Hills - club session

I even checked the training schedule before setting off to the club with Laurence today. And hills were definitely on the programme. This was confirmed by Miguel with the pre-session speech. Luckily we were only going to do 8 short hills. The big question was where?

Laurence and Katia decided to take it easy following Michel's advice, while I set off with Nico, Mireille, Momo, Romain and others towards Chamburcy. It was a long warm-up and we eventually got to the place where the action was to take place - the far end of the golf course at Joyenval with a suitably steep hill.

Miguel did a quick recce and decided that we'd run 4 short hills (roughly 100m) on the odd reps, and 4 long hills (roughly 200m) on the even reps. Clear ? Well Nico was struggling with the maths as he's obviously still suffering from the after-effects (or the jet-lag?) of his excursion to Florence this weekend. He wasn't letting me forget that he beat my marathon time by 90 seconds and is now the man to beat over the distance. He went on and on about it and how he can reduce this time by another 5 minutes at least that we almost beat him up and left him in a quiet ditch in the forest. I'm surprised he was still able to run with his head swollen so big.

I thought that he'd be pushing the hills too just to shove my nose in it but he was obviously very tired and taking it easy. He just ran a couple hard to show that he's still a contender but we could see that his heart wasn't in it and he's obviously very worried about the forthcoming showdown in Conflans this Saturday. I ran average with some tiredness in the thighs still from Sunday but overall not too bad. Give me a track session over this anyday though.

The best part was running back to the club for our warm-down afterwards when Nico and I decided to run along the road rather than crossing through the forest. The last kilometres went 4"40, 4"10, 3"50, 3"48. The traffic shooting by in the dark less than 10 centimetres from us as we ran in dark tracksuits probably influenced the pace somewhat. Visages of being mowed down by a reckless driver were only too vivid as I ran along. I made sure that Nico was behind me along this stretch so that he would take the force of the shock from the vehicle first...

13.9km all up in 1'18.