Black and White

A tale of 2 days....

Day 16
Back up to the oval for the 30 minute recovery consisting of laps around listening to the iPod shuffle. Things seemed to pull up ok except for the usual dodgy lh achilles. Down to Melbourne again and while working in the hotel room and watching tv I worked quite a bit on self massage on the achilles, also put in a heel lift to try and reduce the stretch factor.

Day 17
I decided that I was going to run with the Gunn Runners tonight after the aborted attempt 2 weeks ago. A great idea with a 5km time trial for $6 which then includes a fresh amber ale for recovery :). The run is an out an back around Albert Park lake and I have always struggled to post anywhere near my CR5km times. I suppose it is due to the soft crushed rock surface, a turnaround plus running on a slightly uneven surface in the dark...

Anyway, I had resolved to hang on to the leaders for as long as possible, the first km split flashed up with a 3:40 and at about the same time I let them slowly stretch away with 4 in front. the next garmin split was a 4:10 but the others were still well and truly in sight. Coming back after the turnaround I could see I was slowly hauling in one guy and after another 2 4:10 km splits went past him with a km to go. However I could sense him pick up the pace and loiter a couple of metres back. As we rounded the bend with about 200m to go he came at me and it was an absolute ball busting sprint to the line, even my patented "kick of death" did not seem to sort him out but somehow I still edged him at the line :)

Well and truly stuffed after that and took quite a while to suck the oxygen back and also feel that lunch might not reappear! Ending time was 20:30 but as stated above this always seems to be a slow course (garmin said 5.07 km).

The best part of the whole exercise is the fact that there was absolutely no whinging from the troublesome achilles whatsoever so maybe the self massage really worked!