Long run, crazy run, tempo run

On a cold and breezy Saturday morning, Sas, Richard(?) and I headed up the heritage trail from Darlington to Mundaring, paused for a gel, and then headed back. Pretty uneventful run, averaged ~4:55 up the hill HR146, and 4:23 down it with the same HR. It's 19.2km and seemed a bit of a cheat to be finished by 7:30, but there it is. What a difference from last week's killer long run on Rotto!

On Sunday met up with a few of the gang to watch the Triathlon Long Distance World Champs in the city ; conditions were awful, going from cold and very windy to hot and airless later in the morning ! It was great to have this event here and was great fun to see these elites up close. Local boy Sean O'Niell did well, coming in 18th, and you could tell he was loving being in front of the home crowd. I was pleasantly surprised by the crowd numbers, I was only expecting a handful. We headed off once we had witnessed Rebekah Keat hold of the challenge from the Frenchwoman to come in second in the women's event - results here.

I must have been inspired or just had a moment of blind idiocy as I decided to head out for a 10k easy run at 4pm, with the temperature at 32°! I guess i was thinking I'd try to get this heat-acclimatisation business over with, and was OK for the first half where I was into a fairly pleasant SE breeze. Once I turned, the weather gods really turned up the screws and I suffered a bit heading home, losing the cooling effects of the wind and also heading into the hilly part of the run... I survived, managing 10k @ 4:23 HR159 but felt fairly wiped out all evening as I tried to rehydrate and get my metabolism to calm down.

Monday morning was time for the tempo, but given the exploits of the day before I decided to do an easy 4k down the hill at King's Park and then to a hill-attack fartlek kind of run up the Law Walk and back to NextG. I was happy with how the legs felt, because I expected them to be dead, but they coped pretty well with the 'charge up the hill/ recover down the hill' run, especially considering there's not a lot of downhill on the Law Walk when your heading from the Crawley end towards the city. Averaged 3:55 pace on the 4.6k back to Next G HR170 which is good.

Intervals tomorrow, easy on Wednesday and then a 1k and 3k at Coker with the masters on Thursday.