Mysterious Encounter

My birthday presents included various running-related items, amongst them a new stopwatch, which – wonder of technology – can display the seconds even if I’ve been out for more than an hour. Oh the progress. That should take care of Mike’s, Andrew’s and Phil’s concerns about my time keeping.

The weekend was mainly taken over by various birthday activities (usually instigated by the kids), but I did manage to sneak out Sunday morning for my main tempo run. As I’ve mentioned before, Sunday is the one day of the week where I seem to be able to get my legs going better than any other day. So it proved once more; I run by time, and the turnaround-point keeps being pushed out further and further. I’m always conscious of the second half and try to run even splits as much as possible, and usually I get it right. It went very well again, and I managed 9 miles in just under an hour. This keeps getting better and better. I even feel better during this run. Two weeks ago I was clearly hanging on towards the end, yesterday I was still going strong at the end, and yet another best-pace-ever tempo run was delivered.

I came home to a veritable feast, including fruit salad, birthday cake and blueberry-orange-muffins (I’m a lucky guy!), but had to promise to come swimming later that day. I usually try to wriggle out of that, because keeping tabs on 3 young kids in the swimming pool is hard work, I can never relax, and if I manage to actually swim more than 5 minutes out of the hour we’re in the pool then I’m doing well. Still, with all my fitness I expected to breeze through the water, but was surprised how much I was out of breath after each length. Apparently there’s more to swimming than aerobic fitness.
Anyway, the kids loved it, and I guess we’ll be doing it again soon enough (or even on a weekly basis).

Today called for another recovery effort, and as usual the legs felt completely dead early on, but had no choice but to wake up along the long climb up to the devil’s elbow. Most people wouldn’t run the steepest climb on a recovery day, but it seems to work very well for me. On the second, flat, part of the course I felt I managed a good pace despite the low heart rate. I was a bit surprised when I worked out the average pace towards the end of the run; I expected it to be faster. Not that it matters, these runs are supposed to be slower, and I certainly don’t want to overdo it. I had one strange encounter. I was running along the mountain road when all of a sudden I was surrounded from all sides by some very bright light. It looked like an alien encounter in one of those Hollywood films. For a second or two I was completely disorientated and had no clue what was going on, until I realised that a car was coming down the hill behind me and the light fog caused some strange lighting effects. Well, I never. It really had me spooked for a moment.

28 Jan: 9 miles, 59:59, 6:39 pace, avg. HR 165
29 Jan: 11 miles, 1:32, 8:21 pace, avg. HR 143

Weekly mileage: 83.5