Thursday club session

Got off to a great start this evening by smashing the car before I arrived at the club.

I was in a hurry, leaving work slightly too late to be comfortable for the drive to the 6:45 pm club session. I left at 5:55 and 50 minutes is just a little tight with the evening traffic coming out of Paris. With this in mind, I negotiated the roadworks around the Paris périphérique and then just as I turned left to stop at a traffic light the woman on my left who I'd been overtaking (on the wrong side admittedly), decided to change direction and drove into me. 20 minutes later, having filled in the insurance declaration together, I was back in the damaged car, in a bad mood, and wondering why I'm always in a hurry for these sessions.

I turned up 30 minutes late, got changed in the car and headed to the track. François was doing a marathon training session with Nat of 6 x 1000m at 4:15 pace. I decided that I would run with them and set off almost immediately.

It was a really good session and François has been training hard to achieve his 3h00 marathon in Paris next week. I'll be disappointed for him if he doesn't pull it off because he's followed the plan that I've used for the last 4 marathons most diligently.

The times for the intervals were as follows:

4:14, 4:11, 4:07, 4:09, 4:08, 4:08

So all very consistent and both François and Nat looked fresh at the end. 11 km all up in 50:21 so an average of 4:36 for the session. A whiff of scandal surrounded the session though following the declaration that one of the latest female runners to have joined the club (and closely watched by other married women runners) invited a male runner to share the female changing romms with her before the other runners arrived to open the male changing rooms. This is the sort of news that could change the reputation of the club permanently... and we wouldn't want this to happen, would we. Would we? Anyway, my only risk following this announcement is to smash up the car more frequently in an attempt to arrive earlier!