It’s been two weeks now since Dublin Marathon and while I might have winged my way through that I really should do a little bit of training before Clonakilty. I’ve spent the last two weeks working towards a case of gout but enough is enough, time to get back out training.
Winter training for our triathlon club started last week but I was still recovering from the combined exertions of the marathon and Amsterdam, so tonight was my first night back and it was my favourite session of the week the track session. Early season enthusiasm was really high and we had a very big turnout with about twenty of us, maybe more, milling around in the dark at Portlaoise VEC. After the always thorough warmup and drill from Denise, which actually had me more tired than most of the runs I’ve done of late, we did a little time trial to measure early season fitness and VO2 max – 12 minutes running laps and then measuring how much distance we covered.
I’ve done all sorts of running and distances this year but for some reason running laps always makes me feel like the chubby, unfit kid I was for most of my youth, and a kid who absolutely hated any sort of running without a ball. Give me a marathon any day over trying to run laps (relatively) quickly. I always set off too quickly (something of a common theme), feel horrendous for a bit, slow down before starting to feel right again just as the run is ending. I managed 2600 metres in the 12 minutes which was ok but as always in these sort of tests I finished feeling I could do a whole lot more. Pacing for shorter distances is something I really need to work on.
After finishing we did some strength drills before another spot of stretching and cooling down. After finishing the session, with less than half an hour running in total, my legs felt heavy and slightly sore in places I hadn’t experienced before – upper inner thigh, lower buttocks – but they felt far more alive than they had done in weeks. In some ways then a tough workout but it felt great to get back out there doing defined, specific sessions and to be training with a group again. Roll on next week.
SlowSlowQuickQuickFast? 