Despite the mud, running in the rain is a lot of fun I find. The cold kind of dulls your senses, so you don't notice any aches and pains that might be troubling you. Everything looks clean and fresh and the looks you get from people sitting in their cars are priceless:P I don't have any qualifications in body language, but I'd give a rough guess at the expression approximating 'You are completely and utterly insane'.
I always like Peter Snell's quotation, which goes something along the lines of "The only thing motivating me to get out there on those cold, rainy days, was the thought that the 10 miles I was doing would put another few hundredths of a second on my opponents, safe and warm in their beds."
Training's going quite well this week. On Monday, I discovered the joys of barefoot running, spontaneously deciding to do a spot of shoeless training, upon finding an attractively soft and uninhabited grass oval. I did twenty minutes and it felt great. My form suddenly became a thousand times better, my cadence shooting up from my usual 168 steps per minute to over 185! I think I'm going to make it a part of my regular training regime. It's meant to do wonders to your muscle strength in your feet and with the form improvements it can bring, it can bring your economy up several percent, which makes a big difference over the course of a marathon. Quite a few elite runners do it and of course, many great kenyan runners started off running barefoot, having no other option! After putting my shoes back on, running suddenly felt much more of an effort. It felt like they weighed a ton! My running style stayed the same though, and I continued those choppy, efficient strides for the rest of the run.
Tuesday's hill run was the best I have ever had:D After a decent warmup, I started up the hills and was delighted to see that my legs were suddenly behaving the way I wanted them to. Instead of chugging up the hill at walking pace, I was springing up powerfully, getting proper ankle extension and feeling smooth and efficient. It lasted the whole workout and I was hardly tired after hitting stop after two hours.
I didn't do much running on Wednesday, because the bike shop called and told me that they'd finished servicing my bike:) I ran the 4km to the shop to save money and in addition to paying $129 for the service (no grudges there, it really needed a service and a lot of things needed to be replaced!), I ended up putting down $200 on a Giant Alias 08:
I'd already planned on getting one, because it's my vehicle of choice for the two month cycling tour of Europe my friend and I are doing at the end of the year, but wasn't really invisioning getting one for another month or so til I had the cash. But I was chatting with the guy at Ashburton Cycles and he skillfully pulled me into his web, on the surface, telling me that the 09 model was going to be 25% more expensive due to increased shipping, material and labour costs, but really subliminally screaming 'Buy it now! Buy it now!'. And my subconscious fell for it like a sucker, not even bothering to make sure it was the right size before handing my credit card over. It is a really nice bike though and it felt glorious during the 50m test ride I took. Shame I can't ride it properly til I've paid the remaining $800 off!
Infused with the spirit of cycling, I did a few hours on my refurbished commuter. It rides a lot better than it used to (having a buckled back wheel really slows you down, I've realised) and while it's no Alias, it felt damn good finally being able to keep up with fat, old guys riding expensive bikes on the bike path.
Yet again, my tempo run was disappointing this week. I think I've only had one that I can really say that I actually hit tempo pace the whole way and enjoyed it. After getting 5 hrs sleep and hitting the snooze button for forty minutes, I finally dragged myself out of bed and plodded out to the track. I felt tremendously crap, it felt so bloody slow. I was cheered up a little by the fact that it took 33 minutes, which while it is slow, was how fast I did it a few weeks ago, when I didn't feel anywhere near as bad. Maybe my definition of slow has shifted lately. Despite feeling crap, I still managed 20:39 for the first 5k set, which was pretty much where I wanted to be and the second fastest time I've run in a 5k tempo run all year. But although aerobically I was fully recovered within 10 seconds, even three minutes wasn't enough to bring my legs up to full strength again. My legs just wouldn't move fast and I did two more 2.7k sets (6 laps of lane 8) in astonishingly slow times. Given that I was aiming to do 3x5k in 20:00, it was a pretty dismal performance. I'm putting it down to the 40ish km of cycling I did the day before. It's not much, but I haven't done that much riding in a while. It probably also has something to do with residual fatigue from the hill workout, though I'm not sure about that because I felt pretty good in my 4k of running on Wednesday. Maybe next time I'll do my tempo run on Friday though to give myself more time to recover.
And finally, today's run was pretty good, notwithstanding the slip in the mud. I did 53 minutes at sub 4:30 pace (faster than I averaged in the tempo run:S) before asthma troubles convinced me that I'd be better off getting out of the rain.
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