Saturday, April 02, 2011

A divil for the sup

Woke up feeling ordinary. I decided to head out and get 2 x 12 minute efforts under the belt. After a 3.4km warm-up, I was straight into it. I was using the same course I've used in the past for this session. I have a 3.6km route marked out, and anything more than that distance in the 12 minutes means you are going alright.

The outward section is probably tougher than the return as it's a little more uphill. But today I had the benefit of a strong wind on my back and it felt so easy. I reached my 3.6km safety point in 11:30 (new PB - 3:12/km) and ran on for the full 12 minutes. Then after 3 minutes or wobbling around, it was time to do it in reverse. Wow, suddenly very tough. It felt so slow and there was at least a dozen points when I thought about stopping. But I soldiered on and after 12 minutes of pain I still hadn't reached the 3.6km point. So I decided to keep going and finally knocked off the 3.6km in 12:07 (3:22/km). So 37 seconds slower for the same point-to-point effort. I finished up with a 2.3km warm-down so 13km for the day.

Then in the evening it was into Galway for a pub crawl. Too much fun to be had and finished up in true style in Supermacs. Solid training.

2 comments:

ronoc said...

Hey Matt,

do you have any set way in approaching a session when you are feeling crappy or de-motivated and are not hitting your session target. Do you stick with the planned session and run it slower or do you shorten the session and try and run it at the original planned pace. I tend to cut the session short and am starting to feel that this is not good for mental conditioning.

BeerMatt said...

Ronoc, I tend to be of a very stubborn nature. If I start a session I tend to finish it. Sometimes I may not be hitting my goal times but I will still complete the session as planned and simply run as hard as I can for each effort. That being the case I'll just put it down as a bad day.

I've done some sessions in the past when feeling completely demotivated and that feeling normally subsides once you get into it. Perhaps you need to be mentally stronger as you elude to.