Thursday 29 August 2013

Hill sprints

Yesterday was meant to be a run day. Yesterday was meant to be the monthly handicap canter at work & a great chance to gauge my progress since last month. But no, I forgot my towel, my foot hurt, <insert useless excuse here>, etc, etc.
So I swapped work shifts & forced myself out for a run this morning. Then, as if to punish myself I woke up thinking "I've not done any hill sprints for a while, perhaps that should be today's plan". I mean really, what a muppet my inner monologue is.
I have many candidates for sprintable hills in the vicinity of the house, I usually choose one down a country lane so that the chances of someone seeing me completely gassed on the downhill recovery or straining everything on the uphill sprint is minimal. A light & easy 10 minutes jog took me to my mark, where I proceeded to sprint up & walk / jog / crawl down for a set of 7 sprints. The hill I found is well known to me, about 2km from home & always a bastard. I found out today that it also has two different angles of ascend, a slightly steeper angle that kicked in about halfway up. My contempt for the hill increased with every sprint, how can 45-50 seconds of sprint really be that hard? The distance involved is probably only around the 200 metre mark after all!!
And yet, like after every sprint, tempo or fartlek session there was a nice feeling of achievement. A feeling of having pushed myself further than a normal run.
One big run planned for Saturday & then a couple of quiet weeks with the small tasks of half marathons at the end of them. The culmination of two training plans & nearly 6 months of work. Nearly back to my best, nearly better than my best.
The question is, what follows Copenhagen?

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