1st 8km Tempo Run

The rain had been back since yesterday evening. As I started out on my run at the track, which was located at the top of the hill, I could see the dark clouds looming. The wind was blowing pretty hard and I was hoping to complete my 20 loops of 400m before the rain set in. But my speed was too slow. When I hit my 12th loop, the lightning was lighting up the skies and the safety guy working there, in a futile attempt to chase me and my running mate away, until I could see the lightning got really close and left the stadium after the 14th loop and made our way to the 1.6km loop around the campus.


Coach had put me on 5:15/km pace for 8km. I calculated it to be 2:06min per 400m and was able to maintain the pace throughout the 14laps. On the 1.6km loop, I clocked just under 8min and that worked out to be 5min/km pace. Short of 400m but I was quite confident I would be able to clear that within 2min anyway. Like I told Coach, the effort was about 60-70%. I could still hold a decent conversation with my running mate.


As I started to run with Andrew and the MR25 guys for the past 2 months, I had found that my own expectation of my run times kept decreasing. Looking back on my blog, I had been happy with running at 6min/km pace, 5:45/km and a good speed would have been 5:30/km. But now Coach is looking for even faster pace. His target was a 3:45 marathon at the ironman.  I would love to do that timing but I have my reservations. To me, it will be tough trying to run a marathon at 5:30/km or even faster pace after a 180km bike. Not impossible probably, but probably not so soon?


The Tuesday track sessions do come with a price. My legs had been feeling more retarded, even gentle climbing up the stairs at work made the legs felt tired. I suppose this would be a good sign that things should improve over the next few months. Pushing the legs to work harder at track, the tempo runs on Thursdays and the long session on Sundays, they should get stronger.


Today was a pseudo sports day in school. Got off work early and managed to do my swim just before the rain came. Usual warm ups followed by 3x200m, 2x500m time trial, 4x50m on the 50s, 100m recovery followed by another 4x50m on the 50s. 200m were done in under 3:18, 3:17 and 3:23 while 1st 500m done in 8:39 while 2nd 500m done in 8:52.


I was trying to push my 200m to be under 3:20 and only managed 2 sets under that target. Keeping track of the times are good for me to recall and try to match or get better the next session.  The 500m time trial I was keeping them in good pace. All of the 100m were done under 1:45 except for last 100m I did in 1:54. Have no idea what happened, but it could be simply bad strokes.


The 50m was not that well done. I was hitting the wall every 50s. Last week I was still able to clear under 48s, but this was gone today. Oh well, every dog has its days. This was probably one of those days.


Overall, it had been a good week. No sessions were missed. And I hope it would not happen over the weekend.