Cold Feet!

Saturday (11/6)

I often do my grass speed sessions & tempo's barefoot, but have been wearing spikes or flats since my marathon back in April. On Saturday, I thought I'd go back to barefoot for the session. Only problem is that it was wet, windy and bloody cold! The session scheduled was 4 x 2000 off a 9 minute cycle. As soon as I took my shoes off after the warm-up, I was beginning to regret the decision. After a few drills & strides I was sure that I'd made a terrible mistake. My feet were numb and I hadn't even started the first interval. I looked around and noticed that the only squad members going barefoot were the coach & Fossil. All the other barefoot regulars were smart enough to be kind to their feet. I had contemplated jogging back to my car at that stage and grabbing my spikes, but didn't have time.

Before too long, the session was underway. I couldn't feel a thing, my feet were so frozen. I proceeded to do the first interval in a fairly relaxed 6:56, then I decided to put my shoes back on. Because it was raining and the warm-up is always a lap of the white fence around Centennial Park (dirt), I chose to wear trail shoes, figuring it won't matter if they get a bit muddy. However trail shoes just don't work well for faster running on grass. I just couldn't get any speed. Despite a full on effort, the best I could manage was 7:09, my worst ever split. I decided rather than do the 3rd interval, I would jog back to my car and grab my spikes. When I got to the car I discovered that the spikes there were somebody elses. Same brand & style (Nike Zoom Matumbo's), but different colour and size. I then remembered that after Tuesday night's session, I couldn't find my spikes that I left next to the fence in their bag. Everybody else had gone home and I saw the same type of bag as mine in a different place, so I just grabbed it figuring someone must've moved it. Anyway, I'll worry about finding the rightful owner to these shoes later and hopefully they will have mine. Luckily I had a pair of flats in the boot, so I grabbed them and jogged back to join the final interval. The last interval was a more respectable 6:32, including a 3:12 final km.

All up, I covered around 14.5 km's for the session, plus the drills, strides and jogging to and fro my car.

Sunday (12/6)

Long trail run over hills with Jim. 30.2 km's in 2:16 hr's. We held a solid pace throughout. Jim seemed to be doing it a lot easier than me though. There were a couple of nasty hills in there that slowed us down to near 7:00 km pace, but otherwise the pace was pretty good.

After the run, we jumped into Glenbrook Creek for a 7 minute recovery ice bath. Jeez it was cold. My feet felt even worse than Saturday.

All up a little over 123 km's for the week. Nothing special about that mileage, but it is the highest mileage since April's Rotterdam Marathon. Still it's all part of my plan of slowly easing up the mileage and endeavouring to remain injury free.