The Horrie and Belinda Show

After feeling completely demoralised at the completion of last Thursday's session I was all set for a decent break. Belinda ran on her own on Friday for 30 minutes and and hour on Saturday. But when she saw 3 hours on her program for Sunday, she asked me if I thought I was up to it. After 2 days of not running, there was not a peep from the troublesome knee so I thought 'Why not?'.

1/10/06

So on Sunday we headed out to tackle the 26km option of the Airport Adventure as I estimated we could run that in something close to 3 hours. It felt great to start running with no pain at all. After running for about half an hour, we stopped off for a quick toilet break. Just after starting again, the familiar grind returned and I was not happy. Seeing that we still had over 2 hours to run, I wasn't looking forward to it. I didn't want to say anything to Belinda because I knew she would start to worry. It's funny when you are trying to keep something to yourself that she asks me how my knee is. I just gave her the thumbs down and didn't want to talk about it. She asked me if I was alright to continue. I told her that I would let her know if I couldn't. If I wasn't running with her, I would have pulled the pin. But as I knew how important this run was for her to help prepare her for Fitzroy Falls, I just ground it out and kept chugging along. The thing that saved me is that this is a lovely scenic run as you pretty much run around the water's edge for most of the run. At around 2:20 into the run, Belinda was starting to struggle as her body was entering the fat burning stage. She asked me how long to go and I told her there was 40 minutes maximum as she had 3 hours on the program but we would probably reach the finish before this. We just kept shuffling along until we finally came to the end in just short of 2:55. We were so relieved it was over but were thankful that we were able to get through it for different reasons. This was Belinda's longest run since her return from injury and she pulled up fine with no niggles. As for me, I was thankful that the pain in the knee never got to the stage it did during the week that forced me to stop running.

2/10/06

After resting yesterday afternoon and icing the knee, I decided to head down to the pool and go for a 1km swim. As it was a great day, I was really happy to be swimming again. But swimming 1km in 27 minutes is not going to get me competing in Ironman. It doesn't bother me how slowly I swim as I find it very relaxing and the body enjoys it. The knee felt a lot freer afterwards so double benefits were achieved. Then it was off to Blue Dog's and Bernie G's for a Team GBH BBQ and a chance to celebrate Tesso's birthday and thank her for her crewing at Glasshouse.

3/10/06

I was happy to wake up with no problems with the knee. I decided to head to SWEAT and see what would happen if I stretched out. As a precaution, I wore a knee brace to add some support. I was happy to get through the warmups in one piece. I had 6x1km reps on the menu and Belinda had 6x600m reps. I was surprised to get through the first one in 4:04 as it never felt as though I was pushing the envelope. The aim of the session was to see if I could run all 6 at around the same pace and feel no pain. I was both ecstatic and relieved to get through all 6 and keep the splits between 4:04 and 4:06 for all of them.

As for Belinda, because she was blitzing the 600s and getting too much recovery time, Sean moved her up to 800s after 3 reps. She ran them very well and was running them well under 5 min/km pace.

4/10/06

As we all had 1:15 on the program, Belinda and I again arranged to meet the girls from SWEAT. It really is a case of Beauties and the Beast. LOL. By 5.20 we were off and running with Bernie G and Kit taking us out at a pretty firm pace. Belinda did well to hang on until around the 15 minute mark when she started to drop off the back. We let the others go and soon there were 3 or 4 mini groups. They stopped at the lights at the corner of Cook and Oxford Sts. We stayed together for a little while before they took off again. We finished the outside lap in just over 45 minutes which is around 8km so the average pace was not much over Belinda's 10km race pace. We then headed into Centennial Park for our last half hour and Belinda and I were joined by Becky O and we had a great chat about things as we ambled behind. Just before we finished we saw Sean running so he knew we were sticking to the program. It was a great morning for it and running in a group just makes it that much more enjoyable. We ended up covering 13.5km in 79 minutes for a nice way to start the day.