Tuesday Hills

I was able to get out of work early enough on Tuesday to make it to the club session and I didn't regret it. I hadn't been feeling that fresh in my legs since the weekend and the thought of a club session was a little daunting.

I arrived at the club to find a fairly small turnout, despite the beautiful blue sky and the warm temperature, hovering around 21°C. Out of the fastest group only Thierry, Vincent and Simon were there and Gérald announced that he was going to do a track session and he wasn't intending to do the hills. Nico rolled up late despite having had the day off work: apparently he works harder when he's not in the office! We left for the warm-up without him and he muttered something about doing a track session too.

We warmed-up with a little route to the St Germain terrasse and then made our way to the bottom of the slope where Miguel announced that we would be running 2 blocks of 6 hills. I had been chatting with Philippe and we had both experienced the same sensations over the weekend with the after-effects of the marathon still in the legs, hampering training. I decided that I would take it easy and let the fastest runners go ahead. Nico turned up unexpectedly at this point and said that on second thoughts a few hills wouldn't do any harm and he then proceeded to lead the session up the hills with only Simon able to keep in touch. After a couple of hills I couldn't even see Nico any more as he'd already built up such a gap.

Despite my initial misgivings, the session went fairly well for me and I completed each hill in 53 - 54 seconds, just behind Vincent and just in front of Miguel and Thierry. The long run back down the hill gave plenty of time for the heartrate to calm down before the next interval. The temperature cooled too and so the 22°C to start with must have been a good 4 to 5°C cooler in the forest which also helped.

13.2km all up in 1:23 and a really good session. Shame that Gérald insisted on staying at the track as I would have liked to compare my efforts to his up the hills.