Sunday club session

I was eager to show off my now highly tuned mountain climbing skills at the club session on Sunday and so when Michel Z proposed a circuit towards Marly forest, I was really pleased. The turnout was fairly good with Miguel, Jean-François, Simon, Philippe and a new guy Wilfried in attendance. It turned out that I'd already run once with Wilfried as he lives in Le Mesnil and we'd run to Cora with Nick a while ago.

As we ran around, I began chatting to Wilfried who's preparing for the Millau 100 km race in a couple of months. He runs at very much the same pace as me with a marathon PB of 2:53 (although slightly slower over 10 km race where he's never beaten 38 minutes). The path through the woods to Marly was very sinuous, as always with Michel as he tries to find the narrowest most overgrown sections of the wood, and we took it easily enough for the first 6km out before stopping with the group for a breather.

We'd reached the road to St Nom now and we headed back towards the top of Princess Road before cutting down diagonally to meet the road about half-way down. There was a break away group at the front led by Jean-François and Philippe so with Simon and Wilfried, we accelerated to catch them. This was already no small feat and we were now running at about 15km/h. We hit Princess Road now and ran downhill. I ran to the front with Jean-François and we ran shoulder to shoulder down the hill managing this kilometre in 3:36. I was surprised that the group stayed together at this pace and when the uphill approached, I decided to show how much I'd improved up the slopes too. I accelerated again but I just couldn't drop them and then Jean-François overtook me, followed by Wilfried and Simon. I just cracked and eased off the pace to finish the hill.


A fast pace to finish the route and we ran about 14km all up in 1:10. This was more than enough for me and I was shattered. So much for the altitude training!