Rottnest 10km : 3rd in 35:13

Cracking run in the Rotto 10km funrun. Pretty warm by the 10:30 start but the 32/38kp/h wind kept things cool. Busi as usual lead from start to finish. Simon Coates surged at 1.5km to catch the lead 5km group, but I maintained the gap from that point.

The wind never quite went away and was fairly extreme on the hill leading out of Geordie bay. Tough finish up the hill into the settlement, and squeezing down the path past the 5k runners and then trying not to go A over T on the sharp right hander onto the gravel through the finish...

.I felt very good after the 27km run the day before, but needed a reasonable warmup to help my legs feel less like two sacks of potatoes from standing around and supporting the marathing for the preceding 4 hours.

Splits: 3:22/3:27/3:39/3:27/3:31/3:36/3:24/3:41/3:37/3:26

A few recovery runs now and then we fly to the US. Long Range forecast for the marathon is perfect. Not a good sign :-)

Mostly Sunny


Hi 57° RealFeel® 53° Day

S at 7 mph

Gusts: 23 mph

NYC number #4694 Blue Wave 1 Corral #4 start 9:40am

Got my rego information today along with the race handbook. No going back now...

I'm in the last big week before taper starts which I'm quite looking forward to. 25km on Saturday and I'll race the 10k at Rotto as well. Next week I'll take 25% of the normal runs, and start to hone everything except recoveries around MP. We fly to the US on Tuesday 26th.

On reflection my training has gone very well, perhaps running some of the easy runs a bit hard. Time will tell if doing the long runs at similar to easy pace was wise ; most of them have started slow and finished around MP. The weekly mileage build and race mix has been gradual, where now I feel if I'm not clocking 120km I'm being slack.

One thing the recent warm weather has taught me - my last few Thursday evening runs in direct sun, temperature in the mid 20s, strong easterly wind and RH 10-20% I have experienced what I now recognise as quite severe symptoms of dehydration and lost 2.5-3.5 kg (starting @ around 70kg) of fluid. I'm starting to suspect a large part of my Boston disaster was severe dehydration (coupled with injury and a bad carbo-load) . I’ve never drunk much on my training runs (mostly because I don’t like stopping) , but as a result I am drinking a lot more and will pay attention to this on marathon day.

Only one scare with a soleus tweak which forced me to take a day off and miss an intervals session and a recovery run, but it resolved the problem.

Fremantle HM 8th in 1:17:15

Not a bad result. Weather conditions were perfect today. Inside the body, not so much. I had nagging nausea the whole run ; I made the best of it and tried to keep to my tempo pace, but I had to run solo from about 2.5k ; Stephen Stockwell was ahead, the guy behind me way behind. There were moments when I felt OK and pushed the pace up a bit, but then it got nasty so I dropped off again. Running solo I had nothing to take my mind of things ; the crowd support was great though and I enjoyed coming through the finish area to go around again. Benefits of having a big field – big crowd! All things considered I was pretty happy to run 8th behind Busi, Mackay, Dymnicki, Hill, Stockwell, Johnson and Courtney. The women’s field was disappointing ; no big guns - winner was about 1:27, 5th was 1:37!

In a weak moment I thought about petitioning the WAMC to allow me to compete in the M40-44 age group instead ; as long as Steve Stockwell is running this well, I'm no chance! First M40 was 1:24:00 ... :-)

The bonus of being limited through reasons other than cardio/leg tiredness has been that I've been pretty fresh for the last two easy runs so I can hit my intervals hard tonight and do a decent session Thursday as well. It would be nice to shake this nausea bug that's been kicking around for a bit too long now...