4 Month summary!

Mth - 30 k
YTD - 270 k

Wow my life has turned upside down since moving to Victoria. I have been working now for about 4 mths here and on average working 10 hour days. A few times a month I will at least be working a weekend day if not all weekend. That probably doesn't sound like much but when you have worked for 12 years and then move to another place thinking that not much will change it is a rather rude shock.

I have been training but rather sporadically since my last post. I have not been able to get time off for the event I wanted to do in May which was disappointing but in hindsight I wouldn't have been able to train as much as I would have hoped to anyway. At work I have a few students that are pretty keen on running and although some of them are not what you call dedicated to train for events they are dedicated to train for fitness and regularly conduct interval training after work. I have been participating in some of their sessions which has given me some motivation to get back into training.

Over the past few months I have found a few tracks around home that include varying terrain, currently I have two loops that I do on most occassions when I want to see what my fitmess is like. Of the two loops one is about half the distance but has alot of hills. In january when I first discovered it I ran it in around 18.30 now my PB is 16 flat. The second loop which I have measured out is 8.85k, I think my worst time for that was over 44 mins with my best being 38.40. If I can break 40 mins for this I am travelling ok.

The shorter stuff comes alot easier for me and currently I am focussing on trying to get as close to beaking 8 mins for 2.4 k as possible. This is the fitness test for my employment but the track they run on has a long gentle incline that totally destroys you from 1600 - 2100 m. My best so far was in Feb with a 4 min out and a 4.17 back. A recent interval session that I did saw me do 4.03 on the return leg with 1200 m of intervals under 1.20 per 400 m under my belt before that. So I believe I can improve on my 8.17.

Sub 8.10 is my aim for the next one, the over 30 course record currently stands at 8.46 as my 8.17 didn't get recorded, however the under 30 record stands at 8.07. It would be nice to get under my younger competition but in saying that the fella that ran that time is starting to get his fitness back and is capable of sub 7.40 on a flatter track.

Last week saw me run the Nail Can Hill run. 11.3 k up and over the big hill in Albury. Hard work if you don't train on hills which is what I did. I felt good on the flat but the hill killed me. I struggled and had nothing in my legs. I had organised a team from work and even though I had a shocking run I managed 51 mins with another team managing 48. The next two across the line were 52 min and 57 mins which got us 2nd place in the business / corporate category which was a pleasant surprise.

In the coming month or therabouts I have requested leave to compete in the ADF Cross Country Championships in Canberra. If it gets approved then I will be there on the 18 Jun running around Stromlo. In the next fortnight I am thinking of doing the 10 k at Mt Beauty, some of the students at work want me to do the half but I haven't trained for that distnace and I have other things on the go at the moment and 21 k doesn't really benefit them.

Anyway that's all for now.

Happy Training!