Half-M at Full-M pace, Komazawa park

Well, after Friday's two runs and being on my feet all day, I was just too tired to get up for an early Saturday run. Then family commitments kept me busy. Finally got out for a slow run of 9.6km in the local park. Felt flat, but that only encouraged me not to push the pace.

I wasn't sure what to do Sunday. There was a half-marathon "time trial" scheduled by Brett in Komazawa Park. But it was going to be another hot day, so perhaps I should just go back for some more long, slow distance in Yoyogi. In the end, the lure of something different won out and I headed off to Komazawa at 7:30 in advance of an 8:00 start. It was 27 degrees and scheduled to rise to 30 by mid morning. It was also humid, but not oppressively so.

I arrived just before 8:00 running the 4.5 km at 4:55 pace (but it felt more relaxed than that). Brett, Jason, Paolo and Mika were the hardy souls who had turned up. I only got about a 5-min rest before we started. The plan was to run 10 laps of the 2148 m course, with our starting point moved forward from the marked start by the appropriate adjustment of 380 m.

I ran with Mika and Paolo for the first lap, about 4:23/km, just settling in. Then Mika dropped off and Paolo and I ran together. All I wanted to do was run at 4:15/km pace and/or a heart rate of 150-155 bpm. Very early on, 150 bpm was good enough to run at around 4:10 pace or better. So for the first three laps I was ahead of pace . Paolo reckoned he was going to run a slow first half and then pick it up and try to finish in 92 minutes. But he was right there with me through the early sub 90-min pace laps.

From about the 4th lap I was running around 155HR, maybe up to 160 at times, never more, and a little bit behind pace: 4:18s, one or two 4:20s and one 4:23 on a drink leg. It was hard, but I was feeling OK. And with the heat I was not going to worry too much if I finished in 91 or 92 minutes.

True to his word Paolo did lift the pace around about the fifth lap and gradually pulled away from me. I wondered if he might fade in the heat, but I never saw him again and he ended up finishing one-and-a-half minutes ahead of me. There is a touch of Baldini in him I suspect.

So during the fifth lap, with Paolo receding into the distance ahead, I decided to try and hold onto the pace of around 4:20/km through to the completion of seven laps, and then perhaps see if I could lift a little, depending on what my heart rate was doing by then. Although things did get a bit tougher, my heart rate stayed in the mid to upper 150s. So I decided to push it up into the 160s from there on. On the 8th lap I lifted the heart rate a little, but didn't pick up much pace. The hardest part was finding more speed in my legs. Couldn't lift either pace or heart rate. So I realized I had to change my cadence and take slightly smaller and faster strides. That worked and on the 9th lap I was right back at or slightly better than 4:15/km. On the final lap I pulled out a 4:07 minutes for the downhill 1000 m and then 4:08 over the 1000 back up the hill to the 2000 m marker; I then had enough for a little sprint over the final 150 m to finish in 89:46.

In summary: To finish under 90 minutes and not have my heart rate blow out in these conditions was very satisfying.

After a 30 or 40 minute recovery I ran home, giving me 30.1 km for the day.

Mika was planning to meet Taeko and Ma on the eastern side of Meguro Station for the Sanmatsuri, so I joined them. (Sanma is a type of fish, matsuri means festival. So sanmatsuri is a play on the two words. They grill sanma over charcoal and give them away.) The queue to get a free sanma, worth about one hundred yen from a supermarket or 300 yen in a restaurant, was ridiculously long. So we ended up getting some take-out food and drink from a convenience store and going to the nearby garden of the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum. Although it cost 200 yen to enter, it was really worthwhile as the gardens were lovely and we could stretch out on a carpet of beautiful, silky grass.

After Mika and I said bye bye to Taeko and Ma, and were walking back to get Mika's bike, we got caught in an incredible thundertorm with lashing rain, strong wind, and plenty of thunder and lightning. We waited for about30 minutes and although it was till raining fairly heavily, we scurried to the Black Lion and were able to kill a bit more time over a pint of ale. Finally, at about 4:00, the storm eased enough to allow us to go our separate ways, tired but happy after a really excellent day that brought a bit of variety to my regular Sunday routine.