Penninsula 10k Race

Another week back running, although it was all at a fairly easy pace due to a flare of knee pain after last week's race. I toyed with the idea of skipping the race today, but as alluded to last week, still hold a faint glimmer of hope of winning my age group in the club champs.

Nice day for running with a fairly gentle ESE'erly. My legs felt pretty heavy again. Both these races I've done a 2hr ride the day before, which isn;t too taxing aerobically, but does work my legs quite hard given very little cycling training. Maybe next week I'll skip the Saturday ride.

I thought I'd gone out conservatively but 3:40/3:50/3:50 tells me it was a bit fast (although km 1 was wind aided). I was pleased to see Evan opt for the 5k, hopefully making me 1st in 40-45 for this race.

The rest of the race was a bit of a struggle, all km's close to 4:00 except one, 4:10 when I tweaked the knee a little going up the ramp to Windan Bridge and walked/hobbled for 50m before getting going again on the flat.

Came in about 39:24. Pleased enough with this given my form and last week's dismal effort.


So on to the tight race for 40-44yo club championship. One needs to compete in a minimum of 8 qualifying events to be eligible. There appears to be 3 of us closely contending this year. (To be honest this is  because the faster runners are either just outside the age category or didn't run many races this year - this is likely my one window of opportunity for some years).

The contenders are Evan Kolbe, who appears to have run 7 eligible events so far, Robert Kay, who has run many more than needed, and myself, with 6.

Adjusting pace by distance of race using VO2max/Vdot tables, I'm averaging  56.28, RK 56.07 and EK 55.94. Unfortunately with the pace I'm running at the end of the season, my average will go down. For RK I've picked his top 8 races  - he ran a number much more slowly which would reduce the average if included.

There are lots of other variables which might be considered -eg type of races, head-to-head results, number of first places in AG.

In the end I need to make it through a 16k next week and 8k the following. I'll be happy just to finish them, and in the end the club championship doesn't really mean much, it's more a fun distraction.

Hopefully another race report next week.

Deepwater Point 7.5k race

As usual in recent times, I've neglected the blog. Who still blogs anyway? 2005 called and asked for it's blog back.

I recently went back and read some posts from the past, whilst I was struggling with injury, and realised it's nice to be able to look back and relive my running, beyond just a result time or an entry on Strava.

So after the Marathon I had some downtime, went on a holiday (yet another cruise on the med) and returned retaining pretty good form. Eyeing off the Bold Park XCountry race I started running some hilly loops in Bold Park. Clearly I did too much too soon and on 13th Sept, running the third 10 miler in 3 days, developed sudden right knee pain, which I couldn't run through.

My knee swelled in the next few hours and it seemed pretty clear I'd injured my cartilage again, in very similar circumstances to the injury to the left knee in 2010, which required surgery. After a week off, I tried running on and off over the next month, each time flaring things up a bit. In the end I realised I had to take some time off entirely, which luckily coincided first with a Broome trip, then with a 2 week viral infection and finally with moving house (again), all of which distracted me from my natural desire to run no matter what.

Three full weeks off, and now I've been running again for a fortnight. I've done about 80km each week - pretty much all flat. I've tried hard to up my cadence and land under my centre of gravity, to reduce the load on the patellofemoral joint. I've also been working hard on my weak glutes and crossover gait. I've also been struggling with some left sided achilles tendonitis but this seems manageable with some eccentric exercises

It was really too early to return to a race today, but I still have a small chance of winning the 40-45yo age group for WAMC this year, but have only done 5 races, needing a minimum of eight. Today I needed to run the 15k to count as a championship race.

Pretty early on I knew I didn't have the legs or fitness to race 15k. not surprising given my training runs back have all been about 10k. In fact, at the pace i was running I didn't have the legs/fitness to run 7.5k. I made it to 5k in 18:53 and was knackered. I walked for 30sec then ran the rest closer to 4min/k, finishing with 28:34 running time and 29:08 race time.

I'm about 15-20sec/km off my peak pace at the moment. interestingly though my training paces are much closer to normal, there's just much less between easy pace and race pace at the moment. The prospect of winning the age group seems less and less likely, especially seeing Evan Kolbe (my rival for this) finish a long way ahead of me today. I need to run each of the three remaining races this year to qualify - 10k, 16k and 8k on the next 3 Sundays, and would probably need to beat Evan if he runs them also. I might go into the specifics of the competition next time.