When the planets are perfectly aligned....

5 x 1k - 3:25, 3:17, 3:21, 3:16, 3:22. Avg 3:20:20 with 60 SR

Celebrated my 32nd (aaaargh shit) birthday last night with dinner at the Breaky Creek Hotel's Spanish Garden with MJ and also enjoyed a relaxing day at home. Am still trying to work out how Tesso and Clairie knew it was my birthday and tipped everyone off. Perhaps Tesso has a secret black book dossier on everyone??

I was hardly bothered by the adductor niggle at all this morning but after Tuesday's disastrous session, I wasn't getting too fired up to shatter myself with a hard session although I had a vague target of going close to 3:20's. For no reason at all, I made a fairly conservative start trailing Jason, Mike and David to the 500m at West End. At that point, I was feeling a million dollars so went past Mike and David and set off after Jason, clocking 3:25 for the first interval. With Jason dropping out to run the rest of the session by himself, David and I worked well together in the second split to clock a slick 3:17, crossing the line together. I led the way back to the boatshed on the third split stopping the clock in 3:21. By the fourth split, I was fair dinkum flying. My lungs were comfortably handling the workload, I was well balanced and my foot strike seemed very light on the bitumen. I went through 500m in 95 secs and started thinking about a magical 3:10 split but faded to a 3:16 finish with a bit of a gap to the competition. Now, I was was sucking in the big ones and I knew the last rep was going to hurt. Mike R gunned it from the start and skippped away to a lead whilst I was content to save myself for a big finish. I dug deep from the 600m and managed to get past Mike and career away to clock 3:22 for a deeply satisfying 3:20:20 average. That average is easily a PB for the course and is clearly better than my all time PB of 3:19:75 for 4 x 1k which was run on a flatter strip.

Of interest is that two of my best sessions recently came after a slightly conservative start in which I covered the first 400-500m at around 3:30 pace. I might try that more often to see if it is a successful long term way for me to work my way into a session.

Its just great going to training at the moment - everyone is training so hard and pushing each other along very well - I couldn't have done it without David and Mike today.