Gammoudi beating “Pre”

This week was a tough one – 3 hard sessions crammed in and two which mimicked legends of the past – one is Mohammed Gammoudi who won the Gold in the 5000m at the ’68 Olympics. He would apparently do sessions where he started quite slow and ramped up and up through a rep of 3k or so. The session is tough as trying to run fast off about 10k pace, in a long rep, is pretty challenging, but great race simulation.

Steve with hair

The other was the classic Mona fartlek – a staple of Steve Moneghetti – an Australian marathon icon. For anyone that doesn’t know this session, it’s a 20 minute continuous effort with subtle pace changes over shortening time periods starting at 90secs on/off and ending at 30sec on/off efforts. It simulates surging mid race and pushes up your aerobic threshold as you practise a slight surge and then settling into a pace that is still pretty quick. This session is as hard as you make it really, so a good one in a hard week.

A tiring week but more progress.

Monday – 66 mins home from work at 6.33/mile. Felt pretty good (10)

Tuesday – AM – 36 mins easy at 7.05/mile (5.5)

PM – “Gammoudi’ session. This is 3 sets of 6 laps of the track at 80,80,70,70,2 laps fast. 5 mins between sets. I’d never done this before and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. 7.12 (2.12), 7.12 (2.09), 7.10 (2.09). A decent session again. (10)

Wednesday – AM – 87 mins easy/steady. Another AM Wednesday – these are supposed to be evenings really but circumstance dictated an early start. 6.52/mile. Felt pretty dead. (13)

Thursday – AM – 37 mins easy into work. (5.5)

PM – Dobroyd Hills – 2 x 6 x hill off 5mins. This felt awful. I don’t know if it was Tuesday in my legs, or the shock of 2 sessions in 3 days or what, but I knew from rep 1 this was going to be a struggle. Ranged 1.53-1.57, which reflects this! A few others also struggled. (11)

Friday – AM – Pilates.

PM – 56 mins easy at 7.14/mile – (8)

Saturday – AM – Mona fartlek – 4.03 miles in 20mins. Yugi and Nipper got away in 2nd half but a decent session at the end of a tired week. (9.5)

Sunday – 2.15 long run. Started early to try and beat the heat but it still bit! Last 30 mins was a struggle. 6.25/mile. (21)

93.5 miles. Another solid week and an improvement bar the tiredness!