After setting the plan up to get my marathon training and ultimately the Ironman fitness up to scratch, today was the first real crack at something different for this age grouper.

I’ve been plugging away at easy mileage and it’s been relatively pain free. I’ve avoided running with others as I find it hard to adjust my pace. I feel guilty if I’m too slow and, well….I’m never too fast.

Today was different, you will of course recall, today is sprints day. 12*400m. 400m at pace, 400m recovery. The pace defined by a target 5k time, in my case 21:00 which gave me a target pace of 1:43. I’ve no idea what pace that was and frankly I’d have skipped the session if it wasn’t for a colleague (“Half Marathon Matt”)  insisting we should go and I’d enjoy it.

It was tough. We set our sights on 10 sprint laps and we managed 9. Primarily because I can’t count and Matt couldn’t be bothered to argue with me. As I’ve said before it seems to take me a mile or so to get past the initial shock to the system and lesson learnt here, I struggled for the first 3 laps. After that I seemed to find the pace, but wow it was hard. Certainly a lot harder than I expected, moreso that having someone to push me made a huge difference to my effort levels. Data below for those that are as ridiculous about numbers as I am.

He was right. I enjoyed it.

cadence

You will of course note that I was clearly blowing out of my back end, pacing was good, but I need to warm up!!

stats

All that with a lumpy man bag…