Tasty Polar Bears

We just crawled through the door after a tough 48 hours of work, training, college, work, training, and I've kinda flopped in front of the laptop with my tub of B&J's Baked Alaska to keep me fuelled for this brief update. The legs are feeling heavy and tired after the return of the long run on Sunday though being the guinea pig massage client for fellow students last night was most welcome if a bit painful for the quads and ITB. I'm expecting the adjustment to this gradual increase in training volume to be challenging and the usual freshness for a session has gone for now, but it'll pay off in the coming months I'm sure. Just finished a track session tonight - a new and refreshing approach to track work for me - compound sets. I thought I'd give this approach to interval training a bit of a go after some interesting reading covered in my marathon research. Tonight was 4 x 2k efforts comprising of 400m at 5k pace, 1600m at 10k pace then a jog recovery for 2mins before repeating. It was very tough and more so because of the particularly short recovery. M's tum didn't survive the long thrashing around the track so after the first two sets and a couple of dashes to the loo he switched to 800m reps and I ran the rest of my own session alone, churning the 5 lap intervals under the Nelson night sky. The volume felt tough after Sunday's return to a longer run so I didn't worry about my alarmingly slow times. The shift in pace is the interesting bit and it will hopefully pay off with increased physical and mental strength in future races. We are gonna be so hard core when we get used to all this, you'll see... Now, back to the ice cream and those chocolate polar bears...