Hill Race Report

23 km race: Trail des Eaux Vives, 8 May 2013

An excerpt from a message I wrote to my friend Andy:

I am now one day after a race I may have mentioned I was doing, the Trail des Eaux vives. The experience has caused me to reflect quite a bit on our undertaking because I now see that the stats we have available for templiers are quite hard to visualise for us, perhaps even more so for yourself, although maybe not!
Why?
I really don't want to blow my own trumpet, but I suppose its fairly true to say I was feeling pretty good about my marathon performance in March. The three hours is there for the taking! I finished with the first female! I qualified for London! What a hero...
23 km with 1500m vertical gain, it'll be hard but I can hack it. I have run an ultra for goodness sake.
I quit - for the first time ever - at around 11km, which took me around 1:40 to complete. During the previous kilometer I'd seen several overtaking me and I could scarcely breathe as i tried to keep the pace - walking - up to the crest if the hill. If I hadn't quit and hadn't lost any more placings, I would have finished almost exactly in the time it takes me to cover 42km on the flat. The winner finished in 2hrs almost flat, a local guy. That's two thirds of the time I wasn't even capable of maintaining. Gabresellasse can't do that on me in a marathon!
Finally today, my legs keep giving way under me, there seem to be multiple angles where all support just goes.
Conclusion, this is an ENTIRELY different ball game. Its all about the up and down, Andy, and I am wondering do you really think your legs will be able to get the exposure they need for this living in London!? Mine currently aren't even close. In fact I don't remember them ever being quite so trashed if I am honest. Hence my wondering what the goal might be. Maybe, like with the bob graham round thing, there are some intermediary levels we need to do first. What I am asking is: are there any tough races like this that you should be trying first before committing to the templiers race? Also, might there be something else we could try the same weekend, in Uk, France or heck somewhere?
Sorry if that was a but much, I just had such a reality check there I thought probably best to share with u!
Running blessings!

Hill sprints, finally some much-craved consistency

8 hill reps: 56, 56, 56, 55, 57, 59, 57, 57 (seconds).
I have been despairing recently about my apparent lack of consistency over the repetition training sessions, I invariably fade at the end, and go out too hard at the start. But isn't the point going out hard in a repetition? I'll come back to that question at the end of this post.

So today I felt I needed more hills work, and so off I went to my local "killer" minute hill for 8 reps. Sounds easy, but once I had done 3 I really did wonder how I'd keep the quality going. As it was, I never dipped over a minute, which was really great. I kept saying to myself that the 7th rep would be the hardest, as the last one you know you can throw everything into it. I don't feel fully consistent yet, as the second set of four were clearly struggling and secondly, what I didn't do consistently was maintain the rest time, which invariably grew toward around the 2 min 10 sec mark (1:45, 1:52, 1:56, 2:08, 2:00, 2:17, 2:14)

My only thought on those early reps is simply to say to myself: I have to be able to do 7 more like this. That alone probably just released a little self-restraint while still keeping it a true rep.

Just so grateful to be healthy, ache-free and even the stomach hasn't been this receptive in a while, and is accepting gluten and chocolate again! Woohoo, thank you! And even more amazingly, and it is so important in running I think to maintain some sort of healthy perspsective, I am going to be a Dad again. This is more amazing than all the rest! I am a grateful man.