and I never really recovered on this interval. Ran this one in 8:20.

Set of again for the last interval and was sweating buckets by now. Still not much faster as I ran into the park and ran this one in 8:12. Well down on my pre-Toulouse times which is what I have been expecting.

12km all up in 55 minutes so an average of 4:35 over the course.