Sunday's Equaliser plus top-up, and Monday on the 'mill - again

The Equaliser went okay - description as per Coolrunning:
An interesting event - I missed this last year due to illness.

After chatting to Luke Skyrunner and Action last week, I set my expectations at around the 63 - 64 minute mark - rule seems to be to add 7-8 minutes to your C2S. I'd never seen the course before, so was probably going to be dependant on seeing the usual suspects around my speed.

The opening couple of km basically involved barreling down a hit at a great rate of knots, then climbing back up out of the creek. I found the climb fairly painful, and took a while through the road section to get settled again. Fairly surprised to see Glenn sail past (thought it was Blue Dog!) here. Lost sight of the group I was chasing, and stopped for a moment to check if the course was straight or went left.

Rejoined the trail not long after this and Mohammed went past. Having been a bit sore, and a bit indignant over having to stop to check directions, I had a bit of a sook for 5 minutes or so until the sight of Mohammed's red cap up ahead finally sparked me into action.

I harried Mohammed through for probably a good soild twenty minutes or so. We pushed pretty hard through this section, during which time I worked out I was probably a touch faster down the hills, had a distinct advantage up the hills, but Mohammed seemed to have an advantage on the flat. I figured I'd wait until the last hill before making a challenge.

I slipped past part way into the first hill, but the heart rate went up and I thought better of it. We held in lockstep until the course evened up and the second part of the hill came up. I drove on here, and put 20 metres in to Mohammed from there until the trail flattened out, and eased that out until the finish, which was around 62:30 (forgot to stop my watch!).

Pleasing thing was using Mister G's technique of recruiting the glutes and hammies to drive up hills, and finding once settled back on the flat that the quads were in good shape. Bodes well for mid-March.

Happy with the run. The battle with Mohammed was a good entertaining one, and probably dragged us through a minute quicker than we would have otherwise - the beauty of racing! Good course, too, and a few tumbles.

Met Mister G and Action at Drummoyne Rowers for a fairly gentle 14k (buggered the timing, but I'm guessing around 4:55 - 5:00 per km pace) at 4:15 Sunday evening. Felt pretty good, actually, a combination of the race being on a pretty soft surface and the Bay Run being flat. Good to bring the day's distance to 28k, plus Action and Mister G always make for enjoyable company.

Only issue was my orthotic (which I didn't race with) cutting into my right foot again, right on top of the just-healed blister. Most likely a function of tiring form, as Action pointed out. Oh well, it's survivable...

Monday saw the usual 5 min/k pace 5km 'brain in neutral' recovery on the treadmill at the gym, transfixed by 9 different channels of rubbish....