The Horrie and Belinda Show

27/1/06

As I couldn't remember the last time I did 1km reps, I thought it was time I did them again. I did a 3km warmup which left me dripping with sweat and I knew I was in for a tough morning. I lost a bit of time on the first rep when I had to do battle with the garbage collector. I then lost a bit of time on the second rep when I had to go around a lady and her dog. I then punched out the last 2 reps at 3:56 to give me an average under 4:00 per rep. I then ran the 3km warmdown and I felt like I had just had a shower.

28/1/06

I ran my 10.8km loop as I hadn't run that for a while and thought a change of scenery would be a nice change. This run has a few small undulations throughout with a couple of downhills thrown in. I felt happy to finish again in a lather of sweat with an average pace of under 5 min/km.

29/1/06

I ventured out to the Airport Adventure STaR this morning. I had not run one for 2 months and as I have been doing a fair bit of long slow running in recent times, I decided to head out with the 6am group who are meant to run at 6 min/km. This decision was also helped by the continuing humidity we have had the last few days and I remember this weekend was the one where I had a shocker at Dee Why last year. This was made easier by the fact that Kit, Johnny Dark and Tesso were also running at 6am. We set off and before I knew it, we were bounding along doing 5:10/km and we were at least 200m behind the lead group. Where was Action or O Runner to enforce the correct pace? I settled in nicely with Tesso and Johnny Dark and we eventually picked Kit and her group up at around the 6km mark. We stayed together for a while but moved ahead of them when they stopped for a drink break as we were all wearing Fuel Belts. We then started to put a gap into this group when we started running the hills on this course. JD must have had a good brekky as he was literally flying up them. Tesso and I just tucked in behind him and he would reward himself with a break and a drink at the top of each hill. Just when I told them that we had run our last hill, we turned left instead of right and found another hill we didn't have to run. We then came to a dead end overlooking the water with no bridge in sight. I knew we had to run over Tom Ugly's Bridge so we back tracked. We asked a local who was watering his garden what street we were in and we then realised our mistake. Then we saw a whole bunch of Striders up ahead, including a lot of the group we had left behind. Then Professor shouted to us as we ran up what was the last hill so we knew he was not far behind. I'm sure JD was on a mission not to be caught by him so he upped the pace at this point, dragging Tesso along with him. I had run out of diluted sports drink at this point so I needed to stop and dilute 2 bottles of undiluted sports drink. I found a tap in a park and had just finished doing this when Professor, Gefjam and Redback came by. I ran with them until Professor and I decided to cut across the park as we had both added a bit of distance to our runs with wrong turns. We slowed it down a bit from here and just relaxed and chatted as we tucked in behind some of the 6am group. Professor then tried to brush off a bit of gum from his shoe before realising it was a fish hook when he cut his finger. We made it back just on 9am, which gave me 3 hours for a distance of 31.3km, although after talking to Tesso about what distance she measured, a more accurate distance sounds like 30.8km for a nice enjoyable morning's running.