Building up the kilometres.

This morning Ewen and I met at the War Memorial carpark at 7am and started our run on the Mt Ainslie track. We ran some off road on the trails only to discover, when we clambered over a locked gate heading for Campbell Park, that we were not supposed to be running that track due to unexploded ordnance (military ammunition which has been fired many many years ago, but failed to explode). We headed through bush to Campbell Park, Duntroon, across the golf course grass and through the wetlands. A lot of this was on a much better surface than the concrete cycle paths in the other direction. The weather was overcast and actually quite pleasant at that time of day and we had a lot of cherry comments from happy cyclists or runners heading in the other direction.  We saw a Liz look-alike approaching on our return and I waved my arms wildly at her in the distance, thinking "gee she's focussed, she hasn't seen us"! Ha ha, as she came nearer we realised it wasn't Liz, just someone running in her style with similar hair and clothes. Oops, she must have wondered who that strange woman was screaming out "Hi Liz" and waving wildly! We ran back over Commonwealth Avenue Bridge and Ewen left me just before the carillon when the distance read 15km.

I plugged in my music and continued on back past Molonglo and along the track to the airport where I  met Tony who was out there running 500m intervals. He stopped for a chat before I continued on to the end of that track and back and over the bridge heading out towards Fyshwick. I turned at 23km and headed back to the war memorial. When the distance hit 30km on my Garmin I stopped the watch and walked the last few hundred metres up Anzac Parade.

Total distance: 30km
Time taken: 3hours 20mins
Pace per km: 6:40
Calories burned: 1658

This pace does not bode well for a good marathon time but at the moment I'm just building up the distance and hoping the speed will return eventually and if it doesn't, well I guess I just hope to finish in one piece!

At the end of the run, Mr B cycled over after his run to join a few of us (including Jen and CJ) at the War Memorial cafe for a sandwich and coffee and I really enjoyed a refreshing diet coke too! CJ was rewarded with cake and coffee from Ewen as she has now covered 53 days in her running streak - amazing! What's more, Ewen is only about 3 days behind her:)

Yesterday I visited The Runners' Shop and bought some new running shoes using up lots of vouchers I had accumulated.. I may try them out tomorrow. They are the updated version of the Asics DS Trainers which I currently use. They're so pretty and I'm looking forward to running in them!