Drenched

I didn't manage to make it for an early morning run so I concentrated on making it to the club for the evening session. The weather was lousy and I mean really lousy. It was blowing a gale and the rain was falling sideways. I wondered why I bothered attempting to get out to go running in this weather quite frankly.

When I turned up at the club there wasn't a huge turnout which considering the state of the conditions outside was hardly surprising. Momo, Mireille, Fred, Jean-Marc and Ilyes were there though togther with José and Thierry so there was some chance of a decent session. Miguel announced that the training schedule was 2 x 2000m of slow/fast/slow. Since I arrived only just intime I didn't manage to hear what was being announced and besides, it was now chucking it down and any plans looked to be optimistic.

After a quick warm-up in which everyone managed to arrived drenched back at the stadium, it was decided to change the plan and to run easily around the track and then do some running up the steps of the stadium seating and back down. With Fred, Ilyes and Jean-Marc we created a renegade group and stayed on the track running 5x300m off 100m recovery and then a second set of intervals. This was our own interpretation of the initial training plan and it seemed fine to me. We did the first set of intervals and Ilyes ran well ahead whereas Jean-Marc, Fred and myself stayed together. At the end of this first set, Jean-Marc called it a day and went to run up some stairs while I decided to run 2km at 'active' recovery pace before attacking my second set.

Fred tried to stay with me but when he dropped off complaining that I was going too fast, I realised that my active recovery was 15km/h and after 8 minutes, I started a second set of intervals with Fred acting as a pacer.
We ran all of the 300m intervals in 55 -56 seconds and was very regular. I was pleased with the session which under these conditions was nothing short of a miracle.

13 km all up in 1:03. We didn't hang around before heading home!