Sunday, October 03, 2010

Freo HM 2010

A bit of a last minute decision to run today - entered Friday lunchtime. Having pulled out of Melbourne I thought why not? The HM is the distance I have always performed well at, and this would give me some confidence and benchmark my current fitness position.

I'd run 55k leading up, having returned to WAMC/JK intervals on Tuesday with 2x400, 2x500,2x600,2x500,2x400 all with 90 sec breaks. Was surprisingly solid and surprisingly similar pace to 2 years ago when I last regularly ran here. The rest were easy-ish runs through Bold Park

I decided to run today without looking at my watch too much, just run by feel to maintain a consistent HM pace

5k splits 19:52, 20:10,20:25,20:23, last 1.3k@3:48 total time 1:25:42

Nice day for running and I felt solid without going into the red zone. Although I slowed slightly in the second half, I passed 8 people in the last 10k, 3 in the final km. No-one passed me after 3k (except one frontrunner who must have stopped for a pee). I think my recent bold park running has helped as I powered up the few little hills in the final 1.5k - which is how I caught the last 3.

Sugar looked good but I note not quite on PB pace - 145km weeks will do that to you. I was mightily impressed by the female winner - Clare McKay- who finished less than a minute behind me and came home like a train in the second half. She said afterwards that she'd run the C2S half in 1:30 and was happy to beat that - I suspect she'll be winning a few races in coming times.

My pace today was very similar to that which I ran last year with Clown, and gives me some confidence moving forwards.

I'm still in a quandry re track this summer. I looked at last years Masters McGillvray results and I'd have won the middle distance race every week by some way - most competitors were in the over 50 category. I dont really fancy being in that situation. Looking at the Friday Athletics WA meets at AK I'd be near the back of the field with several near my pace and not dead last. This might be the better option although I dont know about Friday evening running - thats usually prime summer beer and BBQ time!

Happy B'Day Clown and good luck next week - hope it's a good present to yourself!

4 comments:

Clown said...

Great work, shows you're in pretty good nick even though you've had a bit of downtime.

There was talk a while back of a number of us doing some track work amongst ourselves. I'm keen on getting that started in the next few weeks if you're interested.

trailblazer777 said...

Well done! Great run! good decision to race with Melbourne out of the equation.

Dve K and I did two track seasons with Athletics WA about 7 years ago (the last time I ran for UWA), so might be a good option, although Masters still good if you can get enough of us bloggers down there to push each other, but to be certain of raising the bar Aths WA is the way to go...

attitude running said...

nice to see your run was 200m to long as well!

DC64 said...

Great to see you out there again!

Re: track work, Masters at Coker Park on Thursday's not a bad option, but as you say, competition (or the lack of) is a factor. I was lucky that Mike Mezatesta started coming along. I did a few races at WAAS last year - while a great track and good competition it can go very late. The one 5k I did kicked off at 9:45! The 3k tends to be scheduled earlier so is a decent option.

I'll be doing some track over the summer once NYC is done, I know B'man is keen as well. If we can get a bit of a group going, Coker could be good.