grinding it out

a week has gone by since the last time i posted in here and a few things have changed in my running life since then. i am getting a good feeling about this winter, i can feel some pbs coming. in fact just as a guide, i have raced 3 times so far this winter and ran 3 pb's, even if two of them were for distances that i will only race once a year, that is the same every year and it demonstrates that my year on year progression has been quite positive when you consider for the first two races i knocked off 36 seconds and 27 seconds respectively for my best times for those respective courses. on tuesday night i ran a third pb of the winter, 17:33 for the bridge inn 5k road race at shortwood. overall i would still say the race was a disappointment as, whisper it quietly, i was beaten by claire willer, who also ran her fastest time for that course. my legs were tired from saturday still and i felt rough pretty much the whole way around. thats not making excuses though, because even though she had never even been in front of me at any point before in any training session or race, (she was 40 seconds behond me at clevedon), when roles were reversed and she was the one with the heavy races in her legs. she is a good young runner though and i always felt that at some point she would get me. the two positives i can take from this though are firstly being behind her gave me a nice view of her arse and having done that on tired legs i know i can run faster when i am fresh and on a faster course. just to put in perspective how well she ran, she was only two seconds behind martin flook the current senior mens midland area 800 meter champion. its still some thing that i have to put right next time.

thursday night was a 5 mile tempo run around coombe dingle, or they say its 5 miles i personally think its a bit short by about a hundred yards or so. i completed the course in 27:42 some way ahead of the elite women who aprt from one who was just behind me and some way (about two minutes i am told) behind the elite/international men who were only about a hundred yards in front of me at the end of the first lap as they decided they were going to run easy and chat to each other while they were running before they got a bit more serious on the second lap. it felt like they were toying with us and it was infuraiating! its the first time any body can remember running that course as a straight 2 lap tempo run. previously it has either been 2x1 lap with a long 6 or 7 minute recovery or just a 2.5 mile tempo run.

staying on the subject tempo runs will be the order of the day for tonight with a hard 11.5 mile effort around where i live as a final hard run before the swindon half marathon and i will be aiming for 6 minute mile pace or thereabouts. i am delibrately running tough courses because it will harden me up ready for what is apparrently quite a tough course and also because living on the top of a very steep hill i have no alternative. running may have to take a bit of a back seat soon though becausethe threat of redundancies at work are looming large and are now very real. if they succeed in cutting saturday deliveries, i will almost certainly be out of a job. they're saying that 40,000 jobs out of 170,000 will go through natural wastage. yeah right who do you think you're fooling crozier you evil cunt? still theres no point in me worrying about or trying to control things i can never have any control over and i bet adam crozier wont lose any sleep either with his £500,000 in bonuses. as joe frazier once said you just have to be a man and do what you have to do and not what you want to do.