Thursday, May 25, 2006

Thunder, lightning, torrential rain, and glorious sunshine

The first three were what characterized last night's Wednesday at the Track. A very unstable weather system came through last night and decided to deposit a lot of water on Tokyo and make a lot of noise and lightning and frighten the bejeezus out of those of us who were too stupid to stay indoors. After some warmup in the park we ventured to the track, nervously relieved that the worst of the lightning-producing cells seemed to have moved away a bit. The other people (an amazing dozen of us braving the conditions) did a ladder, but I decided to do 6 x 600 m with 200 jog as a reduced workout and sharpener for Saturday. I went out a bit hard on the first and the times were: 2:03, 2:07, 2:08, 2:09, 2:07, 2:09. That's an average of 3:32/km. Given that I would dearly love to run this race on Saturday at 3:35/km (for a 17:55 finish), these times seem to have me up there or thereabouts.

I was going to have today and tomorrow off completely, but today broke with glorious sunshine and low humidity. So I got out at lunch for a slow recovery run around the Imperial Palace and made sure I checked where the kilometer markers are for Saturday. The 1k is just before the flower beds near the  Palace front gate. The 2 km is right on Takabashi bridge, The 3 km is just before the corner up near the British Embassy, and the 4 km is just near the bottom of the hill after Hanzomon. Required splits at each of those respective points are: 3:35, 7:10, 10:45, 14:20, and, finally 17:55.

I feel nervous just typing this.

2 comments:

Tesso said...

Wow, what a course you will be running! Sure you don't want to go slower and take happy snaps along the way.

Ewen said...

That nervousness is a good sign Steve. The 600s were a good choice and sharpener for the race. Have a good one!