Ascension day intervals

Bank holiday here in France and it was a pleasant change to be able to go to the club this morning and to run with the others.

Laurence and I arrived late and so we missed the morning briefing as to the details of the session from Miguel, but no stress it was a holiday so we took off with the others to see what would happen. There was a good turnout with Jean-Marc, Ylies, Nico, Olivier, Fred and Wilfried amongst others at the front for the men and Laurence was running with Katia, Brigitte and Michèle.

After the 25 minute warm-up, we stopped for the last prep talk and discovered that the menu for the day was a 3', 6', 9', 6', 3' pyramid session. I set off for the first interval with Ylies, Nico and Olivier and was pleased to see that I was keeping up with them, feeling fresher after a day off yesterday. This lasted into the second interval when they pulled away slightly towards the end, but I managed to stay ahead of Olivier.

It was on the 9' and third interval that the going got tough. We started on the 'bosses': the mounds besides the railway line with a short, steep uphill to start and then a long drag into the second half of the interval. I suffered now and eased off the pace, letting Ylies, Fred and Nico gap me with Olivier and Wilfried just in front. I managed to catch and overtake Wilfried towards the end as he flagged and finished with Olivier.

Nico began to complain of a full stomach now, a result of an excess of hamburgers and M and M's downed by Desperados (for the non-French amongst you, this is a foul concoction pretending to be beer with a dash of tequila. It is in fact purely chemical, but attracts youngsters who don't know any better). He ran with Olivier and myself for this 6' interval and then we ran the last 3' together before he pulled away towards the end.

A good session and I was pleased with the results. It's my first speed session in a long while and I'll need more of these if I'm to be competitive over 10 and 15km. The intervals were run at the following pace approximately:

3:39, 3:25, 3:49, 3:45, 3:42.

So a total of 16.2km all up in 1:23 or an average pace of 5:08.