26/03/11

I had a really excellent run on Wednesday night, I had planned a normal 10km hoping maybe expecting now to go under 50 minutes. The first lap felt ok but not hugely fast and it turned out that I ran it in 11 minutes 45, which spurred me on and I lengthened my stride and sped up on the flatter sections. I sprinted quite hard for the last 200m and was really pleased that I had kept the speed up over the four laps and had managed to get round in 46:36 which is a PB on that course. Allowing for the fact that the course is about 10.4km not 10km my 10km time would have been very near to my PB of 44:41. However I mustn’t get carried away as I’m not supposed to be improving my speed but my stamina, so we’ll see how Saturday’s long run goes. How long it will be I’m not too sure yet.

On Thursday night I was planning just to go for a gentle un-timed 5km round the other park that I normally only run around in the summer or in daylight. I had forgotten how annoying it is running there in the dark, there is a section under some trees where the roots have pushed up the path and I nearly tripped and fell a couple of times. I was also accosted by a chavette and her two male friends, for some reason she bent over in the middle of the path and was filming me between her legs. Odd, I thought, then she shouted, “Alright sexy!”, I decided that it would probably be sensible to ignore them in case some kind of ‘happy slap’ incident was in the offing so put on a turn of speed and left them standing there looking stupid. As I neared home I felt that I wanted to run for a bit longer so I did one lap of the usual park but in the other direction. It was very odd running that way round, especially seeing the landmarks in from the other direction and I was momentarily confused as to where I was at a couple of points.

I have discovered that there film of me running in the Knowle Park 10km from a couple of weeks ago. It’s at the following address: http://www.7oaks.info/sevenoaks-rotary-10k/race-summary-2011.shtml towards the bottom of the page, I appear at about 2 minutes 13 and then again at about 4 minutes 7.