20 x 400m

Work is manic at the moment and if I'm not running I'm working. In fact, Wednesday I was working so much that there was no time at all in the day to fit a run in so I skipped my recvoery run and postponed this to Friday instead. The marathon plan for today was one of the final long interval sessions before the 2 week taper until Florence and the event.

I lke to be able to compare my sessions now with those that I was running just before last Autumn's marathon. It's reassuring to see that I'm running all of my intervals faster and better than before but I couldn't remeber running this session last year so how would I do? Nico had arranged to run with me tonight as it's always easier to motivate yourself to do these hard sessions with somebody beside you. I had to call him after I left work though as the jams were just incredible and I knew that I'd be late for the club session. He agreed to wait for me and I was thankful that Iwasn't going to run these alone.

I turned up at 7:15 pm, half an hour late and changed in the car. Nico was waiting for me ready to go and we ran a 10 minute warm-up around the outside of the track before running onto the track and starting the session. Nico suggested taking it in turns to head up the intervals in bursts of 2 and I agreed. He would run the first 2 in front and then I would take over and so on.

The first interval felt ridiculously easy but we were running these off 100m floats and by the 3rd or 4th it was already getting slightly more complicated. Half of the effort when you're running this number of intervals is mental as you count down how many you have run and how many are still left to do. Luckily there were some distractions at the track to take our minds off the effort as we teased Laurence, Katia and Sandra about their own 3km intervals that they were running.

Gérald joined us after the first couple of intervals and it was also reassuring to hear his heavy breathing as we ran each 400m. So it wasn't that easy for us but we obviously weren't coasting judging by the strength of Gérald's panting! Our intervals were very regular too. Nico had suggested that we aim for each interval between 85 and 90 seconds but after the first few, we were running constantly at around 84 seconds or less, so we just maintained the pace there. The recoveries were regular too with each 100m in just over 35 seconds.  Gérald pulled out after running 9 intervals with us, telling us that he couldn't take any more.

I began to struggle with the laps over the last 5 intervals when we picked up the pace slightly and I found that the recoveries weren't quite long enough for me. Despite this I managed and we completed the session together, really pleased to have run so regularly and in such a good manner. I compared this performance to last year when I was averaging between 1:27 and 1:28. Admittedly, I wasn't on the track and this does help, but we were averaging 1:22 - 1:23 by the end. The intervals went as follows:

1:24, 1:22, 1:26, 1:23, 1:22, 1:24, 1:23, 1:23, 1:22, 1:24,
1:23, 1:23, 1:22, 1:22, 1:22, 1:21, 1:21, 1:20, 1:20, 1:19

15.6 km all up in 1:12 or an average pace of 4:39 for the session. Really chuffed to have gotten this one under my belt.