LSR with hills

The tour of Aurillac is a 20 km route marked out on the roads that encircle the town. The last time I ran this was a year ago when I did the 20km loop in 1:33. The idea today was to run with Laurence around most of the loop and then carry on up the crest of the hills and along the tops to the crossroads before dropping back down into St Simon and then back to the house. An ambitious run, as the tour of Aurillac is already tiring enough with plenty of hills to manoeuvre skirting the town, but the added loop around St Simon was going to add severely to the overall difficulty.

I set off with Laurence around the loop at a steady pace. She's been running very well recently and improving constantly. We were running around 5:30 pace and she looked easy. We ran around to La Ponétie, onto the park at the far side of town and then back to Belbex in the second half of the course which is a lot hillier than the first half. Gmap shows this nicely. Laurence only started to slow down at the 14 km mark. I say slow down but she maintained her pace but was looking slightly more tired. I left her with 2 km to go after 1:43 of effort and she was chuffed as she knew that she'd beat the 2 hour barrier, something she's never achieved before for this course.

I ran up "la route de cretes" at this point: 3km of constant uphill and 150m of height gained going from 676m to 826m in altitude. I caught another runner on the top who'd been walking at this point and he started running again as I passed him. This was an encouragement as I'd been resisting the urge to ease my muscles by walking for a while uphill and the company now made this impossible. I ran easily with him along the top chatting about the weather and the beautiful countryside. We came to the crossroads on the top and swung right heading back down into the valley and St Simon. The road down goes down for 2km, losing the 150 altitude that I'd struggled so hard to gain minutes earlier! My new running companion was heading back through St Simon and out the other side back up the hill on the other side of the valley to Boussac. I ran with him through the village and then back on the old road to Aurillac, including another 50m of uphill for good measure.

30km all up in 2:42 or an average of 5:23 per km. This doesn't sound very impressive but I reckon there is also approximately 500m of uphill over this route and when I got back I was exhausted and ready to drop. The fact that I'd only had a glass of orange juice before heading out didn't help either. Pleased with the run and thrilled to hear that Laurence had finished in 1:54 her tour of Aurillac.