Pacing Laurence

Laurence is also following her own marathon schedule and as I was racing tomorrow and didn't want to run hard, I promised her that I'd run with her and help her to achieve her objective of 7km in 33 minutes. This equates to 4:42 pace so I wrapped up and we set off together for a half hour warm-up before we attacked the programme for the day.

We ran down towards the hippodrome and began the 7 km after a 5 km warm-up. I was actually quite stressed about my pacing duties and didn't want to set off too fast and tire her or too slowly and miss the morning's objectives. I set up a new screen on the garmin to see the lap pace and used this as my reference. We were very regular and only one kilometre was run slower than the designated pace in 4:43 while the others were well under.

We finished the exercise in 32:33 so well ahead of schedule and I probably gained as much satisfaction doing this as achieving my personal bests over my own training routes. Laurence is running very regularly and her progression in training and racing is most impressive. I'm sure that, barring any unexpected incidents, that she'll beat her PB over the marathon in Paris next month.

14.25km all up in 1:13 so an average pace of 5:07.