Recovery run

I went running with a new British colleague, who like me, takes his running kit with him whenever he's on the road. We don't have exactly the same pace but it's nice to be able to run with somebody and to chat and relax. We had arranged the previous night that we would meet up at 5:15am to run as he had a telephone conference at 7:00am. I must be mad...

So there we were at 5:15am in the pitch black off for our run and it was really pleasant. We basically looped around the roads around the outside of the hotel grounds looking for a way to run a complete circuit. Unfortunately, there isn't a way through the hotel at the back and we had to run the same way back as we set out. By the time we got back, we'd covered 7.4km so I headed back out by myself while Bruce went and got ready for his call.

This time, I headed back up to where I'd done my interval training the day before and carried on this time into Camberly. The amount of traffic along this road is considerable even at this early time in the morning. I have to admit that it brought back memories of life in England and I don't think that I'm ready to go back for a long stretch.

I managed to relax now and stretch my legs a little, testing my achilles which had been hurting slightly the day before after the intervals. Today there was nothing and everything seems to have sorted itself out which was encouraging.

14.1km all up in 1:12 or an average pace of 5:08/km. The second half of the run was run at 4:45 pace so still slow for a recovery.

8 x 800m

God, I wasn't looking forward to this one. I knew it was going to be hard. Firstly, I was running in unknown territory as I was staying in a hotel in Bagshot, Surrey; secondly, I had been drinking the night before running; and thridly, I still hadn't recovered from the long runs over the weekend.

I set out with the firm intention of running around the hotel's golf course but at just before 6:00am there wasn't any light whatsoever and having tripped over a couple of times, I gave this up as a bad job and headed out on the roads. I was struggling to find any pace at all from the start and I thought that I'd just get up the hill and find some flat sections in the housing estates where I could run the intervals without being run over by traffic.

This intention wasn't as easy as it sounded and it was only after the first interval that I found a block that I could run around that was almost 800m in length. I wasn't looking at the splits on the Garmin but I knew instinctively that I was not running as fast as I'm able and I had nothing left to give. At one point, I thought that the people living in the houses would call the police as I'm sure that they weren't used to seeing a runner at 6:00am circling around their houses 10 times. Still, I managed to finish the session without being pulled over despite one guy staring at me from his upstairts window for at least 3 of my loops.

The splits went as follows:

3:01, 2:56, 2:54, 2:57, 2:55, 2:54, 2:54, 2:54

So a little disappointed as I should be running these under 2:50 now. The excuses were all found however.

14km all up in 1:08 or an average of 4:52 per km which wasn't surprising seeing how I felt.