A Sunday most foul....well, fairly foul.

Awoke at 6:30 to the sound of strong wind and rain. Venturing outside the bedroom revealed it be cold, too. Feeling tired and fairly beaten up after yesterday, my first thoughts were 'oh joy'.

Elected to do the two hour run on no breakfast this morning. As mentioned earlier, I've made the decision to run with SW's long run squad on Sundays (although not next week as I'll be joining Action to run the C2S course). Hit Centennial Park at around 7:25, and there weren't many around - in fact, there was one or two around. I recognised one fellow (Gary, from the squad) but he was gone after I got changed.

CR Don Juan turned up, and it was about 7:45 by this point. We decided to run for 6 minutes and turn around, mostly to keep warm. We got back to the start, and picked up Gary, Liz and Byron, and started in wind and intermittant rain.

For the next hour or so Gary and Liz took us on a wondrous tour of the various internal informal paths in and around Centennial Park. Never felt fantastic during the run, with the hip causing some issues, and a lot of calf tightness early on, doubtless a result of the change of surface to grass and compacted dirt, made soft by the recent rain.


Ran for another half hour with Don Juan who headed home three quarters of the way through the lap, and did a short variation by myself to complete 24.8k in 2 hours flat. I was pretty tired at the but was able to maintain 4:50 per km pace or so in the last three quarters of an hour, although I was pretty damned hungry. I had one of EliseS's brownies in the bag which worked a treat at the finish, along with a bottle of Powerade.

101k for the week, and I felt it was pretty good quality, with two pretty decent speed sessions and some strong timed runs. It'll be interesting to see how I pull up tomorrow from doing the long run on grass - taking the impact out makes a big difference, although I suspect I'll have some soreness simply it takes more effort to run on grass (less energy return). The hip is a bit of a concern, but I'll get that looked at this week.