Only Nine Weeks to Go!

Sunday 6 February - Waitangi Day in New Zealand

I met up with Ewen at The Deck in Commonwealth Park just after 4.30pm for a lovely run in cooler, slightly windy weather. We ran to the Australian National University (ANU) and along the dirt paths which were in a really pretty setting among bushland. The wind was a bit strong at times but the time went fast as I was entertained the whole way by Ewen telling me in amazing detail about the movie he had watched that weekend. It was better than a storyteller on my ipod! Thanks Ewen.

After we had finished 8km I ran 6 x downhill strides while Ewen rested on a nearby park bench!
Distance of training run: 8km
Time taken: 51mins
Average pace per km: 6:20
Calories burned: 469
Total distance including strides: 9.15km
Total distance for week: 92km plus daily Teddy walks!

Monday -9 weeks until marathon

In the morning I spent over an hour at the gym working on upper body strength, abs, stretches etc with a warm up on the cross trainer and finishing with 1000m on the rower.

4.30pm Run - I was two minutes late for the early warm up but fortunately Ewen and speedygeoff saw me coming and waited for me. Amazingly enough I managed the whole early session and enjoyed it because the temperature had dropped by about 10deg. It was wonderful. It makes such a difference to how I feel when it is cooler.

We met up with the others back at Parliament House at 5.30pm for our main session. We ran our warm up before heading for the rose garden. There was lots of work going on with barriers and ropes everywhere and we had three attempts at navigating a course before finding a suitable unblocked way to run. We were divided into five teams of three and speedycoach just ran the loops. Chris turned up when we had 8 minutes of the 24min main session left as he had been held up at work. We ran a short relay loop with the first person running fast, one jogging the loop while the other team member waited to be tagged on the first person's return. The loop included a number of steep steps which ran into a short steep incline and then a run through the sprinklers back to the start. Half way through the session the sprinklers changed direction to run on the grassy slope as we ran downhill instead. It was fun and refreshing. Although the temperature was much cooler than it has been lately the sun still felt hot and the sprinklers kept us cooled down. We were all very wet by the end of our 24mins! To finish up we ran in and out of the trails and back to the start at PH. Ewen, speedygeoff, Chris and I ran a little further to round up our distances.

Total distance for night: 16km

As soon as I arrived home I had a shower and took Teddy out for his walk before dinner and by the time I arrived home I was absolutely starving! Thank goodness I had already prepared mushroom and basil risotto before training and only had to heat it up!