"It's a treat being a runner, out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do." - Allan Sillitoe


Monday, June 22, 2009

Hill repeats and old age

This morning I did a 5.64km warm up and then 8 hill repeats up Banksia Terrace. Pretty cold conditions but the good warm up and a bit of stretch made for a good hard workout. I have looked back through my blog for when I did this session in my program for Boston and found that I did 6 x 1 min for the hill. Today I did 8 x around 52 secs (although the first one was 48secs) which is a pretty big improvement. Looking back through my blog I also noticed that I am running my general aerobic runs quite a bit quicker than early in my Boston program. Back then I was happily running in 4.30s a km whereas these days I would be horrified if I did that unintentionally.

Medium long run (21.5km) tomorrow. Forecast is for showers for the remainder of the week.

Yesterday was my rest day. Rox and I quickly went down to the river to watch the start of the Perth Half (at 2.5km) before we went to football. Saw Simon and Kim run past and got a couple of photos which I will email to them. Great run by Simon who finished in 1.19 and change. Sub 1.20 is an awesome run and puts him on track for another fast half at the Gold Coast and then a great debut marathon in Melbourne. Seemed like good conditions for fast running with not too much breeze on the way out and then a bit of a tailwind on the way back. Kim is well into her taper for the Perth marathon so looks like she followed her plan to take it easy as she finished in around 2hrs 2mins.

Stark reminder of advancing age the other day. I was talking to a co-worker about Ben's football team which I coach and I commented that we were sort of like the "Bad News Bears". I got a bit of a blank look on that one and it was only when I mentioned it to Rox and thought about it a bit more that I realised that he wouldn't have been born when the Bad News Bears movies were made back in the late 1970s (although I think there was a remake a few years ago).

I can handle getting older (just ...) but it's a bit rough when you have to find yourself a whole new set of popular culture references as well.

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