Saturday 21 March 2015

Saturday morning session - 1 x 4 miles, 1 x 2 miles

This was bloody tough. I don't know whether it was the wind, the small puddles left behind by the overnight rain, or simply me just becoming soft - but today felt harder than I had envisaged. The goal was to run 4 miles at my goal 10km pace (which is 3:18 min/km), followed by 2 miles again at the same pace. I feel like I failed, with an average pace of 3:20 min/km and 3:21 min/km respectively. Despite being a flat course, Passmore Reserve is not a fast loop - and again I will blame the canopy of trees covering the final 150m of the circuit. My GPS instaneous pace always drops a couple of seconds per km when passing underneath - well, that is my excuse anyway. Nevertheless, I have set a baseline, and will likely attempt to repeat the same session next Saturday, hoping to average 2 and 3 seconds per kilometre faster, respectively. The real test will come in a fortnight with the next race of the Sydney Striders 10km series at Lane Cove National Park - an undulating, yet surprisingly not so slow 10km road course. Still undecided about entering the 10km road race the following week down in Canberra for the Australian Running Festival. My coach Sean Williams believes that it is not a particularly fast course due to its winding nature. A weekend away down in the nation's capital could be fun though, and it would be great to cheer on my fellow squad members and Sudney Striders the following day for the half and full marathons.

2 comments:

  1. 10km race pace for 6.4km followed by 3.2km (whatever the rest) sounds very ambitious for a training session mate. I'll run with you at Passmore next week, but I doubt I can do 3:18's.
    And forget the Garmin when running in circles, Passmore is 650m, period.

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    1. Thanks so much Tom, that's certainly encouraging to here. Macca even told me on Thursday morning that the actual length of Passmore changes depending on whether you run it clockwise or anticlockwise. Yeah, that 3:20 pace certainly felt much harder and faster than what the watch was suggesting. How have you recovered from NYC? Great time by the way! Looking forward to the Curry Night tonight!

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