Weekend Wrap

Saturday
Up early to North Head to set up the electronic timing system. Was in 2 minds as to whether I'd race or not. Everything was set up and one of the people not running, Richard, seemed to be pretty confident of being able to monitor the timing stuff so I decided to run. First couple of km were pretty relaxed, just running about 5-10m behind Spud and Mr G. As we climbed back up from the turn I could feel the exertion in trying to maintain the pace, also started to worry about the timing and if something went wrong. As we ran back down the slope towards the start/finish and turnaround I could feel the niggles start to complain a little more and opted to withdraw so I could make sure everythinh went ok at the finish. At that point I did 5.7km roughly and bang on 4:05 pace which was my target.

As it happens it was a good thing I dropped out as the timing compute did hang and I had to reboot everything, just in time for the leader to finish. To add to the good karma about making sure everything was working 2 of the 4 different timing methods then did subsequently fail as we processed the 330 odd finishers and so it was even more important that the main system was working, phew!!

Sunday
Quite a while earlier I had offered to be the 7am host at the STaR given the timing between Canberra and SMH and also that it was not far from home. A more relaxed group at around 6 min/km pace and we headed from Buffalo Creek up towards Ryde through East Ryde. As we ran I noticed that the legs/body felt fairly average. At about halfway one person who had stopped off for a nature break had not rejoined us so I sent the group on and went back to find her. No such luck so I cut across towards where the group should be and then ran it pretty hard to catch up. Only caught them in the last km or so and have to say the body did not like the run at all.

Upon reflection I did too much last week, first a km interval session, followed by a tempo run followed by 500m reps, three hard runs in a row, not what should be done. That somewhat explains why I was starting to struggle on Saturday and also why I felt pretty crappy on Sunday.

A full recovery/rest day today and will see how I feel tomorrow morning before deciding what type of run to do. Only 2 weeks to SMH so if I am ok will make this week a hard week before a mini taper next week.