15 x 200m

It rained, rained a little more and then it chucked it down. This is not normally a problem but unfortunately when you're a driver in Paris it is. Parisiens don't like driving unless it's dry and visible. The rain that was now falling was causing chaos on the roads. The periphérique had turned into a carpark and when I came off the ringroad, it was worse still. I had left work at the usual time to go running at the club, but today I was stuck in gridlock. It took me just short of 2 hours to drive the 26km between Paris and St Germain. I arrived too late to do anything.

My plan had been to run the intervals with Nico and barring that, to run them on the track with other runners around at least. The plan went out of the window and I arrived just in time to see Régis leaving and then to watch Gérald, Bruno, Wilfried and Stéphane running their warm-downs. I watched Laurence, Katia, Sandra and François finish the end of their session and went home with Laurence, too late to see Nico who'd finished early and didn't want to hang around in the rain.

The planned session was postponed to the next morning, by mself, on the roads, in the dark with only the Garmin for company. At least when I woke up it had stopped raining and the temperature was very clement. I gritted my teeth and set out, not looking forward at all to the marathon training plan and the 15 x 200m intervals that I'd programmed into the Garmin. The plan said that they had to be run in 42 seconds or less off 200m recovery, but this seemed far too easy so I had in mind to run each sub 40 off 100m recovery instead.

I ran past the roundabout in front of the castle at Maisons Laffitte, so a little under 3km warm-up before starting. Then I began.

The first couple of intervals passed easily enough and I would recover quickly setting off slightly before the Garmin beeped at me to begin. The pace felt quite fast but I had no idea of the time I was running them in. I concentrated on keeping them as fast as honest as possible and slowly those recovery times lengthened and each interval felt harder and harder in the legs as the level of lactic rose. The times went as follows:

40, 40, 39, 39, 39
38, 37, 38, 39, 38
39, 35, 39, 36, 35

Recovery time was about 40 seconds for the 100m between each interval. McMillan says that I should be running these between 34 and 37 seconds per rep but that's on the track, so I'm not too disappointed.

13 km all up in 59:27 or an average pace of 4:34.