As expected, the Get Jacked sessions combined with my first workout last week left me quite sore in subsequent days. A busy work schedule Wednesday onward had me skipping sleep to complete a few things and this ended up torpedoing my original mileage plan for the week. Training never goes well when I have multiple late nights stacked on top of each other; operating on little sleep has never been one of my strengths.
After these couple days my whole sleep cycle into the weekend was messed up, so I ended up watching the Fukuoka Marathon online. Like many Letsrun fan boys, I was rooting for “civil-servant runner” Yuki Kawauchi to dip under the 2:07:59 barrier set by the Japanese federation for automatic selection to the World Championships team for 2013. Through halfway he was looking quite good in the pack, sitting behind Geb, but by 25k the hurt face had appeared and he was out the back after a few more kilometres. He continued to fall off the leaders and was passed by others who had fallen off earlier, but kept gritting it out and eventually started to claw his way back into the top 10 as guys dropped out or fell back. Amazingly, he would end up clocking a 2:10 marathon despite being left for dead before the 30k mark. I've seen Kawauchi race before, but I have to say, I was quite impressed with how he held it together- there's a reason more times than not he has ended up in the medical tent after finishing.
I'm getting a bit anxious about my first track race since the summer, which is now just 10 days away. There's no 3k being offered at the Dome so I'll likely enter the 1500…though I'm contemplating entering the 1k as well for kicks. My main concern is that because I've done nothing fast all fall, a 1500 will be a particularly brutal re-introduction…hopefully I can break 4:30? (I say this only half-jokingly…I've had some absolutely atrocious season opening times for indoors in past years, the exact details of which I do not wish to relive at this time). The appeal of the 1k is that it'll only be 2 and a half laps as opposed to the usual five…maybe I can try and run close to my 800m PB and then drop out.
To ease my mind a bit, I've been trying to ramp up the pace on the treadmill while doing the running portions of Get Jacked. The kicker here is I have no idea how fast the belt is actually moving- I assume the paces listed on the screen are minutes per mile and not per kilometre, but a five minute mile feels a bit too easy for me to believe it's calibrated perfectly. So I compensate by saying ramping it up until it feels hard, then running for half a minute or so before slamming on the emergency stop button before I fall of the back. I'll keep you posted on how this works out.
