Early In The Morning

Just a couple of minutes after setting off I noticed a car slowly approaching from behind. As I'm running on public roads, that’s nothing out of the usual. What surprised me was the car pulling up beside me and the driver greeting me with a friendly “hello Thomas, I thought I might see you out here!”. Michael was out early, too. As nice as it was to see him, I hope he’s ok (he was out looking for the doctor, at 6 o’clock in the morning).

I proceeded with my hill workout. As always, I started with 4x30 seconds strides. The first hill circuit consisted of high knees, which is the toughest of the lot. However, I think I can feel an improvement compared to last week already. I hope it’s not just in my head. The second circuit was thigh drive, for which I had gotten clarification for the coach:

Try to imagine that you are stepping on to a box then straighten the knee and then extending the ankle, much like a whip where the energy starts with the handle and accelerates to the tip, the drive starts with the upper thigh travels through the straightening knee the finishes with a flick of the ankle extending.

As soon as I started doing that, it felt “right”, certainly better than the bounding that I had done before the clarification.

The last workout was downhill strides, which would have been fine, were it not for one tiny detail: it was against the wind, which was blowing at 50 kph with gusts of 70kph. Worse than Wednesday! Actually, it was quite cool to run down a hill that normally is too steep to run down properly and just lean forward, relying on the wind to keep you upright. But as far as the downhill strides were concerned, it probably was not ideal.

Maia caught a cold a few days ago, which once more has caused a few rough nights (except for Niamh who is able to sleep peacefully through her child’s screams), and now Shea has started coughing as well. As always, I’m hoping it will pass me by.

At least the weather is going to change slightly for tomorrow, heavy rain replacing the wind. I’ve got a very tough weekend ahead of me. The training is clearly hotting up now. I’ll let you know.

Update: Several of you have asked about the evaluations. MC has just written 2 posts explaining them in detail here and here. The second post also features a real-life example (yes, you guessed it, me).

3 Feb

8 miles, 1:01:33, 7:42 pace, HR 143

4 Feb

10.5 miles, 1:27:10, 8:18 pace, HR 147
   4x30 sec; high knees; thigh drive; downhill strides