Club session

Back to the club this week after the Christmas break for the Thursday evening session and it was good to see a sizeable turnout trying to eliminate the excesses of Christmas and the New Year. Both coaches, Michel and Miguel, were there and I listened to Miguel announce a fartlek session around Poissy with the faster runners.

Nico had decided that he was focussed on a 10k race preparation and as such he'd be staying around the track with Michel's group while they ran 8x800m, he'd be running some 400m intervals followed by a couple of 2000m. I headed off slowly with Yoann, Jean-Marc, Sébastien, Frédéric, Jérôme, François and Gérald amongst others towards Poissy. We started the session proper in Poissy where Miguel announced that we were to run 5 x 2' in 2 blocks off 1' recovery.

I had brought my new Garmin Forerunner 910XT but I had stupidly forgotten to check the battery and it was flat. So much for being able to check the intervals and the pace during this exercise. I just gritted my teeth and tried to keep in touch with Jean-Marc. The advantage of fairly short intervals such as these is that the gap between the runners isn't huge and the recoveries allow everybody to regroup before setting off again. I was pleased with the first block of 5 intervals where I was just behind Jean-Marc and ahead of Jérôme. The second block was a lot harder and I could feel my lack of mileage recently which was showing in my level of endurance. The pace was around 3:25/km for the intervals and probably 5 seconds slower in the second block.

Around 11 kilometres all up in an hour. Good session but I could feel the lactic in my legs by the end.