8 x 800m

God, I wasn't looking forward to this one. I knew it was going to be hard. Firstly, I was running in unknown territory as I was staying in a hotel in Bagshot, Surrey; secondly, I had been drinking the night before running; and thridly, I still hadn't recovered from the long runs over the weekend.

I set out with the firm intention of running around the hotel's golf course but at just before 6:00am there wasn't any light whatsoever and having tripped over a couple of times, I gave this up as a bad job and headed out on the roads. I was struggling to find any pace at all from the start and I thought that I'd just get up the hill and find some flat sections in the housing estates where I could run the intervals without being run over by traffic.

This intention wasn't as easy as it sounded and it was only after the first interval that I found a block that I could run around that was almost 800m in length. I wasn't looking at the splits on the Garmin but I knew instinctively that I was not running as fast as I'm able and I had nothing left to give. At one point, I thought that the people living in the houses would call the police as I'm sure that they weren't used to seeing a runner at 6:00am circling around their houses 10 times. Still, I managed to finish the session without being pulled over despite one guy staring at me from his upstairts window for at least 3 of my loops.

The splits went as follows:

3:01, 2:56, 2:54, 2:57, 2:55, 2:54, 2:54, 2:54

So a little disappointed as I should be running these under 2:50 now. The excuses were all found however.

14km all up in 1:08 or an average of 4:52 per km which wasn't surprising seeing how I felt.