January Bay Challenge 5K.

SATURDAY 29/1/05, 7.20AM, 10K.

 

Fronted for yet another CR handicap 5K after 5 hours sleep (the Australian Open tennis coverage is really screwing my sleep patterns up; I'll be completely useless in winter with the Ashes Tour and with SBS covering the entire Tour de France live). 21 degrees, 90% humidity.

 

Not a good run at all. My GPS died in the arse after 20 metres but my splits were something like 3.44, 4.00, 4.07, 4.07, wheeeezzzze.... for a final time of 20.32. After Wednesday's 10K at Penrith I'd projected a 19.30 for this so I can't really explain it. I recall turning to Tom at about 3K and telling him to get going because he wasn't going to break 20 if he followed me. He did 19.51. Good on him. We then ran back to the start along the course in 27 minutes for a total of 10K in (for me) around 47 and a half minutes.

 

I was thinking before this morning that a PB at the Lane Cove 10K next Saturday was a distinct possibility but I have no idea now. When I decided late last year that I wanted to have a shot at a sub 3 hour marathon at Gold Coast after years of specialising in bush ultras, I was acutely aware that I had to make some rapid gains in speed over the shorter distances at the start of 2005. At the moment, that's not happening consistently or quickly enough and I can't point to any particular reason why this would be the case- I'm actually almost a minute slower over 5K than I was in November, with a little jaunt up Mt Kosciuszko in between there. If I can't start consistently meeting my speed benchmarks in the next month or two, I'll patently not be able to go under 3 at GC, in which case I'm not going to bother going up there, I think.

 

Someone asked this morning if I was over the Coast-Kosci yet. I replied I wasn't sure, although it's been about seven weeks now, so by rights it SHOULD be out of the system. You hear about people at the elite and sub elite levels turning in one particularly gruelling race or string of races and never reaching the same levels again, or at least not doing so for months if not years. I don't know if Coast-Kosci was that debilitating, but the way my running is right now is very reminiscent of how my running was two years ago when I came off Bogong-Hotham in January and was fired up as a result of my performance there, thinking a massive PB at 6FT in March was on the cards. After a couple of easy weeks I got back into training there and my performances were all over the place, as well as having to deal with a few minor illnesses. At the Striders 10K the week before the 2003 6FT I missed my PB by only two seconds and thought I'd finally got it together in time, but got the flu a day or two later and had a disaster at 6FT. My running right now reminds me of those two months, but I can't explain why it should be in that state. (After a few weeks off after the 2003 6FT, I got back into training, did a 10K PB in early June, ran Western States not long after, did another 10K PB in September and did my 100 mile PB at Glasshouse a few weeks after that. So managed to turn the year around quite well. However, I have a tighter schedule in 2005 and more ground to make up.)

 

I heard Kim Beazley say on the TV last night that you can't just tell members of a political party to be unified and expect it to happen. Political unity came out of having a common direction and developing momentum. I think there's something in that. You could stretch the analogy a bit (just stay with me here folks) and rationalise that you can't just tell yourself to have a good mental approach to your running. That positive outlook comes more often from having an acheivable (but ambitious) goal and developing some training momentum. Got to say, at the moment my mental outlook on running- at least when it comes to the speed stuff- is not particularly good, given I'm not running that well (but I'm not even consistently bad!) and my goal for July is looking a bit further out of reach now than it did a few months ago.

 

Anyway, I still have a bit of time. Let's see if I can get it right for the Lane Cove 10K next Saturday. I know I'm better than I was this morning.